...Me
Hi, I'm Jasper Woodard. As of the beginning of this blog I am finishing up a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. My research focuses on advanced anodes for lithium ion batteries. I like all manner of things, but am unusually fond of Joni Mitchell and hiking in the Rockies. Expect plenty of mountain pictures and analogies to fill space, and a very few Joni Mitchell references whenever I can get away with it.
...Prediction Markets
Markets have a way of coming to a better answer than one person can on any number of questions. I don't know how many pizzas Canada should make in April, how profitable GM is going to be relative to Mitsubishi, or what odds Aston Villa have in their next match against Tottenham Hotspurs. Markets answer those easily (Yes, market failure is a thing). Prediction markets try to apply that logic to real world events. Everything I could say in this post has been written before and written better. I will mainly focus on Metaculus and Manifold Markets, which do not use real money.
...This Blog
I will endeavour to write every Sunday about one aspect of the future of energy science, presumably focusing a lot on energy storage and related topics in the near future. I have / will have other blogs where I speak about less scientific matters, which I will presumably talk about on Twitter if there's anything worth sharing. Although this blog will be professional enough to share around, and I hope others become interested and interact with it, a significant motivation is personal growth and better reasoning on these topics.
...The Format
Each post will start with an overarching question. Inspired by Bayesian reasoning, I will start with my prior on the topic and explain how I picked it. Inspired by Holden Karnofsky, I will do the research from there as I write, demonstrating which findings seem most relevant and updating my prediction as I go. Along the way, I hope to create other predictions of questions related to the main topic. All of my predictions will be made into markets on Manifold Markets, where others are free to jump in. Where I can, I will also find any relevant markets on Metaculus and include them in the article, potentially adding in my own. Metaculus also deserves a special shoutout, as the entire concept is partly inspired by fortified essays, which seems like an important concept.
...The Pictures
Each post will be accompanied by a random picture I've taken hiking, either in the Canadian Rockies or in Korea. Happy Trails!
