{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index","description":"In recent posts on Trump and dictatorship, people have asked me - how do you know you\u2019re not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? I take this seriously; we\u2019ve all lost loved ones to this condition. The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several \u201cdemocracy indices\u201d that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude\u2019s analysis here - but they rely enough on \u201cexpert\u201d opinion that I don\u2019t expect them to convince a skeptic. The newest entrant in this space - Metaculus Democracy Threat Index - works differently, and deserves a closer look. Metaculus is a prediction site - like a prediction market, except that no money changes hands. People can record their guesses for how future events will turn out, which get aggregated by an algorithm (currently just a recency-weighted median, although they\u2019ve done fanicer things in the past). Their Democracy Threat Index is a collection of 153 questions relevant to US democracy. For example: https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/the-metaculus-threat-to-democracy ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"