Who the heck is Samit Patel and why is he eligible to win a million bucks for a couple of hours work?

Yet another reason to hate this overhyped event, Samit Patel has not done the hard yards of some of the England bowlers and yet because of the conditions (some of them created by Stanford himself in his choice of location and groubnd preparation) this obscure country cricketer gets a shot at an obscene payout. The Stanford 20/20 for 20 is rapidly losing what genuine credibility it had.

Typical England, though, rather than promoting the game that they claim to so love and enjoy, they sign up for the first greedy, self interestedm narrow focused and, lets face it, potentiallt win-able event that comes their way. England fared poorly in both the ODI and 20/20 world champs last year, they do not deserve to be in the Stanford 20/20 for 20.

Down here, we are doing our best to ignore the whole Stanford 20/20 for 20 hype, but the conspicuous consumption aspect of it shocks and offends us. For all its mania and weirdness, I am supporting the ICL comp from now on, because at least that does involved genuine international players and not some obscure English players with no real track record.

The story is interesting from a knowledge management perspective, in that there is a detailed discussion about neuroplasticity. This is very serendipitous – as I just finished an article myself about young people and wine where I mentioned brain plasticity as an important factor in shaping our ideas, attitudes and tastes.

There are a few things that need to be corrected about this story. Firstly, prediction markets are not strictly following the wisdom of crowds rules, as outlined in the famous book of that name. For one thing, in a prediction market you can see trends from other people’s choices. You are aware of what the other agents in the market have been/are doing. Which is why prediction markets can be gamed, the prediction market itself going on to influence public opinion. This leads on to the next point and that is, although prediction markets were gaining in academic credence, there has, in fact, been a recent backlash against prediction markets.

But typically the journalist who wrote this piece did not investigate the negative sides of prediction markets, instead relying on the media spin presented to her/him by the founders of iPredict.

Intelligent, Good Looking Geotechnical Engineers for Social Experiment.

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