[HN Gopher] Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which ...
___________________________________________________________________
Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes
about gambling
Author : krustyburger
Score : 473 points
Date : 2026-01-18 18:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| uoaei wrote:
| The internet is too connected and communication too instantaneous
| for Polymarket to be anything but a system to be gamed by those
| with money and influence.
|
| Bet appears on Polymarket? You have the ability to direct people
| and resources to enact the under? Congrats you're rich!
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >You have the ability to direct people and resources to enact
| the under? Congrats you're rich!
|
| If you have the ability, you are already rich.
| _bohm wrote:
| Rich people continually attempting to accrue even more money
| is not exactly an unheard-of phenomenon
| uoaei wrote:
| What happens to rich people when they get more money, do you
| think they just stop further attempts at acquiring more?
| goldcd wrote:
| Sometimes they go on a ketamine binge _shrugs_
| lazide wrote:
| Occasionally they make historically bad bets and blow up
| their fortunes, and it gets eaten up it all the smaller
| sharks circling behind them. It used to be most
| billionaires only lasted (as billionaires) for 3-7 years
| before collapsing.
|
| The current stock market insane binge has changed that a
| bit.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Yeah, they historically don't like to keep increasing their
| wealth, Elon musk going from 350bn to nearly 800bn in like 2
| years is definitely not an example of that.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| Rich might be overstatement, but WNBA dildo stir show that
| people are ok with risking jail time over relatively low
| amounts of money.
| drob518 wrote:
| The writer obviously hasn't done any deep study of prediction
| markets and why they often provide greater insight than other
| polling techniques. Are they perfect? No. They predicted Hillary
| would win in 2016.
| linhns wrote:
| Had they existed then, prediction markets would have picked
| Hillary to win also
| drob518 wrote:
| They did exist and they did predict Hilary.
| dh2022 wrote:
| You obviously missed the point of the article. The point is
| that validating and advertising Polymarket on national news
| outlets will have ugly consequences.
| bink wrote:
| It's amazing how many people on HN didn't bother to actually
| read the article.
| drob518 wrote:
| I did not miss the point of the article. You obviously missed
| my point, however.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Why is polymarket any more or less dangerous than NFTs or naked
| option trading?
|
| Fool and his money are quickly separated...
| nemomarx wrote:
| Marketed to a broader audience with more users, like sports
| betting?
|
| And to be fair options trading used to be pretty limited in
| users too, until apps like robinhood tried to democratize it.
| shimman wrote:
| Replace the word "democratize" with "unleash" and that's a
| far more accurate descriptor.
|
| It's not democratic if you can't destroy it, and believe me a
| majority of people want to destroy it.
| chrononaut wrote:
| Naked option trading is certainly the worst of the three from a
| financial risk perspective for the beginner.
|
| Although polymarket would do the best at "attraction" towards
| the average uninformed consumer because the bets and how to
| place them are far more understandable than the various option
| trading strategies.
| bmitc wrote:
| It bother lowers the threshold and increases the breadth of
| things that can be bet in. It's a gambling addiction nightmare.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Exactly! Friction matters a lot.
| dh2022 wrote:
| The article's point was not that Polymarket is the problem-the
| point is validating and advertising Polymarket on national news
| outlets will have ugly consequences.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > the point is validating and advertising Polymarket on
| national news outlets will have ugly consequences.
|
| Coinbase
|
| Robinhood
|
| DraftKings
|
| FanDuel
| Arainach wrote:
| Giving credence and advertisement to all of those has
| caused huge societal problems. Sports Betting is a huge
| problem.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yes, all of those are equally problematic.
|
| Polymarket here is one example among the companies causing
| the problem. Legislation that addresses the problem should
| affect all the listed companies and more, not just
| Polymarket.
| microtonal wrote:
| Yeah, once it's on television, it is similar to polling,
| which can influence elections because people like to vote for
| the winner. However, in this case it's even worse, because
| someone with deep pockets can influence the predictions.
| dh2022 wrote:
| But polling is still scientific and harder to manipulate
| than the betting markets. All of this is covered in th
| article. You should read it-it is a good article.
| microtonal wrote:
| _harder to manipulate than the betting markets._
|
| Sorry, that was what I meant to imply with the second
| half of my comment. Still, in my country there have been
| debates about whether publishing polls shouldn't be
| forbidden n weeks or days before the election (currently
| publishing polls and campaigning is only forbidden on
| election day).
| stickfigure wrote:
| The solution is baked into the problem. If prediction
| markets become generally embraced by the public
| (mentioning them on CNN is part of that evolution) then
| they will be much harder to manipulate. Size matters.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| You are assuming everyone stay rational & this becomes a
| pre-election itself (like poll) but it can change and
| multiple reasons
|
| You got to give even a 1000$ or something in this bet,
| you are gonna be so vocal about support, manipulation of
| data to convince unconvinced voters to join you or other
| details
|
| The unconvinced voters are simply gonna bet on the voting
| side after sometime. For context, a third of the
| population in US iirc doesn't vote so what's gonna happen
| is that a difference of few %'s Lead could turn into
| something massive
|
| And that few % can easily be rigged by an irrational
| actor. You are thinking 1 person = 1 vote (yes/no) but I
| may be wrong but how these work is in the aggregate and
| so a rich person can cause much more disruption within
| the voting system "legally" as well.
|
| The point here is the legal part where what can end/what
| would end up happening is that elites around the world
| with irrational money can basically get political bases &
| favours established around the world for their purposes
|
| Suppose an election is at 49 A / 51 B but now a rich guy
| contacted A and said to invest x$ to now make the odds 51
| A / 49 B and then this news gets to twitter or any
| platform and now people get false news and some undecided
| voters might go bet on 51 itself too so now it might be
| 53/47 and in real voting election 51 A/49B
|
| Some Elections are really close so I am pretty sure
| something like this is bound to happen sooner than later
| dev1ycan wrote:
| because not everyone does naked option trading or nfts... while
| straight up gambling on 50/50 odds is WAY more enticing.
| bshaughn wrote:
| It gives people in power, wether it be the government or even
| an NBA ref, a vehicle to profit off of conflicts of interest /
| fixing games / etc...
|
| Ive seen people point out White House press conferences do
| weird shit, like cut the conference 10 seconds before some
| polymarket prop bet of "how long will this press conference
| be".
|
| Much more heinously, a few months ago right before one of
| Trumps asinine tariff announcements, someone took out a $300M
| BTC short position that was almost certainly from a WH insider.
|
| I honestly don't care if someone loses all their money
| gambling, but the problem I have is how so many institutions
| are able to be undermined at a fundamental level do the
| existence of polymarket.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| >It gives people in power, wether it be the government or
| even an NBA ref, a vehicle to profit off of conflicts of
| interest / fixing games / etc...
|
| there is the stock market for those things, where insider
| trading is nigh invisible to public.
| bshaughn wrote:
| I think you have completey missed my point. The stock
| market only allows you to trade securities, and (in theory)
| there is a lot of regulation and enforcement on who buys /
| sells stocks. Additionally, no one has the power to
| magically set a stock price to be a certain price on a
| certain date.
|
| Polymarket all of a sudden makes it much easier to make
| money betting on an outcome people control. Looking at
| polymarket, I see bets paying 100-1 based on the number of
| tweets Elon makes on a given day. I see another at 100-1 on
| wether the US airstrikes Iran today with $66m riding on it.
| All of a sudden theres an incentive of a life changing
| amount of money for goons in the whitehouse to strike Iran
| for shits and giggles.
|
| Did you know that in 2007 some NBA Refs were caught rigging
| games for just $2000 a game? Now Refs don't even need to be
| payed off when you can make a position anonymously with
| bitcoin.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| >Additionally, no one has the power to magically set a
| stock price to be a certain price on a certain date.
|
| but many have _the knowledge_ of which company or
| industry is about to experience legislation, which they
| can pass to any of their associates worldwide, who can
| then buy or short the affected entities and share the
| profit with the insider. Polymarket is just the idiocracy
| version of that.
| bshaughn wrote:
| I completely agree insider trading is an issue,
| especially with the legality of sitting congressmen being
| able to day trade. But with the exception of elected
| officials voting for bad bills / policies, the "victim"
| is whomever loses money on those trade. Its reactive to
| world events, meaning the world events aren't being
| changed by the insider trader.
|
| Polymarket is worse as it gives a mechanism for
| proactively changing the outcome of events to a much more
| extreme degree, simply because someone can make money on
| it.
|
| A benign version of this would be NFL employees betting
| $1million on the color of gatorade in the Superbowl.
|
| An insane version of this would be Trump issuing a single
| airstrike on Iran after having a friend or family member
| place a $10M bet on polymarket that pays out $1B. It
| completely erodes the obligation our government officials
| have to not act in their self interests.
| scoofy wrote:
| > where insider trading is nigh invisible to public
|
| _...and is illegal._
|
| It's not _illegal_ to throw a basketball game.
| bshaughn wrote:
| Yes it is, this happened before almost 20 years ago and
| the NBA ref went to jail. Yet somehow the whitehouse
| insider trading is. Did you know someone took out a $300M
| BTC Short position right before a trump tarriff
| announcement in October?
| scoofy wrote:
| Hmm yes. I certainly hope they would both be illegal.
| polski-g wrote:
| There's a "cloudflare outage" market. If I worked at CF I'd
| absolutely bet to win 5mn and then cause an outage and
| retire.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Zvi Mowshowitz has an excellent article on the devastating
| effects that legalizing sports betting has had:
| https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...
|
| Personally I find it sickening to see ads that say you can get
| rich betting on the weather. I haven't seen ads for polymarket
| but Kalshi's ads are absolutely predatory.
| torginus wrote:
| It's a website where people can make bets on how certain
| geopolitical and public events shake out.
|
| I used to think it's just yet another way to people with more
| money than sense to get their kicks.
|
| But then I saw the true reason why the platform is terrifying -
| it gives people who have nontrivial amounts riding on the line
| a very powerful incentive to influence said events.
|
| I have seen expertly crafted and highly convincing narratives -
| that I know to be false from firsthand experience - spring up
| inside (and presumably outside) the platform spring up on an
| issue. There was the thing where the ISW (a reputable military
| think tank) reported an Ukrainian city was captured (when in
| fact it wasn't) in order to win a bet.
|
| Imagine if next time someone leaks some military intel in order
| to hedge a bet. Money, especially lots of it, is a very
| powerful motivator.
|
| There's also no way to check and control who has insider info
| or has influence on the outcome (as betting against them is
| essentially suicide)
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Because it is gambling.
|
| NFTs have zero value but people seem to derive non-monetary
| value from them. Naked option trading is a form of gambling (as
| well as risk management) and, as a result, it is regulated.
|
| Polymarket is a "financial investment" for regulatory purposes
| but is gambling, there is no legitimate risk management reason.
| As a result, there is massive scope for harm because it is
| gambling without any of the gambling regulations that exist in
| the US.
|
| People on this site appear to be unaware that gambling is
| regulated where legal. I will give you an example: Polymarket
| do not comply with state regulator's exclusion/no market lists.
| This is immoral. Gambling companies should not take bets from
| users who have gambling problems, they should not market to
| them.
|
| Offshore unregulated books will often market themselves to
| addicts saying that they do not comply with regulator's
| exclusion lists...this is an onshore book operating in
| Lexington Avenue New York, not out of a shed with a pig sty in
| Curaco. It is unbelievable at many levels.
| woah wrote:
| > state regulator's exclusion/no market lists
|
| I'm not familiar, but this sounds like lists of people who
| are not allowed to gamble? Do stockbrokers abide by these?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > Fool and his money are quickly separated...
|
| Example: I had a flutter on the US Election. The odds were well
| in favour of Trump winning and I figured that was never going
| to happen, so I thought I was putting 'smart money' on Kamala.
|
| I stand by it being 'smart' money ;)
|
| I underestimated 'dumb' (which, I guess, isn't 'smart').
| kelnos wrote:
| To be fair, when you place bets on Polymarket, your losses are
| limited to the money you put up.
|
| But if you write uncovered options, your losses are
| theoretically unlimited.
|
| Agreed, though. It's bizarre that this isn't regulated exactly
| like gambling. Because... that's what it is.
| networkadmin wrote:
| The whole nation is eaten up by gambling and other vices at this
| time. It's not the first time such a thing has happened in a
| nation's history. Generally it occurs just after widespread
| monetary debasement and just before major, world shaking
| disasters. (You Are Here.)
|
| Reference: Andrew Dickson White (first president of Cornell)
| "Fiat Money Inflation In France", published 1896:
|
| "The government now began, and continued by spasms to grind out
| still more paper; commerce was at first stimulated by the
| difference in exchange; but this cause soon ceased to operate,
| and commerce, having been stimulated unhealthfully, wasted away.
|
| Manufactures at first received a great impulse; but, ere long,
| this overproduction and overstimulus proved as fatal to them as
| to commerce. From time to time there was a revival of hope caused
| by an apparent revival of business; but this revival of business
| was at last seen to be caused more and more by the desire of far-
| seeing and cunning men of affairs to exchange paper money for
| objects of permanent value. As to the people at large, the
| classes living on fixed incomes and small salaries felt the
| pressure first, as soon as the purchasing power of their fixed
| incomes was reduced. Soon the great class living on wages felt it
| even more sadly.
|
| Prices of the necessities of life increased: merchants were
| obliged to increase them, not only to cover depreciation of their
| merchandise, but also to cover their risk of loss from
| fluctuation; and, while the prices of products thus rose, wages,
| which had at first gone up under the general stimulus, lagged
| behind. Under the universal doubt and discouragement, commerce
| and manufactures were checked or destroyed. As a consequence the
| demand for labor was diminished; laboring men were thrown out of
| employment, and, under the operation of the simplest law of
| supply and demand, the price of labor--the daily wages of the
| laboring class--went down until, at a time when prices of food,
| clothing and various articles of consumption were enormous, wages
| were nearly as low as at the time preceding the first issue of
| irredeemable currency."
| networkadmin wrote:
| "The mercantile classes at first thought themselves exempt from
| the general misfortune. They were delighted at the apparent
| advance in the value of the goods upon their shelves. But they
| soon found that, as they increased prices to cover the
| inflation of currency and the risk from fluctuation and
| uncertainty, purchases became less in amount and payments less
| sure; a feeling of insecurity spread throughout the country;
| enterprise was deadened and stagnation followed.
|
| New issues of paper were then clamored for as more drams are
| demanded by a drunkard. New issues only increased the evil;
| capitalists were all the more reluctant to embark their money
| on such a sea of doubt. Workmen of all sorts were more and more
| thrown out of employment. Issue after issue of currency came;
| but no relief resulted save a momentary stimulus, which
| aggravated the disease. The most ingenious evasions of natural
| laws in finance which the most subtle theorists could contrive
| were tried--all in vain; the most brilliant substitutes for
| those laws were tried; "self-regulating" schemes,
| "interconverting" schemes--all equally vain. All thoughtful men
| had lost confidence. All men were waiting; stagnation became
| worse and worse. At last came the collapse and then a return,
| by a fearful shock, to a state of things which presented
| something like certainty of remuneration to capital and labor.
| Then, and not till then, came the beginning of a new era of
| prosperity.
|
| Just as dependent on the law of cause and effect was the moral
| development. Out of the inflation of prices grew a speculating
| class; and, in the complete uncertainty as to the future, all
| business became a game of chance, and all business men,
| gamblers. In city centers came a quick growth of stock-jobbers
| and speculators; and these set a debasing fashion in business
| which spread to the remotest parts of the country. Instead of
| satisfaction with legitimate profits, came a passion for
| inordinate gains. Then, too, as values became more and more
| uncertain, there was no longer any motive for care or economy,
| but every motive for immediate expenditure and present
| enjoyment. So came upon the nation the obliteration of thrift."
| networkadmin wrote:
| "In this mania for yielding to present enjoyment rather than
| providing for future comfort were the seeds of new growths of
| wretchedness: luxury, senseless and extravagant, set in:
| this, too, spread as a fashion. To feed it, there came
| cheatery in the nation at large and corruption among
| officials and persons holding trusts. While men set such
| fashions in private and official business, women set fashions
| of extravagance in dress and living that added to the
| incentives to corruption. Faith in moral considerations, or
| even in good impulses, yielded to general distrust. National
| honor was thought a fiction cherished only by hypocrites.
| Patriotism was eaten out by cynicism.
|
| Thus was the history of France logically developed in
| obedience to natural laws; such has, to a greater or less
| degree, always been the result of irredeemable paper, created
| according to the whim or interest of legislative assemblies
| rather than based upon standards of value permanent in their
| nature and agreed upon throughout the entire world. Such, we
| may fairly expect, will always be the result of them until
| the nat of the Almighty shall evolve laws in the universe
| radically different from those which at present obtain.
|
| And, finally, as to the general development of the theory and
| practice which all this history records: my subject has been
| Fiat Money in France; How it came; What it brought; and How
| it ended.
|
| It came by seeking a remedy for a comparatively small evil in
| an evil infinitely more dangerous. To cure a disease
| temporary in its character, a corrosive poison was
| administered, which ate out the vitals of French prosperity.
|
| It progressed according to a law in social physics which we
| may call the "law of accelerating issue and depreciation." It
| was comparatively easy to refrain from the first issue; it
| was exceedingly difficult to refrain from the second; to
| refrain from the third and those following was practically
| impossible.
|
| It brought, as we have seen, commerce and manufactures, the
| mercantile interest, the agricultural interest, to ruin. It
| brought on these the same destruction which would come to a
| Hollander opening the dykes of the sea to irrigate his garden
| in a dry summer. It ended in the complete financial, moral
| and political prostration of France--a prostration from which
| only a Napoleon could raise it."
| microtonal wrote:
| What's the point of posting entire book fragments here?
| networkadmin wrote:
| So that lazy people who form their worldview via a Quick
| Google Search, Wikipedia articles, and/or "news media"
| can actually have a chance to learn something real about
| the time they are living in.
|
| It's like a dozen paragraphs, forming one complete
| argument. Is this too much material to take in all at
| once, in this brave new TLDR tomorrow?
| gilleain wrote:
| Neat in theory, but in practice ineffective. Those who
| might read multiple large exerpts from a book would
| actually seek out the source.
|
| Do as you wish, however I doubt this will have the effect
| you want here.
| wgjordan wrote:
| > It's like a dozen paragraphs, forming one complete
| argument. Is this too much material to take in all at
| once, in this brave new TLDR tomorrow?
|
| The issue is not that you cited a dozen-paragraph
| argument, it's that you inlined all the text directly
| into a series of comments instead of a link to the text
| on a separate page. It visually overwhelms the discussion
| thread and is disruptive to the broader discussion, which
| is not strictly against guidelines but generally seen as
| non-normative behavior.
| pgruenbacher wrote:
| i enjoyed reading it thank you
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't come here to read lengthy quotes from random
| authors. I come here for discussion and interesting
| viewpoints from our community. Posting a lengthy quote is
| low-effort; more valuable would be to write up your take
| on it in your own words, and, if you want, link to the
| original source material that you would have otherwise
| quoted.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't make posts consisting of quotes and nothing
| else. HN is a supposed to be a site for curious conversation.
| It's not hard to see how posts like this interrupt that and
| bog it down - imagine someone at a dinner party* reading
| entire paragraphs like this out loud.
|
| (* I don't know why I said "dinner party", since I don't go
| to those, the conversation usually isn't good, and they
| aren't my idea of fun, but oh well, it makes the point)
| aisenik wrote:
| I don't really understand your point. We should reject
| ideas that make us feel like we have to sit through a
| monologue at a dinner party?
| dang wrote:
| We should find more interesting ways to communicate ideas
| than lengthy recitation.
| bahmboo wrote:
| It definitely bogs things down. I would have preferred even
| an AI summary of the text, granted that it was accompanied
| by additional commentary to tie that to the subject at
| hand, rather than dumping in text with the assumption that
| the reader will understand the implicit connection.
| networkadmin wrote:
| Since you have now shadowbanned my comments from the site,
| I'm guessing you won't read this, so it's probably safe to
| point out that you are a useless, whiny fag who desperately
| needs to get out of his mom's basement and get a life.
| dang wrote:
| I don't know if this will help or not, but I didn't
| shadowban you. (I wouldn't post a moderation reply and at
| the same time ban the account without saying so; that
| would be incongruent.)
|
| What happened is that, independently of my reply, HN's
| software started killing your posts because your account
| had crossed some thresholds at which the software starts
| doing that.
|
| Like I said, it may be a distinction without a difference
| to you, but that's what happened.
| elphinstone wrote:
| He's writing about Revolutionary France's debasement, but
| Mackay's Extraordinary Delusions documents France's debasement
| under John Law about 70 years earlier, which shows how easily
| such mistakes are repeated.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Isn't Polymarket very low stakes? For example "Will Trump acquire
| Greenland before 2027" market (the main one for this issue) has
| only 14m USD volume. This is like 2 orders of magnitude less
| money than is bet on El Classico 2 times a year.
|
| There are risks connected when prediction markets run wild but
| Polymarket ain't it. There is also utility. It has high
| predictive value (it beats polls for elections from a little
| sample I've looked at) and allows you to make better decisions.
| toss1 wrote:
| It beats polls for elections _ONLY_ until someone notices it is
| being used as the basis of news stories and figures out it will
| be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small
| market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have
| changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to
| change the opinions.
|
| The very low stakes you point out make this even easier to put
| a thumb on the scales.
|
| Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to
| be a good measure"
|
| The point of the article is that as soon as the "news" started
| reporting on prediction markets or corporatized gambling as if
| it was a measure of sentiment, it ceased to become a good
| measurement. That point has long passed.
| bluecalm wrote:
| News already broadcast tons of nonsense. Political commentary
| is just brain rot. Economic commentary might be just as well
| generated by one of those Markov chain string generators - it
| would make as much sense.
|
| >>out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to
| manipulate that small market and make the news idiots
| broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy
| all the adverts needed to change the opinions.
|
| It will then become more expensive. Out of all the
| manipulation news and journalists do every day I am not sure
| why "people bet money at 1 to 4 odds that Trump takes
| Greenland before 2027" is particularly problematic. It's true
| people bet money on it at those odds. How is that more
| problematic that news running pro or anti Trump segments or
| broadcasting some random crystal ball readings to justify
| stock price fluctuations of the day? You can see how much
| money is bet on the market as well. It's not like you can
| spend 5 figures and suddenly shape the narrative.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| There is a certain kind of person who thinks that all the
| news they disagree with is being faked by people who will
| spend multiple millions on Polymarket just to get a news
| story on CNN.
|
| This person does not realise that most people do not pay
| attention to the news, that people in power are not glued
| to the news waiting for journalists to tell them what to
| say, or that the news is generally not very
| important...except to people like them who play out these
| fantasies about wealthy people mind-controlling them
| through CNN.
| toss1 wrote:
| Right, we agree on just about everything. Political and
| economic commentary is generally brain rot, and Polymarket,
| etc. is not an accurate predictive tool
|
| And yes, if it starts to be seen as one of the levers to
| manipulate in manipulating public opinion, it will become
| more expensive. That does not improve it's predictive
| value, since we never really know how expensive it is on
| either side relative to the bankrolls and motivations of
| those who might want to manipulate it.
|
| But for anyone who wants to use it as a crystal ball, go
| right on ahead -- good luck with that!
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm increasingly convinced that the single most important concept
| to understand in the 21st century is Chesterton's Fence:
|
| _" Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not
| be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs
| is understood._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
|
| Gambling isn't a new problem, but apparently we thought it would
| turn out differently this time, for some vague unclear reason.
|
| I think the simplified version of that reason is: no one really
| believes in anything anymore, except in the value that acquiring
| money by any means necessary is a good thing.
| valiant55 wrote:
| The powers that be have always saught wealth. At some point
| they gained enough power to start usurping the law that was
| supposed to keep them in check.
| mcphage wrote:
| We should have made it clearer that monied interests have a
| choice: be kept in check by the law, or by the guillotine.
| valiant55 wrote:
| I'm too entralled by TikTok to build a guillotine.
| mcphage wrote:
| Is _that_ why the TikTok ban fell through?! ...figures.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The problem is, the guillotine solution to regulation only
| becomes feasible after the monied interest have thoroughly
| fucked society, to a level that would make living as blue-
| collar working in Detroit downtown today feel like being a
| banking executive living in Geneva.
| mcphage wrote:
| Do you believe that the monied interests will stop on
| their own before we get there?
| master_crab wrote:
| This seems like the contrarian argument to libertarianism. A
| libertarian might claim it is orthogonal to it in theory, but
| in practice it is very much relevant to a "break all the walls
| down" ideology.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Maybe, like myself, you're just aging into being a bit of a
| conservative.
| keiferski wrote:
| Eh, I don't think _not wanting gambling and amoral behavior
| to consume society_ makes me a conservative in any real sense
| of the word. More just common sense pragmatism, is how I'd
| put it.
| protonbob wrote:
| Amoral by what standard? That's where the conservatism
| comes in.
| keiferski wrote:
| Amoral, not immoral.
| kelipso wrote:
| The Chesterton's Fence argument is an argument against
| progressive social changes, no?
| keiferski wrote:
| No, it's an argument against removing rules / making
| changes without deeply understanding why those rules
| exist in the first place, and what might happen when they
| are removed.
|
| It's perfectly fine to be for progressive social changes,
| as long as those criteria are met.
|
| I'd call that a pragmatic approach, not a conservative
| one.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I'd call that a pragmatic approach, not a conservative
| one._
|
| The other meaning of "conservative", the one that's
| opposite "reckless".
|
| It should in theory be possible to take a conservative
| approach to being progressive.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It should in theory be possible to take a conservative
| approach to being progressive"
|
| That's likely how most of the middle see themselves (if
| not in those words) - open to new changes but only if
| they're fully understood and not drastic.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| No, sometimes social change is putting up a fence. And if
| social change is sometimes putting up fences, that would
| mean that not all fences are supposed to be torn down.
| kelipso wrote:
| Chesterton's fence has a specific definition. It's not
| supposed to mean restrictions on social conduct or mores
| like you seem to be implying.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Social conduct is the context, not the definition.
| Chesterton's fence is just about not touching things you
| dont understand.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Think of it as grift and not gambling.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Maybe you mean in any modern sense of the word, but I'm
| pretty sure that is indeed a large part of what it used to
| mean.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, but Chesterton's Fence _is_ a pretty foundational
| argument among many conservatives.
|
| Conservatives think societies are hard to understand, which
| makes them hard to engineer, and replacing institutions
| that work with new inventions needs to be done carefully
| and slowly.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| IMO, the world simply functions better when we strive for
| virtue.
| _bohm wrote:
| I think most serious left-wing people also hold a strong
| aversion to gambling on the grounds that it's financially
| exploitative and can be viewed as a regressive tax on the
| poor/uneducated.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Conservatives don't have a monopoly on morality.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Let's not label ourselves. Once we do it, we have this
| tendency to think in black and white terms. Like, I wish
| people didn't divorce, so kids could have stable families,
| does this make me a conservative? Maybe yes, or maybe no,
| because I don't want to FORCE people to stay married.
|
| But once I label myself a conservative, I am stuck, and now
| have a new set of friends with the same label, because I am
| labeled myself, and they have all those radical ideas, and
| then I have to pretend to believe and ending up believing
| them too.
|
| Of course, the same applies when you label yourself a
| progressive.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| > Gambling isn't a new problem, but apparently we thought it
| would turn out differently this time, for some vague unclear
| reason.
|
| Moneyed interests saw a business opportunity, simple as that.
| Economic investment is becoming highly concentrated towards
| high-growth, high-risk opportunities and gambling has long
| thrived in the black market while staying current with
| technology.
|
| > except in the value that acquiring money by any means
| necessary is a good thing.
|
| And this will only become more true as the economy continues to
| worsen. Economic downturns and market collapses favor the
| elite.
| andrepd wrote:
| > I think the simplified version of that reason is: no one
| really believes in anything anymore, except in the value that
| acquiring money by any means necessary is a good thing.
|
| Hit the nail on the head and these are my thoughts exactly. I
| don't really want to be the guy that thinks his time is extra-
| ordinary (cue fake quote of Socrates saying "kids these days
| have no manners"), but... maybe it is?
|
| For me it's like people _don 't even feel the need to pretend
| anymore_. Selfish geopolitical calculations and greed have
| dictated all actors' actions in the 20th, that isn't new, but
| at least then there was a _need_ to appear to abide by laws or
| to uphold human rights, even to strive for the eradication of
| war (and often it wasn 't a disguise; people actually cared
| about those things).
|
| States used to care or at least appear to care about progress,
| betterment, social improvement, moral improvement. Today? All
| any government speaks of is raw GDP growth %. And so gambling
| is pushed on TVs, streets, subways, kids' entertainment... The
| idea that a government of a nation would strive for the moral
| well-being of its citizens (by heavily curtailing gambling for
| example) seems positively _quaint_ in 2026.
|
| Anyway I'm tired, excuse the incoherent ramble.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Gambling isn't a new problem, but apparently we thought it
| would turn out differently this time, for some vague unclear
| reason._
|
| The things I've seen have been either "it's not right to tell
| me not to" or "non-participants can get useful information by
| observing the odds". What I _haven 't_ seen is claims that it
| won't be net-harmful to participants.
| jonstewart wrote:
| Doesn't seem like slow-walking so much as a mad-rush. I saw a
| Kalshi ad on tv last night.
| koolba wrote:
| > A billionaire congressional candidate can't just send a check
| to Quinnipiac University and suddenly find himself as the polling
| front-runner, but he can place enormous Polymarket bets on
| himself that move the odds in his favor.
|
| Maybe not with a specific pollster depending on their scruples,
| but you can definitely pay to be part of the poll. And that's the
| first step to getting any stats whatsoever.
| shimman wrote:
| It doesn't really work, up until a few weeks before the NYC
| mayoral election. Polymarket had Andrew Cuomo winning by double
| digits.
|
| It's a trash platform.
| pgodzin wrote:
| There are much better ways to tell if a prediction market is
| well calibrated than a single anecdote.
|
| And if it works so poorly, there's a lot of easy money to be
| made.
| shimman wrote:
| But this isn't a prediction market... those are highly
| regulated. This is just making money off of insider info.
| So yeah, not only does it work poorly it's entire reason
| for existing is to help people get richer while fucking
| over others.
| vlark wrote:
| Stop calling them "prediction markets" and start calling them
| what they really are: corporatized bookies.
| mathgeek wrote:
| They're also heavily, heavily fixed of course. There's nothing
| stopping anonymous folks from betting on things they
| control/influence.
| woah wrote:
| That's the point. To surface non-public information as a
| price signal.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Disagree here. That's the stated goal and the point for
| some folks, but the subset I explained above also exists
| and their point is to benefit from a false sense of
| security.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and
| players gamble.
|
| This is just another racket for those in power to continue
| making the world worse for just a little bit more gain for
| themselves.
|
| Edit: Throttled like always, you guys hate me (and reality/law
| in this instance) https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/sports-
| gambling/20-charged-ba...
| bluecalm wrote:
| >>At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and
| players gamble.
|
| Oh c'mon now. This is completely impossible to police.
| Players and referees are not under constant supervision. They
| have families, friends, partners. Some of them got caught but
| you can be certain most weren't because it's just very
| difficult to catch.
|
| There are always multiple people who know about key players'
| injuries, illness, other factors. The game is negative sum
| and additionally insiders take a a chunk for themselves. It's
| worse then roulette which at least doesn't pretend to be
| fair.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| It isn't impossible to police. Players and referees are
| under supervision...I am not sure why you think this isn't
| the case. Regulated gambling companies i.e. not Polymarket,
| maintain lists of people who are connected to sports inc.
| through family. And they maintain systems that monitor
| unusual betting activity that is shared across the
| industry, it is quite easy to detect this activity because
| most of the flow that bookmakers see is uninformed. So if
| you see a customer that doesn't bet regularly put down
| $10k, line moves in their favour...that is obviously
| extremely suspicious because that won't happen with 95% of
| the volume you take.
|
| As an example, there was a football player in England who
| had a friend that bet on a transfer market (a market that
| is extremely prone to inside information). It was detected
| immediately (despite being a relatively small bet of $10k,
| I have heard anecdotally that insiders have been detected
| in this market down to $500 bets), the player was banned,
| fined $500k, etc.
|
| Btw, the reason these systems exist is because there are
| certain sports that are too lucrative not to make a market
| in but the economics/nature of the game mean that matches
| are easily fixed: 99.99% of this activity is low-ranked
| professional tennis, and surveillance has been very
| effective (all of this is funded, not by professional
| tennis, but by gambling companies). Generally, this isn't
| as prevalent with US sports because none of those
| preconditions exist for the major sports.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Bookies determine the odds and typically refuse to take bets
| from skilled bettors.
|
| A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all
| participants. In established betting markets such as for
| stocks, pros dedicate their careers and their organizations to
| improving the public estimates emerging from the market (though
| not for the sake of that improvement).
|
| General prediction markets might turn out bad, but the above
| isn't an argument why, it's namecalling.
| vultour wrote:
| I just can't take anyone who uses that term seriously. Just
| because a billionaire CEO told you it's not gambling doesn't
| mean it's true.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The only material objection mentioned in the article is that
| prediction markets are easy to manipulate.
|
| Well, only if they are thinly traded. If they get mentioned a lot
| more on CNN and CNBC, that is likely to change.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| They really aren't. Every attempt at manipulation just turns
| into easy money for those who predict the right odds.
| etiam wrote:
| That only really holds if reporting on the manipulation bets
| is not turned into effective propaganda for skewing events
| towards the manipulation outcome. So the main argument of the
| article holds IMO.
|
| Edited to add: I'd like to rephrase that a bit actually. It
| doesn't even have to help bring about the particular outcome
| being bet on. It's enough that it can be used to shift public
| opinion in some way that's worth the cost to the manipulator.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure, but events where that kind of "skew" is effective are
| going to be quite rare. And even then, the incentive is
| just for everyone to try and "skew" the event as early as
| possible, where factors other than monetary cost or reward
| then become dominant. No different from what usually
| happens with no prediction market at all.
|
| > It's enough that it can be used to shift public opinion
| in some way that's worth the cost to the manipulator.
|
| This has been tried in the real world and is just not very
| effective. It's just too hard to move the price in ways
| that will shift public opinion when literally anyone else
| has a huge incentive to bet against you.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Well, only if they are thinly traded."
|
| Right now, they're all thin traded at their open. As soon as
| they are created is when you see the volatility that makes them
| enticing. Once you get volume, there doesn't seem to be as much
| value to be had.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| No, completely wrong. Deep markets are not more accurate.
|
| People who are unfamiliar with how regulated gamblings works
| assume that the "market" is just lots of informed people
| rationally trading with each other. This is not how it works.
| Bookmakers post lines to a small group of syndicates up to a
| limit, they will often do this non-publicly, and this is how
| prices are set. They are not set by the "wisdom of crowds",
| they are set by people who have invested hundreds of millions
| of dollars in predicting the outcome because bookmakers have an
| economic need for accurate lines.
|
| When lines open to the public, there is often no significant
| movement after opening prices set by syndicates. That is
| because the public has no idea what the actual price should be,
| they are just uninformed noise traders clicking buttons
| randomly...that is the product too, the purpose of the product
| is entertainment not economic efficiency.
|
| It is true that some lines are set incorrectly but the public
| is not able to benefit from this, because they do not have the
| information. I would guess that 95% of money made from gambling
| has been made by under 50 people. And, perhaps counter-
| intuitively, most of the time these people trading does not
| have an impact on price because they deliberately trade in a
| way that does not impact price. Again, the purpose is the same:
| they trade to make money, not produce economic efficiency.
|
| The people who think prediction markets are useful in any way
| are people who never traded any markets and couldn't predict if
| the sun is going to come up tomorrow. If gamblers are noise
| traders, these people are noise speakers. These markets are
| completely pointless, gambling is economically pointless
| outside of the pleasure that people get from entertainment.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Noise traders ultimately create an even greater incentive for
| accurate prediction. The fact that the odds are set at the
| start and never change just proves that there's very little
| change in relevant information about upcoming sport games,
| races etc. where regulated bets happen. That's totally
| normal. Bets about real-world events are a rather different
| matter though.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| No, they don't. If you have a line that is beatable, that
| line has been open for a long time, and you have informed
| people profiting from that line, it will usually not move.
| People who have information will disguise their flow, they
| won't bet with places that will move the line against them
| when they bet (if you bet this with Pinnacle, for example,
| they will work out you are beating their line immediately,
| they have quants who can work out how you are beating their
| line, and you have permanently destroyed your edge) so you
| put money down at soft book somehow and they will likely
| not move line against you...meaning the line doesn't move.
|
| Again, it is fairly common assumption that people make that
| it must be noise traders who are incentivizing syndicates.
| This is the case at open but not after, and there is a
| significant distinction between noise traders and noise
| traders through retail books. Retail books do not set the
| lines, they do not post lines early to syndicates, their
| product is completely different. There is literally no
| incentive for accurate prediction because the economic gain
| from noise trading does not accrue to anyone who has
| information. 95% accrues to firms with the greatest
| marketing advantage, again...this is entertainment, it is
| not about accurate prediction, you are misunderstanding at
| a very fundamental level what is going on here. It is like
| going to see the Minecraft Movie and thinking this is
| artistic expression on the level of Tokyo Story.
|
| This would all be different if there were real markets
| underpinned by economic demand for this risk but there
| isn't. This is why Betfair failed. This is why these
| "prices" you see aren't actually real prices.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Are you describing how sports gambling odds are set?
| Prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi do not function the
| way you describe, at least, not yet.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > People who are unfamiliar with how regulated gamblings
| works assume that
|
| I work in the regulated gambling industry. Prediction markets
| like Kalshi and Polymarket do not work like the regulated
| gambling industry. You don't know what you're talking about.
| gpm wrote:
| There's two forms of manipulation mentioned. One is changing
| the market to influence public perception, that does become
| harder as the market grows in size.
|
| The other is accepting the bribe, sorry, taking the other side
| of the bet, and making something happen. That only becomes
| worse with scale. When you're in the position to accept a
| million dollar payout to cause the press conference to only
| last 64 minutes, or to invade a foreign country, suddenly you
| have a million new reasons to do so.
|
| On any prediction market where a reasonably small group of
| humans decide the outcome, and there's enough money to matter,
| "betting no" is better understood as offering a fee to make it
| happen, conditioned on damages should someone accept your offer
| and fail to do so. "Betting yes" is better understood as
| agreeing to facilitate the outcome - or assisting in the price
| discovery mechanism that says facilitators are over charging.
| cft wrote:
| If insiders trade, the market becomes more accurate, which is
| good for society. Like WikiLeaks. Thus the MSN panic, the legacy
| establishment wants Polymarket to follow Assange's path.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yep, some WH member trading 400k$ an hour before an attack sure
| did wonders for "the good of society". So does media showing
| rates on gambling websites as if they were an oracle and not
| something that can be gamed for cheaper than a TV ad.
|
| For fucks sake...
| SirMaster wrote:
| Sounds like for those paying attention it could give an early
| heads up of what's about to happen.
| toss1 wrote:
| The problem discussed in the article was _NOT_ insiders trading
| on secret information -- it is the nearly opposite problem of
| manipulators trading and skewing the odds.
|
| Insider trading seeks to trade with secret information and
| minimally obvious trades to avoid moving the markets until
| their position is locked in, in order to profit when the
| previously secret information becomes public and the market
| finally moves to a different price level.
|
| Manipulators seek to move the market to create a false
| narrative that market-moving info exists when actual market-
| moving does _NOT_ exist; the expectation is that people will
| see the price change and _ASSUME_ there is information behind
| it, when there is actually just a manipulator willing to lose
| money to create that impression.
|
| In a small market, such manipulation can be more cost-effective
| (make more of an impression for the same cost) vs buying
| advertisements.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| I am guessing you must have made huge amounts of money from
| this irrational behaviour then. Congrats.
| otikik wrote:
| That sounds a lot like "the magical hand of the markets" and
| "trickle down economics". A hope surrounded by a semblance of
| logic but not a lot thought put on the important details of how
| things actually work.
|
| With this I mean: I can think of several ways in which this
| would go in the other direction (bad for society). And I am not
| an economics expert.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| This is a problem, a net negative and a sign of a weakening
| society.
|
| But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less
| likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
|
| It seems hard to be a climate change denier when you're about to
| gamble on it.
|
| Or maybe people will find a way to gamble while still living in
| completely different reality bubbles. Probably.
|
| If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last
| election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000
| on the line...
| sowbug wrote:
| _But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less
| likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?_
|
| Only in a truth-agnostic sense. Good gamblers in player-banked
| games (poker; rock, scissors, paper) vs house-banked games
| (slots) are good at figuring out what the other guy is
| representing. The actual truth is much less significant.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Well, assuming they're paid out truthfully, it does
| incentivize learning the actual truth. Unless you're saying
| that the oracles are falling for fake news? Or you're saying
| people are intentionally buying the wrong option, getting
| other people to believe it, and then selling before it
| becomes worthless? That seems harder than just buying the
| right option unless you already have a ton of influence to
| burn.
| sowbug wrote:
| Closer to the second than the first, but traders probably
| have less agency than the way you're putting it. They
| benefit from misdirection, but they don't need to be the
| ones doing the misdirection. Their special skill is
| recognizing the effect of misdirection (or simply how
| events unfold) sooner and more accurately than others.
| andrepd wrote:
| > But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less
| likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
|
| 5 minutes browsing polymarket comments will dispel that notion
| really fast.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| But at least you can make them poorer
| daveguy wrote:
| Or just ignore all that garbage.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The comments are not the bets.
|
| In fact, they are often opposite.
| tpm wrote:
| > But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less
| likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
|
| Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a
| product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing
| in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in
| physical branches and on the website, along with completely
| transparent information that it is all random, source of
| randomness was even some government audited hardware. The
| customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified
| by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there
| was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of
| random numbers would be generated and based on that a new
| 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4
| in hour or something like that.
|
| And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical
| locations) were often debating the form of the individual
| 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes,
| really.
| reillyse wrote:
| pigeon dancing (ala Skinner). Humans love to ascribe meaning
| to things, we have a real problem with randomness.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Am I overlooking something, or would that mean it's super
| easy for a rational participant to make money?
| gpm wrote:
| Presumably it's a negative expected value game - the
| company running it has to make money after all... so likely
| not.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Prediction markets don't need a bookie. Each bet has
| another real person taking the other side.
|
| It's more like the stock market brokerages. They just
| take a fee on each trade and don't need to give you a
| spread over the stock price
| gpm wrote:
| This subthread is not about prediction markets
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Sometimes. Often the sure fire bets have lower returns than
| the expected annual stock market returns.
|
| You have to watch out for resolutions are don't depend on
| the truth or could be abused.
|
| Examples of markets to avoid are those that a single
| individual can manipulate. They could take the most
| profitable side and corrupt the result.
| tpm wrote:
| Not sure what you mean exactly. If you mean the virtual
| rates, a gambler has no way to make money by placing bets
| there (while the real probability is 1/8, the odds the
| betting company is selling are of course much worse). If
| you mean in a broader context that it is easy to take these
| people's money, yes and no - there is a long queue of
| people wanting to do the same and what they want to do is
| mostly either heavily regulated or illegal.
| itintheory wrote:
| Your company was taking bets on https://www.online-
| stopwatch.com/horse-race/ ?
|
| Unrelated - that site is great. I looked into membership, but
| $6/month seems steep.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last
| election, just wait until next election when he also has
| $100,000 on the line...
|
| I've seen the comment that prediction markets can be viewed as
| a tool for making conflicts more intractable.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I suspect that in practice, because a lot of online gamblers
| spend a lot of time specifically on X, they're more susceptible
| than average to fake news.
| tempaccsoz5 wrote:
| Source for this stat?
| otikik wrote:
| > gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news.
| Maybe?
|
| Crypto bros. Remember when all of them were saying that NFTs
| were the future?
| foxglacier wrote:
| Also hard to be a climate change doomer when you're gambling on
| it. Don't forget popular opinions can be extreme and wrong too.
| Prediction markets sound like a way to cut through the social
| media hysteria, although we already have insurance companies
| with money on the line about that and perhaps they're doing a
| good enough job of predicting the effects of climate change.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Good points. I also realized climate change is too slow for
| prediction markets. Nobody wants to bet on the average
| temperature in 2036.
| kledru wrote:
| chaos-for-profit incentive is what terrifies me
| nullc wrote:
| Why is polymarket worse than cell phone games? At least
| polymarket essentially self identifies as gambling and isn't
| specifically marketed to children.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Cell phone games are knowingly losing money for fun. Polymarket
| is a sign of a failing, rapidly deregulatory economy.
|
| And that's before we get into discussing the social damage to
| country that already sees more school shootings than weeks in a
| year (actually, 4x more), with rising political and civil
| tensions including assassinated politicians, adding potential
| "lose your house" to random events. As if it'll help calm
| things down and let us all keep a level head.
|
| Or the implications of news companies reporting on these odds
| as if they reflect _actual statistical likelihood_ , and how
| that gives the ultra wealthy yet another lever to control the
| view of reality the common people have.
| giantg2 wrote:
| What is the legality for US residents?
|
| Right now Polymarket is subject to a federal agreement that they
| don't let US people participate. Apparently this is just a
| checkbox for the user to attest to. They don't even do IP
| geolocation, never mind payment checks.
|
| So it's currently illegal for them to run this in the US. But is
| it illegal for users to participate?
| shimman wrote:
| It's okay, when the next administration enforces the laws we'll
| see all the VC ghouls attack and decry the government for
| having the audacity to protect citizens from abuse.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Polymarket has been around for a while. I thought the
| agreement happened under the Biden admin, but I could be
| wrong.
| shimman wrote:
| Prediction markets are highly regulated, it's just not
| being enforced... This is just a way to launder money to
| those with insider info to profit from. Also who the fuck
| cares if it happened under Biden? Is that some sort of
| gotcha you conjured up? Democratic members hate the
| democratic party more than Trump, no one cares about Biden
| or what he did but they sure do care what he failed to do.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Also who the fuck cares if it happened under Biden?"
|
| Your comment said the next administration will enforce
| it. It seems that administrations from either party have
| not.
| 0x3f wrote:
| They do check geolocation on order submit. You can read the
| site from anywhere, though.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Ah, I did not get that far in the enrollment process. Thanks!
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Right now Polymarket is subject to a federal agreement that
| they don't let US people participate.
|
| This changed last month.
| giantg2 wrote:
| What changed?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| They bought a CFTC regulated exchange
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, but they're still enforcing the location stuff. I
| don't think they've fully switched over to regulated
| contracts.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Despite looking like a gambling website, the underlying system
| is a cryptocurrency exchange. With a separate cryptocurrency
| used as an oracle to decide (yes/no/later) if the yes or no
| side won. The site itself if pretty hands off with the actual
| financials. (though, they once did refund people when the
| oracle system resolved incorrectly)
|
| I don't think this convoluted setup is enough to avoid US
| gambling laws, but it is important to keep in mind how it
| actually works.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I have the Polymarket app installed because it's a React Native
| app and I installed a bunch of the top apps using RN as
| research. About a week ago I got a notification that
| "Polymarket is now legal in the US!". I'm not from the US so
| not sure why I got the notification. Anyways, seems like
| something has changed.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Text-only, no Javascript:
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Upfdb
| abetusk wrote:
| "Why prediction markets aren't popular" [0] gives some compelling
| arguments (to me) about why prediction markets haven't caught on
| and probably never will.
|
| As I understand it, the main argument is that for prediction
| markets that aim to incentivize the thing they're predicting,
| better to invest in the thing directly. Otherwise, "prediction
| markets" are successful precisely when they can't influence the
| outcome, like sports betting.
|
| I remember finding the election betting interesting last
| presidential election, but I also remember that it was spiked
| when Musk invested to change the odds.
|
| [0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-
| aren...
| strken wrote:
| Musk, being the world's richest person, is something of an
| outlier. He can afford to give free money to the market for
| longer than anyone else, and the size of the market might not
| be big enough to handle the imbalance.
|
| There's a level of irrational spending which only institutional
| investors can counterbalance, and they might not have the risk
| appetite to get into a single market on a relatively less
| regulated platform that could rug pull them.
| contravariant wrote:
| It's somewhat interesting how the wisdom of the crowd and
| economic theory for rational actors are usually combined as
| an argument for free markets.
|
| While the reverse is not used as an argument against
| unchecked wealth.
| lovich wrote:
| I've used it.
|
| There's no functional difference in how markets work when
| 99% of wealth is owned by a handful of kings vs 99% of
| wealth being owned by a handful of oligarchs.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I don't really think so. You just swapped the term king
| to Oligarchs. In fact the Oligarchs are even worse
| because people think that they have freedom when they
| might not in fact have such freedom in the first place.
| lovich wrote:
| I swapped "kings" plural for "oligarchs" plural
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am laughing if its a joke lmaooo, just now realized it
| all of a sudden lol
|
| pardon me I wrote king instead of kings and what you
| wrote in this comment felt like questionable to me first
| but now comical LMAO.
|
| But my point still stands and aside from this mistake, I
| am curious in knowing the real answer to my question even
| now!
| lovich wrote:
| I don't have an opinion on if it's worse or not because
| some people mistakenly think they are free.
|
| I meant that from the perspective of how market forces
| play out, hyper concentration of wealth into a few actors
| looks the same whether the title of the those actors is
| "king" or "oligarch".
|
| You start losing the wisdom of the crowds effect the
| market gives if you have a handful of people making the
| decisions for the entire market
| strken wrote:
| My understanding is that unchecked wealth only remains that
| way until its owner acts irrationally on a stock exchange,
| at which point it is quite rapidly checked and becomes
| someone else's unchecked wealth.
|
| Which is to say that Elon Musk can inflate any market he
| wants, but only by losing sums of money that will become
| increasingly significant as more and more people find out
| about the free cash giveaway.
| d--b wrote:
| since financial speculation exists, the news has been about
| gambling.
|
| Regular people just didn't know it cause the ticket to entry was
| to expensive.
| smeej wrote:
| > The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be
| a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet
| clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding
| whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-
| timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the
| capture of Nicolas Maduro may have been just a stroke of
| phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe
| someone with inside information was looking for easy money.
|
| I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the
| example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a
| way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole
| point was that _yes_ , people with inside knowledge will bet
| large sums of money on things they expect to happen, _and that 's
| what makes the prediction useful._ The market is meant to
| incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that
| makes them known.
|
| If I knew someone wanted me dead, _of course_ I would want a
| prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted
| dramatically in favor of my death, I would use that as a trigger
| for whatever defense strategies I had in place. _Someone_ has
| really good reason to bet a lot of money on the prospect that I
| 'm about to die. It's probably someone who knows of an active
| plot in motion to try to kill me! The sooner I can find out about
| that, the better. I would much rather give them an incentive to
| make that known somewhat earlier than wait.
|
| I feel like there must be some big piece of this puzzle that I'm
| missing that makes it so these cannot operate the way I imagine
| them, but I haven't heard anyone explaining what it is. Someone
| fill me in on what I'm missing here?
| gpm wrote:
| If the prediction market is for a non-trivial amount, it's
| likely _someone is going to kill you in exchange for the money
| the prediction market offered them_. The prediction market isn
| 't acting as a prophet here, it's acting as a plausibly
| deniable murder for hire service and you are its victim.
|
| The people "betting against" you dying just paid to have you
| killed.
| echoangle wrote:
| Yes, OOP might have chosen a suboptimal example here. But for
| general newsworthy events, people aren't going to be in
| positions to manually make them happen. And no person in a
| position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket
| bet.
| gpm wrote:
| The prediction markets aren't yet at sufficient scale to
| purchase a war, you mean. People start wars for money all
| the time though. If they become of sufficient scale, people
| will purchase wars on them.
|
| There's already lots of examples where they are of
| sufficient scale, like paying the press secretary to shut
| up after 64 minutes. Or paying someone to falsify ISWs map
| of the front line in Ukraine.
| CPLX wrote:
| > And no person in a position to start a war would do it to
| affect a Polymarket bet.
|
| Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that
| is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least
| trying to prove it.
|
| If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that
| people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.
|
| Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many
| people exist who have the capability to start wars or
| influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you
| know about these people and their motivations?
| aurareturn wrote:
| It isn't just the people who can start a war. It's also
| normal people who can.
|
| Imagine if 10 million people bet on starting a war vs 5
| million who say no war. Those net 5 million people are
| going on social media saying why the war is justified.
| They'll vote in war mongers. They'll support the
| military. The bet literally influences the result. It's a
| self fulfilling prophecy.
| kbos87 wrote:
| ...but many people in positions where they can start a war
| or cause some other highly visible event of any sort
| probably will start turning to Polymarket to make money in
| the course of their work
| fartfeatures wrote:
| Which makes the prediction market more accurate.
| intended wrote:
| Eh... sort of? In a sense, they become less accurate,
| because the prediction market is the causative event, not
| an independent observer.
| snowmobile wrote:
| Not really, for the same reason entrapment isn't usually
| seen as an accurate way to gather information for law
| enforcement. See also Goodhart's law and overfitting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "You provide the gambling, I'll provide the war"
| nkrisc wrote:
| Until the tail starts wagging the dog.
| xpe wrote:
| As long as we realize that prediction market accuracy is
| not all we care about.
|
| See also: one can have very high economic efficiency with
| very high inequality, war, disease, misery, etc.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| I can see someone in the Trump admin absolutely using a
| betting market when they can influence the outcome. At the
| least I'd also bet that someone in the T admin was the
| person who knew about Maduro being captured.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But for general newsworthy events, people aren't going to
| be in positions to manually make them happen.
|
| Many newsworthy events (and even more events that actually
| reach prediction markets, many of which are at best
| marginally newsworthy) are actions ultimately pivot on a
| human decision, so the first part isn't true.
|
| > And no person in a position to start a war would do it to
| affect a Polymarket bet.
|
| Are you saying "no one would start a war with personal
| financial gain being part of the motivation", or "it is
| impossible for the payoff of a prediction market bet to be
| of sufficient magnitude to alter the calculus in even the
| tiniest iota in that case"?
|
| Because the first seems extremely clearly false, and the
| second seems improbable in the case where the first is
| false.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > And no person in a position to start a war would do it to
| affect a Polymarket bet.
|
| No person in position to start a war and to influence
| economic policies would become a crypto scammer... erm
| wait...
| flyandscryaway wrote:
| Also, the crypto scammer in chief's son is on the board
| of both major prediction market platforms.
|
| Causing real world problems with prediction markets would
| probably be about ego and trolling.
|
| I also find a clear political bias in the naming of some
| of the markets, but that could be simply because of the
| demography of the user base.
| layoric wrote:
| Exactly, these markets exist in the real world, so as their
| size and use increases, the more likely the odds will
| influence real world events. Look at sports betting for a
| much smaller example. Match fixing is known. Electricity
| markets are gamed for individual profits at the detriment to
| everyone and the stability of the system, even with
| regulators trying to keep things stable. Enough "Market for
| all the things" already..
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > Enough "Market for all the things" already..
|
| See, there are two major flavours of pro-market attitudes.
| The first one is "if we allow many independent individuals
| to try their own approaches to a problem _and_ let the
| people with "better" approach to personally profit from it
| handsomely _and_ make them compete against each other in an
| environment with objective-ish judgement of "what is
| better" instead of "impress the (inevitably corruptible)
| officials to be judged victorious and awarded the
| fortunes", _and_ also manually guard and regulate against
| several universally known ways to sabotage such
| competition, _then_ we 'll be able to channel human
| ingenuity into solving difficult to solve technical
| problems while also rewarding those who are able to come up
| with (and implement) such solutions with low overseeing
| overhead". Of course, such an attitude isn't strictly
| speaking "pro-market", it's been around since ancient
| times; hell, the USSR of all places had this attitude in
| spades until about the 70s or so.
|
| The second one is "Nah, we don't have to try and think
| about anything ourselves, just let people fend for
| themselves, they'll figure it out, and it won't have any
| unforeseen bad side effects, why would it; markets are
| magical like that!" Yeah, about that...
| layoric wrote:
| Right, a market is a small tool of larger systems. That's
| fine, hard to get right but can make systems better. Type
| two just seems to be the cargo culted everywhere..
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think it's actually not that hard to get right (or at
| least "right enough"), as evidenced by the fact that
| markets have successfully run the entire global economy
| for thousands of years with no central oversight and
| almost no regulation.
|
| Markets failures do happen, and when they do it _can_ be
| helpful to have an external force step in to nudge the
| market back onto the rails. But even without such
| interventions they work remarkably well on balance.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > markets have successfully run the entire global economy
| for thousands of years
|
| Markets, as they are understood today, are more like
| about 300 years old, even less in some places. The bulk
| of world economy has been sustenance farming for most of
| the human history, with some communal mutual help (based
| on favours and mutual indebtedness) thrown in.
|
| > with no central oversight and almost no regulation
|
| Lol what? E.g. Roman Republic (and later empire) tightly
| regulated its markets, especially food trade, during all
| of its existence.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The industrial revolution multiplied the size of the
| global economy by several orders of magnitude, but it
| didn't create it. International trade has been happening
| on a smaller scale since large-scale civilized society
| existed. And I said "almost no regulation", not "no
| regulation". Probably something on the order of 99% of
| the regulations we have today wouldn't have even been
| feasible to enforce a couple hundred years ago, yet
| markets still functioned just fine on the whole.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The type of people who have the power to change decide
| these type of events already are able to use that power to
| make money in a thousand different ways. These markets will
| change nothing.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Why would the opposing side of that exact same bet allow
| themselves to be fleeced of all that money for free?
| gpm wrote:
| You're asking why someone hiring a hitman would be willing
| to part with their money?
|
| Because that's what money is for, to purchase things, like
| hitmen (apparently).
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| OK so its much a shallower thought than I anticipated.
|
| Why go through the "prediction market" at all then? The
| hitman still killed someone, payments are not anonymous
| in this market, and its certainly not clean. Further, you
| share the pot with however many are involved,
| proportional to the allotted bets on each side and
| presuming binary prediction. And if the winds change on
| the market for the bet proportional to the "hitman's"
| side, you lose out on dollars that would otherwise be
| paid to you (the hitman).
|
| And it'd be so easy to stiff the hitman just by
| equalizing the positions by timing it.
|
| All that risk for something that's far simpler to just
| pay directly?
| gpm wrote:
| > Why go through the "prediction market" at all then
|
| It's there. It's not actually easy to find hitman for
| hire. This is a publicly advertised market for it.
|
| Plausible deniability. We weren't paying for the witness
| to be murdered, we were expressing our confidence that no
| one would murder the witness.
|
| Price discovery. The market tells you how much you need
| to pay a hitman (if you overpay hedge funds swoop in and
| take the difference, telling you for next time. If the
| hedge funds underestimate the cost they end up paying a
| significant penalty to the people who they prevented from
| hiring a hitman).
|
| Crowd funding. The market means that every can chip in
| however much they want towards paying the hitman, and
| they only end up paying if its enough. In fact the
| middlemen who accepted the bets in the meantime may
| promise to pay some small amount of damages if enough
| isn't collected.
|
| It is impossible to stiff the hitman, and there is no
| risk for the hitman that the "winds change". The hitman
| takes out the entire "yes" position before committing the
| murder. If it's not enough, they don't commit the murder.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The opposing side is getting paid, not getting fleeced.
| intended wrote:
| Asymmetry of information. Fixed bets depend entirely on a
| small enough group with the ability to influence the
| outcome, keeping their mouths shut.
| smeej wrote:
| It's not a bounty, though, right? It operates like other
| trading markets? So unless they have big money to wager, they
| don't have big money to gain. If it's hovering at, say, 10%
| odds, it's not like they can automatically 10x their money
| because other people have to take the opposite side. There
| would have to be a lot of liquidity in the market for their
| large bet not to move the odds, and as the odds move, they
| make less money.
| gpm wrote:
| > So unless they have big money to wager, they don't have
| big money to gain.
|
| It requires that they put down collateral (the purchase of
| the the yes bets) that they lose if they don't meet the
| contract, so they do have to have starting capital.
|
| > because other people have to take the opposite side.
|
| That is to say that there must be people offering the
| bounty.
|
| The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of the
| contract, but the total upside available in the order book.
|
| > and as the odds move, they make less money.
|
| They have to put up more collateral for the remainder of
| the contract if they want that upside - but they make all
| the money that they already put up collateral for.
| smeej wrote:
| > The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of
| the contract, but the total upside available in the order
| book.
|
| But one person doesn't get the whole thing. ALL the
| people holding that side of the contract split the
| payout, in proportion to the size of their holdings in
| that side of the market.
|
| I think if I use hypothetical numbers, it will help me
| explain how I think it works, and maybe this will help
| someone figure out where my error is.
|
| Let's imagine the market is about whether I will die by
| the end of the day. So far, there are $500,000 in total
| bets in the market, and there are 5,000 shares in this
| market. Let's say it's currently sitting at only 10% odds
| that I'm going to die. I think that means 4,500 shares,
| or $450,000, is on the "No" side and 500 shares, or
| $50,000 is on the "Yes" side. Do I have that right so
| far?
|
| If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive
| at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share
| splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of
| them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
|
| But suppose someone has a solid plan to kill me by the
| end of the day. They decide they want to dump $50,000 in
| on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500
| shares, because they would need someone willing to _sell_
| 500 shares at the current price. They 'll actually get
| well under 500 shares, and probably not even half that
| many, and they'll still be splitting the pot among the
| other people who already have the 500 shares on the "Yes"
| side. So they're still at not even half the "Yes" side of
| the market. They can probably double or triple their
| money, but we're talking about making another $50-100k on
| top of getting their own $50k back. It's not like they
| get the whole $500k.
|
| That's what I mean when I say it's "not a bounty." A
| "bounty" makes it sound like, "If you're the one who
| kills smeej, you get $500k," but that's not what's
| happening here.
|
| Lots of people might be willing to try to kill me for
| $500k. A heck of a lot fewer are going to be willing to
| try to kill me for 2-3x whatever capital they can come up
| with right before the hit.
|
| Am I at least understanding this part of it correctly,
| how the payouts actually work? If I'm not, that would go
| a long way toward helping me figure out what I'm missing.
| gpm wrote:
| > I think that means 4,500 shares, or $450,000, is on the
| "No" side and 500 shares, or $50,000 is on the "Yes"
| side. Do I have that right so far?
|
| No - there's always an equal number of contract
| outstanding on both sides of the bet. A contract is a
| promise from the person who sold "no" to pay the person
| who bought "yes" a dollar if the outcome happens. These
| contracts can trade from anywhere between 1 cent to 99
| cents corresponding to a 1% chance to a 99% chance that
| you would die*. The odds the market reports is just
| whatever price the last contract traded at (or
| alternatively whatever price sits between the current
| open offers to buy/sell contracts. In liquid markets
| these tend to be the same).
|
| > If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive
| at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share
| splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of
| them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
|
| They each get $1 per share. Their _profit_ is $1 minus
| how much they paid for the share. It 's not
| (meaningfully) a shared pot which is divided up, it's a
| fixed amount per share.
|
| > They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes"
| side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because
| they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the
| current price.
|
| Ignoring the numbers at this point - you're generally
| right that they need to find someone willing to sell them
| the contracts. The existence of a large number of
| outstanding contracts doesn't guarantee this - they might
| be held by someone who is holding them to minimize the
| payout a hitman could get for killing you for instance.
|
| The most direct guarantee is the order book The order
| book is the collection of open offers "I'm willing to
| sell X yes-contracts at Y price" that the market has for
| potential purchasers. The hitman can look at this and
| snatch up all of these simultaneously (up to some race
| conditions in the market - we can mostly pretend those
| don't exist but they do introduce some risk on the
| hitmans side). This can be thought of as the size of the
| currently available bounty.
|
| There's a _chance_ the market will continually over-price
| these yes contracts - and the hitman will never kill you
| as a result. That would be a huge mistake on all the
| financially motivated holders of yes contracts though -
| their positions go from worth something (if they sell to
| the aspiring hitman) to worth nothing if they don 't
| price them low enough. In general you should expect the
| market to find the price at which a hitman will carry out
| the contract - so long as there's enough money in the
| market in the first place.
|
| * Ignoring transaction fees and the time value of money,
| it's close enough for this discussion.
| smeej wrote:
| But the hitman _still_ does not get the entire value of
| the contract. The hitman gets the value of the number of
| shares he can afford to buy, but that 's not the whole
| contract by any means.
|
| I think I understand what you're saying about the
| pricing. Am I correct in saying, then, that if the odds
| are 90% in favor of my living through the contract, the
| "No, smeej won't die today" price should be close to
| $0.10 (again, ignoring fees and the time value of money)?
|
| If the hitman tries to buy in with 10% of the total funds
| already in the market, the odds/price are going to shift
| hard. It's going to devour a huge chunk of the order
| book. Any market that suddenly has someone come in at 10%
| of the whole market value is going to get a massive
| trading wick. So yeah, he'd get some shares at $0.10, but
| he's probably going to eat the open order book to a much
| higher cost. He can 10x some very small portion of his
| money (however many shares are on the book at $0.10), but
| he can only 5x his money at $0.20, or 3x at $0.33.
|
| Even if we assume he does have $50k to dump into the
| market, I still don't see how he's going to more than
| triple his money, which is a heck of a lot less than
| taking the entire market's value as though it were a
| bounty.
| gpm wrote:
| Yes - we agree on how the pricing and odds work now :)
|
| The hitman shouldn't expect to capture the value of the
| entire open interest. The market here is serving to
| negotiate the bounty with speculators betting that too
| much was offered taking the rest (a privilege they pay
| for by buying contracts that only pay out if they don't
| take too much). It's a curious form of negotiation since
| the people paying for the murder don't participate... but
| should (in a very theoretical efficient market) come to a
| "fair" (large enough to get the job done, and no larger)
| payment for the hitman.
|
| 2xing your money in a night is a _huge_ payout, I think
| you 're overestimating how high the multiplier on the
| capital requirement needs to be. That said, if you
| aren't, and you need a 5x payout to find a hitman then no
| rational speculator would purchase contracts for more
| then $0.20...
| smeej wrote:
| It's only a huge payout if you have a huge amount of
| money. If you have $1k to put in, you get $2k out. Who's
| risking getting caught and potentially facing the death
| penalty for $1k in profit?
|
| If someone already has significant money backing, and
| especially if that person already has some other specific
| reason to want you dead, I can see how it might be added
| incentive, but even so, you also now have to tip your
| hand. To buy in hard, you have to send a signal saying
| you have reason to be confident I'm about to die. You're
| basically shooting yourself in the foot right before
| trying to shoot me in the head.
|
| Plus, it's not like the markets are anonymous. Polymarket
| isn't trading with Monero. You're not just tipping your
| hand ahead of time. You're pointing the investigators
| right at yourself.
|
| I just don't see how the calculations end up falling in
| favor of killing somebody if you weren't already planning
| to do so.
| concats wrote:
| A risky bet can give back much more than 3x the money.
| Take this absurd one for example, it seems like it's
| offering up to 9x on a yes bet right now:
| https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027
|
| (I don't know how much volume is available, nor do I
| endorse betting on either side of things like this)
| hpdigidrifter wrote:
| This was discussed on polymarket with the Galve Goat burning
| bet and assume it's why
|
| Essentially it's a big straw goat in Sweden that vandals
| sometime set on fire.
|
| Right towards the end as the probability approaches zero
| there's a huge profit incentive, "done deals" usually go
| under well under 1C/ meaning 100-200x returns.
|
| A US man once traveled to Sweden to set the goat on fire, he
| was caught, fined $20k(?) and then fled the country before
| paying the fine.
|
| Risk reward in a situation like this absolutely creates a
| situation for prediction markets similar to the observer
| effect in physics, it's no longer predicting the future and
| instead altering it.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think as this becomes a reality, in general people will
| stop trading so close near the deadline for so little gain.
| mminer237 wrote:
| As it gets closer to the deadline, the timeframe
| shortens, so the gain does increase. A 1% return which
| you're paid on tomorrow is a 3,778% annualized return.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Ok, but the risk of manipulation increases as well, since
| the payoff for event manipulators is the highest near the
| deadline.
| flyandscryaway wrote:
| There's still limited liquidity. You need to find someone
| willing to put up a very large amount of money for almost
| no gain. I also doubt these websites have enough activity
| to well calibrate near 1 dollar bets, so it's not clear
| the market is giving you accurate predictive power with
| very expensive bets, which means you're risking a lot
| (again, for almost no gain).
| CPLX wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here
|
| > If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a
| prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted
| dramatically in favor of my death
|
| No, you definitely would not want that. You don't want to live
| in the world like this. That's the point.
|
| It's fucking horrible and dystopian, people betting on extra-
| legal invasions of countries, murders, things that could hurt
| or harm people where they have incentives to do something else
| that you've just distorted.
|
| Gambling has been illegal, immoral, and proscribed by religions
| for literally thousands of years, in all sorts of different
| forms and iterations, for a reason. Because it's incredibly
| toxic to society.
|
| You can make some arguments that pure games of chance, like
| casino games, and even maybe sports betting (since sports is a
| spectacle) aren't that bad. Based on what we've seen recently,
| I tend to disagree, but at least it's an argument.
|
| But now we're talking about betting on all sorts of political
| issues, things that are illegal, things where people are acting
| in an official capacity and shouldn't be given incentives to
| subvert that. And all these other examples are just bad.
| There's not really any upside to this at all. It's just bad for
| society and it shouldn't happen. It's horrible.
|
| If you feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle you
| should take a couple of steps back and think about the
| consequences of a world where this is common.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| I think easy gambling over the internet is terrible, tons of
| young people are getting stuck in it. People get addicted to
| it throughout history and ruin their lives, vulnerable people
| get in trouble with huge losses.
|
| But I don't think we should do anything because religion
| doesn't like it - that's a foolish thing to use to make your
| crucial choices or world view. A key reason is pretty much
| every terrible thing ever was excused as requirement of some
| religion or forever. Separate from the hurtful things in
| religious books at times, it's too easy for leaders or
| authorities to somehow justify actions.
|
| Let's instead use a goal of treating each other respectfully,
| stop hating and killing each other. Yeah, that's all naive
| stuff, we aren't there, maybe we'll never be there. Still a
| good goal, treat each other with kindness. And yeah, I'm an
| optimistic sort.
| CPLX wrote:
| You have cause and effect backwards. I'm saying that it's
| horrible and toxic for society which is why almost every
| major religion over every major period of history noticed
| and banned it.
|
| It's not toxic because religion doesn't like it. Religion
| doesn't like it because it's toxic.
|
| Religion has been the primary means throughout history by
| which humans have tried to figure out right and wrong. You
| can feel however you want about it, but that's just how
| it's worked. It's basically the ultimate example of
| Chesterton's fence.
|
| To carry my analogy further, there are many, many, many
| times where the fence doesn't need to be there or where the
| fence has outlived its useful purpose. But it's still a
| good metaphor.
| smeej wrote:
| I think the problem is that I _don 't_ think it would end up
| primarily being about gambling.
|
| I already live in a world where people make odds about
| whether I'm going to die. They're called "actuaries," and
| they work at life insurance companies. There are also
| oddsmakers of the same kind at car insurance companies, etc.
|
| Right now, I _hate_ that people who can actually analyze
| enough data to make odds about these things can only earn a
| living working for companies that are incentivized to find
| ways not to pay out when the odds do break against them. I 'd
| much rather these people be able to make their livings just
| calculating odds, placing bets, and being right. _I_ would
| like to have access to their calculations, and not be in a
| position of "just take it or leave it" when I'm evaluating a
| prospective plan from a life insurance company, for example.
|
| Yes, by all means, there will be gamblers in these markets.
| There will always be some amount of noise, just like there is
| in the stock market. But why would that end up being the bulk
| of the industry? Just like with Wall Street, I would expect
| companies to grow up around these markets that specialize in
| getting the odds of things right, and making money off of
| their predictions. If the market ever became truly efficient,
| I think we would have a MUCH better idea than we do now about
| the likelihood of all kinds of things.
|
| Heck, even if I think of something as apparently mundane as
| weather forecasting, if somebody came up with a breakout
| model that was right substantially more often, I would expect
| they would be able to raise all sorts of capital around it
| and start winning in all the weather forecasting markets,
| which would then make their predictions a reliable signal,
| and we'd finally have better information about what the
| weather is going to do.
|
| I think one part I must be missing is why so many people are
| assuming that the primary user of prediction markets would be
| gamblers instead of specialists, especially once they
| operated at scale. I just don't see why that would happen.
| Anywhere there's an opportunity to make money reliably by
| coming up with better analysis or prediction tools, capital
| will flock there and incentivize coming up with better
| analysis or prediction tools.
|
| I think I really would like to live in a world where that was
| highly incentivized, and I'm confused why people would not
| want that.
|
| ETA: I don't think the gamblers would ruin this any more than
| they ruin Wall Street. I don't think they have enough capital
| to matter. (They are, after all, prone to losing money.)
| perfmode wrote:
| The missing piece is the distinction between a market that
| observes reality and a market that instigates it.
|
| The criticism is about the systemic risk of converting
| prediction markets into "Assassination Markets"--mechanisms
| where the payout is not a reward for foresight, but a bounty
| for action.
|
| In the case of Maduro, the operation cost around $300 million
| so a $400,000 payout isn't providing a financial incentive.
|
| But in the case of assassination, a $400,000 payout is
| sufficient motivation.
| WolfCop wrote:
| > In the case of Maduro, the operation cost around $300
| million so a $400,000 payout isn't providing a financial
| incentive.
|
| It is if you are spending someone else's $300 million, and
| getting the $400,000 yourself.
| gpm wrote:
| Or if you're the military commander with the option to
| disobey the illegal order (to go to war without
| congressional authorization) or take the bribe and execute
| the order. "Unmarked cash" (which this is) has pretty
| different purposes from official funds.
|
| I think there's a pretty good chance the person who took
| that money was opportunistic, this time, but $400k isn't a
| trivial sum of money, it's not impossible it was the
| difference between this happening and not.
| smeej wrote:
| But it's not a _bounty._ It 's a _market,_ right? So the
| payout is split among everyone on your side? And the if you
| try to dump a ton (measured relative to the size of the
| market) into the market, the price tanks because there aren
| 't enough people coming in on the other side. You get a big
| wick in the trading candle, so you scoop up the much less
| favorable terms of the bet at higher cost.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I 'm trying to understand what the criticism is here,
| because the example seems to support the point that these are
| meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it._
|
| Indeed. Insider trading is a _feature_ of prediction markets,
| not a bug. There are two kinds of people who participate in
| prediction markets:
|
| 1. People who have insider information, or at least more
| sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.
|
| 2. Gamblers.
|
| In effect, prediction markets are a way to move wealth from the
| second group to the first. If you understand that and still
| want to participate, cool. It's your money, and you're allowed
| to gamble it away if you find that entertaining.
|
| At any rate, given the relatively small-potatoes level of bets
| going on at Polymarket and Kalshi, the article author's
| breathless anxiety about this is a bit overblown.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >1. People who have insider information,
|
| I mean, most stock trading _prevents_ insider trading, unless
| of course you 're a in congress.
|
| Seemingly regulators consider this a bug in every other
| market type, but suddenly this gambling market allows it?
|
| > breathless anxiety about this
|
| All fun and games until people start dying from it.
| valkmit wrote:
| Insider trading in stocks are prohibited but not for the
| reason most people think. It has nothing to do with someone
| having an unfair advantage in an informational sense, and
| everything to do with fiduciary responsibility.
|
| The CEO and executive team has fiduciary responsibility to
| act in the financial best interest of the shareholders.
| Your broker too.
|
| If you have insider info (Obtained legally) but no
| fiduciary responsibility you can act on it. That's why
| congress members trading US equities based on decisions
| they're privy to is not, from a legal perspective, insider
| trading. They don't have a fiduciary responsibility to
| their constituents
| derf_ wrote:
| "Insider trading is not about fairness, it is about
| theft" is a uniquely American approach that is not shared
| by other jurisdictions.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Where the hell did you read that
| nly wrote:
| Presumably he means theft from shareholders. It's an
| accurate summary.
| triceratops wrote:
| Probably Matt Levine.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| This comment is not really correct
|
| 1. The misappropriation theory of insider trading covers
| anyone who trades on material non public information
| sourced through a trusted relationship regardless of any
| fiduciary duty to the company. For example, if I tell my
| personal attorney a non public fact about the company I
| work at, and they trade on that information, they
| absolutely can be found guilty of insider trading despite
| having no relationship to the company at hand.
|
| 2. Congress is explicitly covered by insider trading law,
| which was affirmed in the STOCK Act of 2012. The fact
| that they're rarely indicted has more to do with the
| legal and political challenges associated with doing so,
| not the legality of the act.
| floam wrote:
| > The misappropriation theory of insider trading covers
| anyone who trades on material non public information
| sourced through a trusted relationship regardless of any
| fiduciary duty to the company. For example, if I tell my
| personal attorney a non public fact about the company I
| work at, and they trade on that information, they
| absolutely can be found guilty of insider trading despite
| having no relationship to the company at hand.
|
| Huh. The lawyer example works because attorneys have a
| very specific, enforceable duty of confidentiality. Swap
| that relationship out and the conclusion may change. As
| written, the comment slides from "duty-based misuse of
| information" to "any private knowledge you shouldn't
| have," which is not the same thing.
|
| A lawyer (not my lawyer) gave me his off-the-cuff opinion
| on this scenario:
|
| A pharmacologically-literate clinical trial participant
| for a novel new drug strongly suspects he did not receive
| the placebo/comparator drug, based on the subjective
| effects, plus their own pharmacology knowledge,
| experience with the placebo, and the research on the
| candidate drug.
|
| However, this drug was not therapeutic for him, the side
| effects were onerous, or perhaps he believes the trial
| will be halted. Whatever their reasoning behind his
| inference, no details of others' experiences were leaked
| to him, blinding was maintained; protocol was followed.
| He didn't base this on a lab readout.
|
| Based on his understanding of published research on the
| candidate drug, and projecting from his lived experience
| as lab rat, he believes this trial should disappoint
| shareholders. At the very least, shares may be priced too
| high.
|
| Can the participant, based on this inference, invest $$$
| shorting the pharma firm? This drug is considered the
| firm's last best hope.
|
| Their answer was yes, basically. He can trade on this
| non-public info.
| colinmorelli wrote:
| This scenario seems very different because nobody gave
| the person any material non-public information at all,
| they simply deduced it from their experience
| participating in the trial. This feels similar to the
| question of "can a passenger on the Boeing jet with the
| door plug that blew out trade on that information" to
| which the answer appears to be yes.
|
| Misappropriation theory is the following: > The
| misappropriation theory of insider trading is a form of
| insider trading where an individual trades stock in a
| corporation, with whom they are unaffiliated, on the
| basis of material non-public information they obtained
| through a breach of a fiduciary duty owed to the source
| of the information
|
| The important part, which you're right was unclear in my
| comment is that the recipient of the information must
| have a fiduciary relationship with the source of the
| information, even if they do not have one with the
| company in question at all. That's the distinction.
| csomar wrote:
| Kalshi and Polymarket have a billion dollar of open interest
| between them (though velocity here matters too and volume is
| not very useful). The important thing is they are growing
| fast. Which means it might become big-potatoes very soon.
| spir wrote:
| > 1. People who have insider information, or at least more
| sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.
|
| This bucket as you've defined it is too broad.
|
| There are a few different kinds of non-gambler participants
| in prediction markets:
|
| 1. People with "insider information" as we think of it - they
| "know" the answer to the market because they are "involved"
| somehow.
|
| 2. People who aim to do superior analysis of publicly
| available information to produce an edge. For example, an AI
| firm with better hurricane prediction modeling may try to
| monetize that by betting on whether or not a hurricane will
| impact an area.
|
| 2b. People who do the work to create new information. For
| example, the Trump 2024 election market on polymarket
| famously had better odds for Trump than polling. It turned
| out that a mega whale was bidding Trump up _because he had
| paid for his own private polling in battleground states_ and
| that gave him confidence Trump was going to win.
|
| In short, it's mostly incorrect to suggest that prediction
| market participants are either illegitimate insiders or
| gamblers; there is a third class of actors that are a very
| important cohort: those who do the work to create better
| predictions and monetize their work by betting in the
| markets. This third cohort of professional predictors is the
| most important in long-term prediction market growth.
| kajaktum wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because
| the example seems to support the point that these are meant to
| be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the
| whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet
| large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's
| what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to
| incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that
| makes them known.
|
| Except the paragraph you quoted nullify this benefit
|
| > The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user
| placed right before the capture of Nicolas Maduro
|
| So we learnt nothing. For the entire duration the stock is
| online, its pretty much 50/50 then suddenly 1 day before, the
| ticker spikes to yes.
| smeej wrote:
| Yes, but it spikes BEFORE the attack begins, which means we
| learnt someone thought there was a string reason to believe
| things were about to change _earlier than we otherwise would
| have._
|
| That's the whole point, isn't it?
|
| And if you're going to tell me the paragraph I quoted
| nullifies what I've said, would you please explain how?
| Obviously I don't currently understand it the same way you
| do, and I have asked for help understanding what I'm missing.
| Saying, "You're missing it," isn't helpful.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It appears you are missing any cursory philosophy, ethics,
| logic, etc. courses.
| porksoda wrote:
| Me too, and I wish you would have answered the clear request
| for enlightenment instead of pointing out the obvious fact
| that we weren't in your class.
| pcchristie wrote:
| I thought the reason prediction markets were useful was not
| that people with inside information participate in them
| which can provide an indicator to the rest of us, but that
| by providing a sense of consensus at scale we can more
| accurately predict things.
|
| e.g. two sports teams participating in a fair match
| tomorrow, someone runs a book and after 200,000 punters
| bet, the odds are 90/10 in favour of Team A indicates that
| 90% of the time Team A is going to win that game.
|
| This assumes perfect and fully available information with
| punters availing themselves of this info (or at least an
| equal split of passionate/casual/informed/wreckless or even
| slightly "inside" punters on each side).
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Then pay me and I'll enlighten you.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| It appears you are missing any cursory ethics courses.
| smeej wrote:
| Ironically, I actually have a philosophy _degree._ If I 'm
| still missing the point, I really don't think it's because I
| haven't learned how to think.
|
| All I can really do in this case is ask for explanation. If
| you're enough higher and mightier than I am that you don't
| care to give me one, that's fine. You don't have to. It's
| just kind of...unnecessarily condescending to rub my face in
| it without even trying?
| manicennui wrote:
| The interesting thing to me about this example is that it had
| to be someone lower level in or near the administration with
| less wealth, but who knew about a military operation. Hard to
| imagine any of the rich people around him risking a bet for
| such a small sum.
| md2020 wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here
|
| You're correct in your understanding of prediction markets with
| respect to traders using insider information. There are a
| couple things going on here. One is the subtext from most news
| media now that Technology Bad. New technologies are treated as
| guilty until proven innocent, because that is a more engaging
| narrative for readers. So in this case, those covering this
| stuff immediately latch onto the rich get richer, insider
| trading viewpoint, and that gets reported without any analysis
| of why that might actually be desirable.
|
| Second, prediction markets, in trying to become broadly
| accessible to "normal" people and desiring liquidity, need a
| marketing strategy that is understandable. They can't put out a
| Robin Hanson article as marketing material. So they market by
| appealing to something people do already understand, which is
| gambling. The public has this idea now of prediction markets as
| a way to _make money_ , not as a tool for _learning
| information_. So the default perspective on insider trading is
| now one of unfairness: somebody used their privileged position
| to make money. The correct perspective is, in fact, that
| prediction markets are providing users with value by eliciting
| information from those insiders, information that the public
| would not otherwise have. The latter perspective is mostly
| foreign to degenerate gamblers, and the marketing campaigns of
| Kalshi and Polymarket aren 't helping.
| concats wrote:
| >If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a
| prediction market on it [...] Someone fill me in on what I'm
| missing here?
|
| The assassin might place the bet at roughly the same time as
| they place the bullet in the chamber. Making the prediction
| into a bounty. Not giving you any meaningful time to ponder the
| new information. The notification from your phone would be the
| distraction they'd use when taking aim.
| TZubiri wrote:
| One of the problems is that by creating a prediction market for
| your death, you may be creating a hit for yourself.
|
| You enable different enemies to crowdsource for your bounty,
| and as soon as it is deemed worthy by a hitman, they might take
| up on the job by placing the opposite bet.
|
| It's a very specific example but the mechanics work for most
| events in a similar fashion.
|
| It is for this reason that event creation is not open to the
| public, but rather handled by the regulated markets themselves
| tech_ken wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because
| the example seems to support the point that these are meant to
| be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the
| whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet
| large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's
| what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to
| incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that
| makes them known.
|
| You're ignoring the critical issue of _timing_. It 's one thing
| to crowd-source knowledge in a steady, homogenous way. It's
| quite another for an actor with material knowledge of the
| situation to exploit this dramatic information asymmetry to
| turn a profit, revealing the new information at the last
| possible timepoint it could be used to lay a wager. Insider
| trading is quite different from a Hayek-style price signalling,
| and it's the same here. In principle (and on long time-scales)
| these markets can incentivize important information to come to
| light sure, but in infinite time we're all dead anyways. The
| short-time dynamics matter a lot more, from a social welfare
| perspective.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I don't really understand the argument for prediction markets if
| you don't have inside information. The reason they beat other
| forms of news is because insiders are incentivised to bet, that
| makes some sense. But surely an investor without insider
| knowledge will always make less money on a market where they're
| trading against insiders than one where they're not.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The argument is not that you should bet on prediction markets,
| the argument is that you should use the odds from the market to
| make decisions about the future.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| But they don't work without someone making the argument that
| some non-insiders should bet on them right? Because the
| insiders aren't going to bother moving the market for us if
| there's nobody to take money off.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| The traditional way to square that circle is to say that
| someone who's interested in the answer should subsidize the
| market. Essentially they provide liquidity to the market
| which essentially pays people with accurate information to
| bet. Some work has been done to figure our effective ways
| of doing that. In practice, it seems like gamblers often
| provide enough liquidity that this is not needed
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You forget that people are not necessarily doing this for
| rational reasons.
|
| Some people do it for for entertainment, some people are
| gambling addicts, some people think they have a strong grasp or
| inside knowledge when they don't.
|
| It is, at root, a casino. Apply your lens to any casino game,
| and it shouldn't exist (some very narrow exceptions apply in
| the casino).
| csomar wrote:
| It is not a casino in the sense that in the casino you are
| better against the house. Polymarket is basically an arbiter
| with financial infrastructure.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| I don't know how this works but assuredly polymarket takes
| a cut, right? So if we were betting on a coin toss on
| polymarket, the payout would be less than 2 for both heads
| ands tail after accounting for polymarket's fee. That's not
| different from the rake for a poker game in a casino?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| For the purposes of understanding the behavior of those
| laying down bets, it is an irrelevant distinction.
| fasterik wrote:
| Not all casino games are played against the house. The best
| analogy would be a game like poker, where the house takes a
| small percent of every pot (the rake). Other than that,
| money changes hands between players. The game has an
| element of randomness and luck but there is also a large
| element of skill. Players have a wide range motivations and
| skill levels, from casual players and thrill-seekers to
| professional players.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I don't really understand the argument for prediction markets
| if you don't have inside information.
|
| If you don't have inside information and you participate in
| prediction markets, you're there mostly to provide liquidity.
| elzbardico wrote:
| If you don't have insider info, they are betting houses.
| Prediction Markets is just a cynical euphemism.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Part of me wishes there were prediction markets for flight
| delays. The ETAs are wildly inaccurate, like last time the
| counter staff suggested I not reschedule cause our plane was
| arriving in 15min, when I could see on a slightly hard to find
| site that the plane was still grounded 500mi away.
|
| Part of me is careful what I wish for, starting with passengers
| bothering staff even more.
| kshacker wrote:
| Isn't travel insurance one form of this?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Do you mean the kind that pays for cancellations? The
| scenario I'm sometimes in is the flight is delayed, I can
| switch for free anyway, but I don't want to have to wait a
| whole day or something. So it becomes a game of, stick with
| current flight or switch, and which one do I switch to.
| kpierce wrote:
| Flightly or flightradar24 listens to air traffic control and
| updates the app before any announcements are made. Huge help
| for delays or gate changes.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I'll try that one. Last time was frantic and tried like 5 bad
| sites before finding at least where the plane was.
|
| But maybe the passengers or crew on that plane had a better
| idea of why they were delayed, which I'm not sure any site
| would show. I've been on the other end too, knowing my plane
| isn't taking off due to a jammed door and texting updates to
| someone who was supposed to pick me up on the other end.
| akomtu wrote:
| "Accounts payable: 11111. In 1 hour. John Wick. Excommunicado."
|
| The essence of prediction markets.
| 827a wrote:
| Prediction markets have an alluring quality that they become a
| pulse-check on what humanity believes is going to happen, putting
| your money where your mouth is, and when they work like this they
| work pretty well and are an interesting instrument. Brian
| Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, has even gone so far as to say
| that Insider Trading is a necessary source of data for prediction
| markets, if the goal of prediction markets is to be an accurate
| prediction of the future [1]. However, it seems increasingly
| clear that even this function of prediction markets doesn't
| behave how the silicon valley elite seem to think it does. In
| multiple markets throughout 2025, we saw insiders "snipe" correct
| predictions at the last minute, while odds were still against the
| correct outcome, moments before some finalizing event or news
| became public.
|
| In theory, insiders give correct signal. But in practice, their
| volume is often too low to meaningfully move the market in the
| correct direction, and the timing of their order flow can be too
| late for that signal to actually be useful as a tool for
| predicting the future.
|
| Its also critical to note that insider trading laws don't just
| exist to protect investors. They exist to protect the
| organizations the insiders belong to. The order flow on both
| prediction markets and the stock market is public information.
| Its one thing to short the company you work at because you know
| they're going to announce bad earnings. Its another thing
| entirely to take out a million-dollar position on "US Strikes
| Venezuela before Jan 3: Yes" on January 2nd. Sophisticated
| geopolitical opponents are monitoring these order flow feeds, and
| it begins to become a genuine matter of national security.
|
| Overall, I am fine with prediction markets. I think they're an
| improvement over sports betting in the sense that they better-
| align incentives between the participants and the market-maker.
| In typical sports betting, the casinos running them set the odds,
| and participants take out positions against the casino; which
| means the casinos are incentivized against allowing anyone to
| actually make money on their platforms. This has surfaced many
| times in "professional sports betters" getting blacklisted. In
| comparison, PMs are a contract between participants, and the
| market-maker only takes a fee on each transaction (Robinhood's is
| 2.5%; quite high), which means the market-maker is only
| incentivized to increase PM order book volume and provide
| interesting markets. There's more opportunity for actual skill
| and dedication to shine through.
|
| But, KYC is critical.
|
| [1] https://x.com/itslirrato/status/2008184149450891724
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Prediction markets are not considered gambling for the same
| reason that stock markets aren't. There's no fixed odds or random
| chance. A skilled analyst can make consistent returns.
|
| Unlike stock markets, prediction markets also provide valuable
| data on important world events, such as elections. It's _wisdom
| of the crowd_ with financial incentive.
| jart wrote:
| Equities markets allow society to collective allocate labor
| resources and they incentivize the public discovery of business
| intelligence. Prediction markets reward the public discovery of
| gossip. Any kind of trading can be gambling depending on how
| you do it. But with equities the odds are usually almost
| guaranteed to be in your favor if you long them and wait. I
| can't remember ever seeing a prediction market where I felt I
| could have a thesis on its outcome, unless I was spying on
| people. So I really don't see how they could be anything but
| gambling for most people.
| nkzd wrote:
| > A skilled analyst can make consistent returns.
|
| So can a skilled coach make consistent returns in his sport.
| But sportsbetting is considered gambling.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Depends on the scope. If you take stock movement, and zoom in
| close enough, the fluctuations can be considered random. And
| suddenly you have people putting their money on things like
| binary options.
|
| Surely, in the prediction market, it is possible to set up
| prediction bets which are practically impossible to predict.
| And with binary outcome, your odds will be 50/50.
| gizzlon wrote:
| Polymarked has a 3% chance of Jesus returning _this year_ :
| https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...
|
| Good example to show when people tout how great these are at
| predicting.
| StrayTint wrote:
| The Jesus market is really a bet on interest rates. You should
| bet that Jesus will return if interest rates are >3% because
| "No" holders will sell to put their money in the bank instead.
| gizzlon wrote:
| You are probably right, but I believe it's a failure of
| prediction whatever the reason is.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| It is, but it's a well known systemic error that has to do
| with the rate of return from certain accuracy improving
| predictions falling below the rate of return of anything
| else.
|
| You can learn a lot more about whether these markets are
| accurate at this great resource:
|
| https://calibration.city/introduction
| rifty wrote:
| In theory I like the idea of prediction markets but how they are
| done right now makes a bunch of markets too insecure to put much
| stock into or informationally unvaluable to inform other
| decisions
|
| There is little incentive for someone with significant
| information, reason, or intuition to reveal it early leaving the
| market dumb for most of its existence or also open for someone
| influencing the outcome late.
|
| They also aren't currently that reliable for gauging the wisdom
| of the crowds for situations where trust in the market effects
| its outcome. It's easy due to the scale of them for someone to
| just burn money to skew the perception of it for rhetorical and
| influential benefits.
|
| I feel like there is no getting off this train though because
| news media companies are still desperate for revenue. Gambling
| around news will either increase advertising revenue for them, or
| if they do real information uncovering journalism, drive
| subscriptions because there's now incentive for getting news
| early on more than just financial news.
| Kinrany wrote:
| > There is little incentive for someone with significant
| information, reason, or intuition to reveal it early
|
| Yes but only if they know no one else has the same information
| and enough money to move the market
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Is insider betting illegal? I know it's illegal in the sports
| context, but not necessarily in other areas.
|
| Even for insider trading, it's illegal not because it's unfair,
| but because the insider is considered to be stealing information
| from shareholders. For example, it's not illegal for a company to
| buy back stocks while holding insider information.
|
| Not legal advice of course.
| thm wrote:
| https://archive.is/gFUry
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The gamblification of the country will go down as one of the
| darker chapters of USA.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Gamblification is everywhere, not just in US. Eastern Europe is
| cooked in this regard. LATAM the same probably.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I hear bad things about the state of Australia's gambling
| industry
| popopo73 wrote:
| Yep. Can't get a drink in NSW without seeing people wasting
| their pay check on the pokies.
| nnevatie wrote:
| The US will be the last casino he'll bankcrupt.
| hippo22 wrote:
| The gamblification of everything is just another stepping stone
| on the path to the financialization of everything. Many of our
| best and brightest dedicate their lives to "financial
| innovation". It's sad.
| loeg wrote:
| Gamblification is very, very different from financialization.
| hippo22 wrote:
| It's the financialization of outcomes.
| vladms wrote:
| Who does it though? I feel that many people that gamble
| are the ones that feel "they know better" and they don't
| see any better way to use their money. Having a part of
| the population with those attributes seems the root cause
| of the issue, rather than the specific mechanism they
| use.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Some of it is, but Polymarket is a horse of a different
| color.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| A financialization example: Somehow some company's stock
| became the go-to for investors that had continuous
| expectations just for the stock, and not about actual
| company health. And the company chose to prop up the stock
| quarter per quarter, instead of investing in long term
| development, until it crashed.
|
| This is somewhat similar to dangers of gamblification I
| guess. Where the expectations of the investors (gamblers)
| start shaping the decisions of the professional management
| of the company.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Indeed. Imagine a future where all news have a permanent
| _"place your bet on this event! No money? No problem! 36
| month financing plan available"_ banner in the side. You'll
| first just have to purchase some stable coin that the broker
| mints. Automatic wage garnishment if you default.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| You won't have to buy stable coins, you'll just pay with
| your credit cards. This is basically sports gambling
| applied to the sport of news. I bet they'll use the same
| kind of emotional manipulation too: "Real republicans
| (fans) bet here." You'll be watching a political debate and
| then you'll have a "the DraftKings Minute" debate analysis
| segment which is like three guys that don't know anything
| about politics screaming about odds.
|
| This sounds exactly like the timeline we are in.
| nly wrote:
| Gambling isn't the problem (it can be regulated and safety
| measures can be put in place). It's the corruption that goes
| alongside betting on outcomes that can be easily manipulated
| with no common-sense oversight keeping the market fair.
|
| The Nobel Peace Prize bet was a classic example. Any right-
| minded bookmaker would have voided that bet given that it was
| proven that the outcome had leaked ahead of time. Venezuela
| betting markets were equally corrupted.
|
| The fish rots from the head what with Trump blatantly
| manipulating markets to enrich himself, his family and anyone
| who curries favour with him and says he's wonderful.
|
| I personally will not set foot in the US, or buy services from
| any US company, until this administration is over.
| pseidemann wrote:
| Isn't this just the result of unregulated capitalism?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Still a good chance that something will happen in these four
| years that makes the gambling crisis look completely trivial. I
| suppose I should bet on that, or would it be in poor taste?
|
| Many, many years ago the libertarians had something they called
| "assassination politics", in which it was pointed out that the
| ability to bet on the death of famous figures also created an
| "untraceable" way to funnel money to someone who could make
| that event happen.
| misja111 wrote:
| I read the article but failed to grasp what exactly the disaster
| is that America would be walking into.
|
| Is the reliability of Polymarket predictions overhyped? Sure. Is
| there manipulation of Polymarket odds by some people? Most likely
| there is. But to say that this is a disaster that America is
| walking into is nothing else but clickbait.
| elar_verole wrote:
| I think you are underappreciating how "manipulation of poly
| market odds" can be destructive when you are betting on
| geopolitics. Here this means that every decision is now a
| conflict of interest, and that doing the unpredictable
| (politically, economically etc) has a financial incentive for
| potential insiders. Sounds pretty dangerous to me.
| bawolff wrote:
| On the other hand we have had stock markets forever. Sure you
| couldn't directly bet on e.g. if trump would invade iran, but
| you could indirectly bet on it by betting on things like the
| price of oil.
|
| I dont think this is a new threat.
| newdee wrote:
| Comparing crusty old stock markets to the mass appeal of
| shiny, low-barrier-to-entry Polymarket is somewhat naive.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Polymarket is way higher barrier to entry than the stock
| market. For starters you need to sent ETH over the
| Polygon network. Stock market is in dollars.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I don't think Polymarket even allows US people yet, but
| Kalshi you can fund with a credit card even.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was the crash of the stock markets that eventually
| created the social situation that pushed people into WW.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| It's all fun and games until someone decides to bet $100K
| that someone they don't like won't die via assassination
| this year.
| eru wrote:
| How is that any different from existing financial markets?
| elar_verole wrote:
| Heavy regulation, harder to anonymize, and overall less
| person exposed to insider info because you can bet on only
| a subset of stuff, and not everything that can ever happen.
| Mind you, I still think these existing financial markets do
| have a ton of issues of this kind (trump's tariff to
| manipulate the market is a very recent example), but why
| add more on top of it ?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| The disaster is the consequences of people treating the data
| generated by these prediction markets as revealing some sort of
| insight into future events, rather than just a silly game
| played by silly people.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| It's actually not a terrible idea to take some insights from
| prediction market data.
|
| For example, you can expect the data to closely correlate to
| poll results for elections, because when it doesn't... people
| will notice and correct it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Markets are good at aggregating information. If there are so
| many obviously flawed predictions, I recommend you become one
| of the silly people as it sounds like you would quickly be
| rich.
| eru wrote:
| I guess journalists don't like markets?
| woah wrote:
| Journalists like writing about America walking into disasters
| xpe wrote:
| With the exception of financial or economic analysis [1],
| relatively few journalists get paid to write with quantitative
| nuance, much less awareness of probability. These articles are
| rarely written to prioritize harm or predict the future.
| Instead, everything feels like an emergency. [2]
|
| There is a large disconnect between the amount of combined
| effort and thinking that goes into prediction markets versus
| the glibness of which so many people write about them. It is
| almost as if people lose the plot -- in capitalist countries,
| many financial flows are heavily informed by futures markets
| which share many of the same characteristics as prediction
| markets.
|
| [1]: also: fraud investigations or other areas where rigor is
| expected
|
| [2]: Even the better sources such as The Atlantic are somewhat
| advertising fueled, driven towards "engaging" content,
| prioritizing interesting ideas rather than practical relevance,
| dumbed down to maybe a high school reading level, hardly a
| trace of showing one's methods. I don't think I've ever seen
| any backing analysis in the form of a spreadsheet or (heaven
| forbid!) source code of a simulation. This is not meant to
| point fingers at writers or journalists; we just have to
| recognize the context they live in. If we want detailed and
| careful analysis, we need to find ways to build system systems
| that provide it. What we have now is a joke compared to what is
| possible.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the
| now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge
| wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election,
| generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor
| did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two
| researchers who examined the trades. "More plausibly, this trader
| could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds
| of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale,
| and turnout," they wrote. The trader lost at least $4 million but
| might have shaped media attention of the race for less than the
| price of a prime-time ad, they concluded.
|
| Reminiscent of PG's essay about the submarine[0]: it's another
| way of attaching credibility to a 'news' item you're pushing.
|
| [0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| frenzcan wrote:
| >As this new kind of writing draws readers away from
| traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR
| mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work
| to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine
| they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they
| can figure out how.
|
| I think it's safe to say they figured it out.
| terminalshort wrote:
| This is just implausible. Nobody with a brain is going to throw
| away 4 million on the speculative hope that a prediction market
| price is going to magically manipulate media coverage on the
| election.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| That's a lot of money for an individual, but if the (dark)
| money originates from a donor or PAC, it's just another
| campaign expense.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| It's still a lot of money from a donor or PAC for this kind
| of change. I find it remarkably hard to believe that lines
| moving on Intrade would have a bigger impact than an
| equivalent amount of money spent on battleground state
| television ads.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted. Not only are you obviously
| right, nobody cared about prediction markets in 2012
| ceejayoz wrote:
| People spend more money on sillier things on a regular basis.
| usefulcat wrote:
| It's not much different than other forms of advertising.
|
| Compared to typical total advertising expenditures during a
| presidential election, my guess is that $4M is close to a
| rounding error.
| rurp wrote:
| Modern presidential campaigns are absolutely saturated with
| money, and everywhere they spend has diminishing returns. You
| might be able to spend $50-100M in ads and get some value
| from it, but a second or third $100M? By that point you've
| reached every possible voter many, many times and each
| successive ad can be zero or even negative value.
|
| Given the immense sums of money, little to no accountability
| on how it's spent, and a finite list of traditional spending
| targets I expect campaigns have dabbled in all sorts of
| unusual approaches.
| encroach wrote:
| The article suggests that if a candidate's odds of winning goes
| up on the gambling market, then his chance of winning in real
| life are improved. But they don't provide any evidence that
| this is actually the case. Maybe seeing the odds of one
| candidate rising is just as motivating to his supporters as it
| is to his opposition.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Not just America, everything is. With stock market, at least we
| can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate
| manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is
| no way.
|
| With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being
| tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track,
| jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between
| bureaucracy. And proving something becomes moreso a question of
| free will - if I decided to do X and then someone bets millon
| dollars on me doing X when odds are low, how do you prove I
| haven't decided to do X before? Will you prevent me from
| exercising my free will because of suspect insider trading? What
| if I am a president/senator?
|
| Years ago, I was a kid who discovered online betting - often it
| was the only time I could place bets on MMA events, especially
| because it wasn't as popular as it is now. Even then, the
| gambling sites had "Other" options where you could bet on
| presidents, popes, landing on mars etc. The new markets aren't
| that much different, but are just using a nicer way to talk about
| it.
|
| It isn't gambling, it's prediction.
|
| You aren't a gambler, you're a "hyperinformed high iq individual
| predicting the geopolitical moves". Just like crypto gave people
| the identity crutch of a "tech investor", this gives them the
| identity crutch of a "geopolitical strategist".
|
| But in the end, it is still just gambling - wrapped in a nice ego
| stroking suit, but gambling none the less.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Stock market integrity is important because of their function
| in the economy. Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not
| detrimental to society.
| bradhe wrote:
| Except when "gambling adicts" end up as a cover for money
| laundering and funneling cash to people to buy influence.
| butlike wrote:
| People do that with drugs too. I'm not pro gambling, but
| what's your point?
| kleene_op wrote:
| Depends on how many of those gambling addicts there are.
|
| If a huge enough portion of the population try to solve the
| statue quo of their economic problems by betting all on red,
| that's not gonna be great for society, including those who
| don't gamble.
| rl3 wrote:
| > _Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental
| to society._
|
| It certainly is at scale.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| That is one of the takes I've ever read. There is a reason
| gambling is so tightly regulated worldwide, and it's
| certainly not because governments hate easy vice tax revenue.
| Gambling debt destroys family units, increases poverty rates
| (most notably for the children of gambling addicts -- the
| consequences are not localised only to the person making the
| bad decisions), and increases violent crime rates. Gambling
| is massively detrimental to society. There can be arguments
| in allowing people to do things that are detrimental to
| society in the name of freedom, but it's not a great thing to
| pretend those detriments don't exist at all.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Do you know of any studies that can accurately show the
| correlation between gambling and societal costs? On the
| surface the link makes sense to me and seems like it should
| be right, though I'm not sure how we could have tested it
| in a controlled way to really know the link exists.
| snapcaster wrote:
| This is such a weird question, just go outside and
| interact with humans and the evidence is everywhere
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's anecdotal, I was curious if there were (well
| designed) studies that showed likely correlation between
| the two.
|
| I have had family members addicted to drugs and/or
| alcohol and friends that have been addicted to gambling
| at various times. I've seen similar reactions
| anecdotally, but that isn't societal or scientific.
| BoxFour wrote:
| There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I
| found immediately) showing the risks around problem
| gambling, but like with most vices people who've already
| picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable
| ways (myself included):
|
| 1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound
| misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the
| methodology like "N=200? That's meaningless."
|
| 2) Apathy: "So what if some people get addicted? We can't
| babysit everyone."
|
| 3) Rationalization: "Yeah but it helps Native American
| reservations, so..."
|
| 4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how
| prevalent is problem gambling really?"
|
| 0: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-05439-001
|
| 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32402593/
| pvab3 wrote:
| There's also a version of rationalization where people
| project arguments from the war on drugs to illegal
| gambling, as though the enforcement of illegal gambling
| was somehow had costs greater than just letting anyone
| bet any amount of money from their phones.
| nilamo wrote:
| Do you know of any studies which show any evidence at all
| that gambling has no costs?
| trollbridge wrote:
| One study showed a significant increase in domestic
| violence after gamblers lost sports bets (based on the
| team for a specific city losing or winning and then
| comparing DV rates to cities before and after legal
| online sports betting).
|
| I believe it increased it about 10%.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| In my country, lot of institutions running out-of-home-
| campaigns against gambling-addiction etc.; so yes, if
| public institutions are doing this then there is some
| evidence there
| wat10000 wrote:
| Must be nice to live in a country where you can make that
| inference.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| EU country
| bsder wrote:
| > Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental
| to society.
|
| I used to believe that. With the legalization of all the
| sports betting and how fast it can drain a gambler which can
| then affect the gambler's family, I'm now pretty much on the
| other side of the fence.
|
| Just like we banned public smoking because of the effects of
| secondhand smoke, I'm pretty convinced that the secondary
| effects of gambling means it needs to go back to being
| banned. I don't see an obvious way to legislate gambling to
| prevent the auxiliary victims. It doesn't help that getting
| maximum profit as a bookie means being part of a group of the
| scummiest people on the planet who will stoop to _anything_
| to drain people of their money as fast as possible.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| The sports betting sites even have account managers who are
| tasked with keeping people on the sites even after the user
| has decided to quit. It's so lucrative they can afford to
| pay people to sit and text gambling addicts.
| capncleaver wrote:
| This is common practice in gambling and now games, too:
| Zynga has 'VIP' teams for high-spending free to play game
| customers, they would talk on the phone at length, get to
| know them, fly them to Vegas for jaunts, etc.
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-
| whales...
|
| > "We've done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. We
| know what's the frequency of contact. We know what call
| types work. We know what times to call. We know exactly
| who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity
| to be more susceptible to our call."
| autoexec wrote:
| Video games are massively under-regulated to the point
| where we've basically got online casinos specifically
| targeting children. It's so gross.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Sports betting is particularly galling because the actual
| prediction is so unimportant. The only real reason to care
| whether Jontay Porter is credited with three or fewer
| rebounds in a basketball game is to win a bet about it.
|
| You're encouraging people to waste their money just so that
| you can use the Wisdom of Crowds to predict something
| completely worthless.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Just so we're clear on the standards of solidarity here,
| someone murdering your entire family would be tragic but not
| detrimental to society. How much should society do to prevent
| that from happening?
| ace32229 wrote:
| You are ignoring the point of TFA. Kalshi & Polymarkets
| provide a marketplace to monetise political decision-making,
| a.k.a corruption. This is definitely detrimental to society.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Until people are making money and affecting the world. Let's
| say that you're someone close to Trump and you have betted a
| very large sum that Trump should take a certain action. Are
| you going to try to make him take that action even if at that
| point it turns out to be the worst decision for the country
| and the world?
| nkrisc wrote:
| The gambling industry itself is a net drain on society.
|
| What is the societal benefit provided by it?
| jstanley wrote:
| Some people want to gamble and the gambling industry
| provides what they want.
|
| How would you like it if people who didn't care about your
| hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing
| you to do it?
| nkrisc wrote:
| > How would you like it if people who didn't care about
| your hobby started questioning the social benefit of
| allowing you to do it?
|
| In this hypothetical scenario, is my hobby actively
| harmful to society?
|
| Some people would enjoy killing people but we don't let
| them do that.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Maybe I enjoy having an arsenal of late-model machine
| guns, doing research on rare nuclear isotopes, brewing
| cholera in my septic tank, tending a Japanese knotwood
| garden, raising lantern flies, and breeding new strains
| of cold viruses.
|
| Perhaps society should continue to restrain such hobbies.
| freejazz wrote:
| What is the point of being this obtuse? Is there a
| rhetorical benefit to pretending that gambling is not a
| vice? That it is just a "hobby"? Should we apply this
| logic to selling illegal drugs?
|
| >How would you like it if people who didn't care about
| your hobby started questioning the social benefit of
| allowing you to do it?
|
| Gambling? Is people questioning gambling a new thing?
| Seems like the opposite is the case. Again, this is where
| being purposefuly obtuse gets us.
| sznio wrote:
| >What is the societal benefit provided by it?
|
| Same as beer or any other drug - just a way to have some
| fun and not destructive provided you can control yourself.
|
| Though, the one time I opened a CSGO gun case and felt the
| dopamine rush, it was way stronger than any drug I've done.
| Not that I'm a "highly-experienced individual", but
| alcohol, weed or adderall don't come close to a CSGO case.
| Gambling feels much riskier.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Those things should really be illegal too, I think, even
| as someone who enjoys alcohol.
|
| The costs to society due to alcohol and the like are
| massive for essentially no real benefit.
|
| Yes, I know what happened during prohibition. That still
| doesn't mean alcohol is _good_ for society.
| autoexec wrote:
| Regulation and education are where the sane middle ground
| is. You don't outright ban the stuff (which is expensive
| and doesn't work anyway) but you keep the worst of the
| harms it causes from getting too out of control. Sadly,
| gambling is under-regulated and we'll probably all be
| suffering for a while as a result before regulations are
| tightened back up.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I agree that sane regulation is the most likely
| successful approach in the world we currently live in. A
| large cultural shift would be required for total
| prohibition to be successful.
| butlike wrote:
| Alcohol is the only painkiller which can be infinitely
| self-administered. There's value in that. It's quite
| ancient, been proven to work, which is why it's probably
| stuck around so long.
| wat10000 wrote:
| What makes alcohol different from others? You can take
| any painkiller indefinitely until it kills you.
| epolanski wrote:
| I can't think of any addiction worse than gambling. It
| can ruin the life of a family quickly whereas all other
| addictions are in general only self destructive.
| butlike wrote:
| Entertainment.
|
| It's also the only vice you don't have to ingest an outside
| substance for.
| smarf wrote:
| > the only vice you don't have to ingest an outside
| substance for
|
| to name a couple: gaming, prostitution (okay you might
| incidentally ingest an outside substance but YOU DON'T
| HAVE TO)
| nl wrote:
| > Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental
| to society.
|
| This isn't true. each 10 per cent increase in
| gambling expenditure in NSW results in more than
| 4,500 additional assaults 2,800 additional home
| break-ins 1,300 additional break and enter (non-
| dwelling) offences 1,400 additional motor vehicle
| thefts 2,300 additional stealing from motor vehicle
| thefts 3,800 additional fraud offences each year
|
| https://www.connections.edu.au/news/strong-link-between-
| gamb...
|
| > Stock market integrity is important because of their
| function in the economy
|
| Some might argue that people - including gambling addicts,
| and those impacted by their addiction - might possibly be
| more important than one of many possible financial mechanisms
| for free enterprise.
| moring wrote:
| Is that NSW = New South Wales? I'm asking because Wikipedia
| lists New South Wales as a population of only 8.5 million,
| and those crime numbers are insanely huge relative to that.
| rpsw wrote:
| The original paper would be:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16648
|
| The part the article OP linked to would be based off the
| line: To put these percentage changes in
| terms of interest to policy makers, a 10% decrease in
| gambling expenditure in NSW would result in 4579 fewer
| ASS offences; 2867 fewer BESD offences; 1380 fewer BESND
| offences; 1398 fewer MVT offences; 2361 fewer SFMV
| offences; and 3793 fewer FRD offences 2 each year
| trollbridge wrote:
| It is, and some policy proposals have put it forward as
| the single largest factor of increasing crime.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| More than half of all physical slot machines in the world
| are in Australia.
| butlike wrote:
| Right, it's almost like necessity and desperation cause
| people to do desperate things. If I take your money and
| give you no resource in return, that's a degeneration.
| jedimastert wrote:
| First of all, anyone getting scammed is detrimental to
| society because society is made out of people and those are
| people getting scammed. Gambling addicts are not less
| important than wealthy people.
|
| Second, these markets are generating new gambling addicts,
| which is wildly and provably detrimental to society.
| sarky-litso wrote:
| Have you watched sports recently? Gambling has always had a
| negative effect on the perceived fairness but once that
| effect becomes a core part of the way the sport is monetized
| it gets even worse for everyone involved. Watching playoff
| games last weekend either Draft Kings or Fan Duel showed an
| ad where a single person in a crowded bar is cheering wildly
| by themselves while looking at their parlay bet or whatever
| on their phone - this isolation of the communal experience
| alone is a definitely a negative effect but I could go on...
| jbstack wrote:
| As a matter of adopting sensible definitions, I think you need
| to draw the line somewhere between what is gambling and what is
| not.
|
| If the risk taken can, in principle, be shifted in your favour
| (i.e. to produce positive expectation) through application of
| skill, then it isn't gambling. For example, in my mind, betting
| on whether you will win a game of chess is not gambling. On the
| other hand, if you cannot influence the outcome in your favour
| through skill, then it is gambling. Roulette is generally a
| good example of this (with the caveat that in some very
| specific circumstances it's possible to beat with skill).
|
| If we're limiting the definition to merely risk-taking (you
| might win or you might lose) without factoring in skill, then
| virtually everything in life becomes gambling. For example, you
| gamble when you deposit money in the bank because it might go
| bust.
|
| There's also the legal definition, in which case it's just a
| matter of checking whether the jurisdiction you are in
| considers the activity to be gambling or not.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| I would say that gambling with skill component is still
| gambling. For example, in blackjack you can limit your losses
| by following a basic strategy, which is a 2x2 matrix with
| rows containing the value of your hand and columns containing
| the open dealer card.
|
| If you can obtain an edge through a skill component (card
| counting in blackjack), some people wouldn't call this
| gambling anymore, but I would still call it gambling myself.
| Someone doing this for a living is a professional gambler.
|
| What for me would be a sensible definition is that a
| bet/gamble has no other goals. Putting money in the
| bank/investing in a stock reallocates capital, which can be
| invested by someone. The fact that it is a risk-taking
| endeavor is merely a side effect. I would say the same goes
| for selling/buying insurance for your car.
|
| So for me, the difference between betting and putting money
| in the bank/investing is that the primary goal is something
| different than the risk-taking activity.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Does this not boil down to the distinction being one's
| intent? I play poker occasionally, for example, and my
| primary goal is to win money not to take risk. Does that
| make it meet your definition of investing rather than
| gambling?
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Well you're not committing the money to purchase an asset
| that will generate returns, so no, it's not "investing".
|
| It would be more accurate to say you're working, really:
| spending time and effort to earn money. Though the "work"
| here, assuming you're a skilled poker player sitting with
| lesser-skilled marks, is similar to a crypto bro
| performing a rug pull. You're enabling other participants
| to gamble in the hope of an uncertain win, while they
| actually are pretty much guaranteed to lose in a zero-sum
| game where the house will always earn its keep.
|
| One could say that if everybody else at the table is
| gambling and you're working, it's still gambling. Lunch
| is lunch, whether you're the customer, the chef, or the
| lamb.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| In most jurisdictions there is a difference:
|
| "real gambling", random game like Roulette
|
| "unreal gambling", game with incomplete information like
| Poker which allows you to get a better outcome based on
| skill & experience
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "...betting on whether you will win a game of chess is not
| gambling."
|
| It's the money aspect that makes it gambling. Just ask Pete
| Rose.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Many sports gamblers (horse racing, etc.) will say it's about
| skill. They believe they shift the risk in their favor
| because they have the data and because they bet strategically
| so as to win over long term. (They can spend a while
| detailing it for you if you are willing to listen.)
|
| Prediction markets in general can make anyone feel like it's
| about data and skills. If they lose, then they didn't have
| the good enough information, so clearly they should improve
| their skill, right?
|
| From my understanding, purely natural events aside, the
| probability of you betting against the "house" will always
| approach 1. If the platform is centralised, they have a
| strong incentive to influence the stakes, or (this has been
| documented) straight up limit your ability to bet if you are
| winning "too much"--enough to cost them real money. If the
| platform is open and decentralised, "house" is another player
| with much more capital and personal influence in the matter
| than you (for example, some president can bet that he would
| invade a country--and then invade it; some footballer can bet
| that he wouldn't score N times--then score N-1 and fake an
| injury at the most favourable time; of course, they would use
| intermediaries, and only the careless ones will get burnt).
| SirMaster wrote:
| Is it gambling if the outcome can be shifted through the
| application of your money and influence?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Ask a VC.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| The "skill" line is what gamblers tell themselves to justify
| it. A much more useful demarcation is "does this game have
| any positive impact on the world" (entertainment value of the
| gambling itself doesn't count). For example, insurance is not
| gambling even though it is itself a zero sum game, it enables
| societally beneficial risk taking. Options trading on real
| assets like stock aid in price discovery. Memecoins, sports
| betting, your local poker game and the way prediction markets
| actually function in practice are all gambling.
| banannaise wrote:
| Talking about "traditional" sports gambling rather than
| prediction markets: how do we account for the heavy
| restrictions they place on "sharps" (consistent winners)? If
| a game can be won through application of skill, but winning
| through application of skill causes you to be effectively
| banned, then the game cannot be won through application of
| skill.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Phrase it like this - market makers and casinos and other
| hosts really don't want it be a game of skill.
| bluGill wrote:
| They don't mind a few with skill so long as those people
| don't win too often and they brag about their winnings to
| others who then think they have skill.
|
| of course if you had the skill to win big why would you
| not make that your job thus making too much.
| hamdingers wrote:
| The game is still won through the application of skill even
| if the house chooses not to play it with you.
| butlike wrote:
| Duration comes into play here. Is blackjack a single long
| game or is each hand a "game?"
| banannaise wrote:
| The house isn't a player. They offer the game for players
| to play. That is a fundamentally different role.
|
| Saying that the house is playing the game against you is
| equivalent to saying that Nintendo is playing Super Mario
| Bros against you.
| hamdingers wrote:
| There is an entire category of casino games where the
| house is a player. These are called house-banked games
| and they include most of what you imagine when you think
| of a casino floor: blackjack, roulette, craps, slots,
| etc.
|
| But even in player-banked games like poker, the house is
| an agent participating in the game through the dealer.
| They can still exercise their right to free association
| and not play with you.
|
| A corrected analogy would be Nintendo banning you from
| Mario Kart Online for suspected cheating. Yes, Nintendo
| isn't playing, but they still have that authority as the
| facilitator.
| butlike wrote:
| I thought the commonly-held definition of gambling is: "it's
| gambling if it introduces risk."
|
| e.g. a transaction to buy paper towels is not introducing
| risk, since I pay an amount and get something.
|
| If I have a chance of not receiving those paper towels if I
| put money in, then it's considered gambling because the
| inherent activity introduces risk. It's the same reason the
| lootboxes were considered gambling at first, and the same
| reason I classify betting on a chess game as gambling. You're
| player may potentially not win.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >For example, in my mind, betting on whether you will win a
| game of chess is not gambling
|
| As a general rule it is considered gambling not if skill is
| involved, but if there is any uncertainty involved.
|
| And because there is not such thing as a perfect application
| of skill, all applications of skill have a degree of
| uncertainty to them. And you don't necessarily know how much
| your skill and luck will be in effect in the game.
|
| In the context of Chess. Do you get to choose who you play
| against or is there a random draw? How close is the other
| player to you in skill? If you are both alike in skill then
| the skill application will be less important to the outcome.
|
| I once lost a game at a tournament that had the rule that
| usage of en passant required saying en passant before doing
| it, so I was playing this guy whose skill was abysmal, we
| walked into a scenario where the very next move he did was
| going to allow me to do en passant, he had to take that move,
| or do something else that would lead to me taking his queen
| in the next move, and then folding up pretty all of his
| pieces and coming out two queens ahead. If he did the en
| passant move his position was worse, it was checkmate in like
| 10 moves.
|
| If he had seen it and had any politeness and grace he would
| have just resigned. I mean it was extremely painful to have
| gotten into this position because it could be seen 20 moves
| before we were going to end up here and yet, he laboriously
| walked in to it, he could have gotten out before, by
| sacrificing a horse, and then a bit later he could have
| gotten out by sacrificing a horse and a knight, and then a
| horse and a knight and a castle, etc. etc. But nope, he just
| made move by stupid move into this position.
|
| So then he made the move that I should make en passant with
| and ... I forgot the term "en passant" I couldn't remember
| the term to use, my brain froze, I probably let the clock run
| for ten minutes trying to remember the word, it's also not
| like I didn't know the move and the phrase, I had known it
| that 20 moves ago when I was thinking I do A, he do B I do
| C... and then en passant. But I couldn't remember.
|
| Now if I had been not such a stickler for rules I might just
| have done it anyway hoping for him to accept and not require
| me to say it, but I didn't. So he won. Later my friend played
| him and he said "You lost to that guy?!" and I said "fuck I
| froze up and forgot the word to en passant, I had him setup
| to take all his stuff but because I forgot the word he had
| me. Damn it"
|
| Despite differences of skill other factors can prevent the
| skill from being deployed to its greatest effect. If someone
| knew Bryan is skillful, but he does have a habit of choking
| up or sometimes losing focus in longer games, whereas that
| guy there sucks so the odds are 4 to 1 in Bryan's favor
| (which I was very much more skillful than this guy, so
| embarrassing), but that guy is skillful enough to drag it out
| a bit, and he will never give in, therefore it might make
| sense for me to bet a small amount in this case to leverage
| the uncertainty.
|
| Because of course that kind of gambling is itself a form of
| skill.
|
| If you only consider gambling on things that do not have any
| skill component, you then essentially say that gambling does
| not take any skill, which then leaves you with a large sphere
| of skilled activity, that many people have taken part in for
| many years of human society and that has traditionally been
| known as gambling, which now does not have a name to identify
| it.
|
| What should this field of activity that you have rendered
| nameless by your fiat be called then?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| There are some distinctions between gambling and prediction
| markets. For example, in prediction markets, some forms of
| insider trading are considered somewhat desirable -
| essentially, it monetizes insiders leaking inside information.
|
| Other forms of insider trading can be problematic: What if
| someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group)
| bets millions of dollars on you _not_ doing X, in the hopes of
| you taking the opposite bet and doing X?
|
| The most extreme that I've seen presented so far are markets
| where people can predict the death date of a person. On the
| surface, that just seems like a morbid bet. Once you consider
| the above form of insider trading, you realize that this can
| act as a reward for someone who can accurately predict the
| death date of said person, for example because they're making
| the counter-trade from a phone next to a high-powered rifle on
| the rooftop across the street - and like in the bribe example
| above, the people on the "losing" side of the bet might not
| mind too much.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _What if someone (could be an individual or even an
| uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not
| doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and
| doing X?_
|
| From their POV, that's the purest form of voting with money.
| If you do _X_ , they're presumably happy with the outcome
| they just paid for; if you do the opposite of _X_ , they at
| least have their payouts as consolation prize.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| >What if someone (could be an individual or even an
| uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not
| doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and
| doing X?
|
| If the market is efficient and aware of the bribery effect,
| others will bet that you will do X up to the point where the
| indirect bribe is equal to the cost of you doing X. If you
| have private knowledge that a bribe would be taken, you
| probably have the access to do it far cheaper off market (and
| you can still use crypto).
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >If the market is efficient
|
| If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike
| epolanski wrote:
| I am completely against any narrative attempt to distinguish
| gambling and prediction markets.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I've never quite understood what's supposed to be so mind-
| blowing about the assassination market concept. I _think_ the
| concept is supposed to be that assigning legal responsibility
| for such a killing would be difficult, since no one is
| literally paying an assassin.
|
| But surely the answer is just that governments can and should
| ban prediction markets that are deemed to directly
| incentivize a crime. Where exactly to draw the line is
| challenging, sure, but no more challenging than all the other
| stuff that legal systems have to deal with. After all, pretty
| much any existing market (like stock markets) could be
| influenced by murdering certain people.
|
| You may say "oh, but assassination markets are unique in that
| they're hard to ban those markets because they use
| cryptocurrencies and other
| decentralized/anonymous/censorship-resistant communication
| technologies." Well, okay, but if those technologies are so
| effective than people can already just run normal murder-for-
| pay markets.
| alphazard wrote:
| If only there was some sort of way to see if a given market
| participant's behavior was best explained as a "high iq
| individual predicting geopolitical moves" vs. "just gambling".
|
| Maybe a number of some kind?
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| >You aren't a gambler, you're a "hyperinformed high iq
| individual predicting the geopolitical moves"
|
| And finally, here it is: The one guy who won the Venezuela bet
| by being hyperinformed-high-iq-predicting-the-future:
| https://futurism.com/future-society/polymarket-venezuela-ins...
|
| (btw: you forgot to add AI and blockchain!)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| To be fair, if you were aware enough to separate the
| characteristics of wealth and intelligence, you've probably
| seen the investing world as a casino with ego-stroking suits
| long before this. The difference between the cigarette-burning
| retiree surrendering their OASDI check at a casino in Kansas
| City and Wall Street investors is a diploma from the "right"
| schools and in the ability to sway the odds in their favor;
| they both can - and will - destroy themselves or those around
| them to indulge in their habit.
|
| Any sort of announced intention to "somehow stop the bad
| actors" became laughable after 2008-2009. We had bankers and
| financiers kick the monetary legs out from under an entire
| generation and unless they did something blatantly illegal
| (read: were Bernie Madoff) none of them faced a consequence.
|
| That's why you have the current situation in the US where
| scammers can take advantage of distrust in any and all of
| society's institutions, up to and including the federal
| government.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Having a "betting" market whereby someone is in complete control
| of the outcome is just asking for it to be gamed. Betting should
| be on unpredictable events.
| Traster wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised the article doesn't spell out why these are
| "prediction markets". They're prediction markets because it
| _used_ to be that what they were doing was illegal. It was
| illegal to just set up a gambling website in the US and so these
| "prediction markets" were the same thing as crypto, masking what
| was really happening behind some tech speak. In the same way that
| in the crypto market you regularly get behaviour that would get
| you locked up if it were to occur on the CME, what happens on
| these prediction markets would be illegal if you were just a
| betting company.
|
| The reason they're getting big now though, is because we know
| none of those regulations are going to be enforced. So through
| regulartory arbitrage, these gambling sites are just going to eat
| the entire regulated industry until nothing is left.
|
| It used to be Harry Enten's former boss would joke about Scottish
| teens, when talking about betting markets because frankly, the
| betting markets didn't seem predictive and were so niche, it
| seemed like the people on them were generally just betting with
| no idea what they were betting on.
|
| But today, let's face it, soon we're going to see a contract on
| whether the S&P goes up or down tomorrow, and when you have that
| contract, gamblers are going to be betting on it instead of going
| to Robinhood and buying some Puts.
|
| It's a real test to see if what all those people who talk about
| the halo effect of trusted well regulated markets are actually
| correct. The conventional wisdom is that most of the users of
| these sites are going to get their faces ripped off, and the
| companies will get very rich doing that.
| TZubiri wrote:
| The top markets: Polymarkets and Kalshi are regulated and in US
| jurisdiction, so your whole analysis is wrong.
| b40d-48b2-979e wrote:
| Regulation without enforcement is no regulation at all.
| botacode wrote:
| I am broadly in favor of the existence of prediction markets.
| They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can
| help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds.
|
| The article has two core points, but fails to go deep enough in
| addressing either. This leads to a _somewhat_ incorrect
| scapegoating of prediction markets rather than acknowledging head
| on some more core issues with the state of American journalism.
| Bullet (1) addresses this core issue while bullet (2) tries to
| suggest some ways in which these prediction markets can better
| harnessed to serve the interests of journalists and
| readers/viewers. IMO the first point is far more important than
| the second to understand the broader challenges.
|
| 1. The centralization and roll-up of American media has led to a
| dangerous monoculture where truth and accuracy risk being
| compromised by pressure from big business as well as politicians.
|
| This is by design. It is important for folks to recognize that
| these are systematic efforts to denigrate and marginalize
| critical/skeptical voices by individuals with tremendous amounts
| of wealth and power. A prime non-journalism example of this is
| the persecution and harassment of short sellers (like Andrew
| Left) in public markets.
|
| 2. Prediction markets are not being described / addressed with
| sufficient uncertainty. The article touches on this, but fails to
| go so far as to suggest a fix. Prediction markets should, as the
| editors/implementers at orgs in the article suggest they do,
| serve as another data point rather than the whole story.
|
| They should be addressed with the skepticism applied to any
| source (a lot of "journalists" don't even do this anymore though)
| with the source, values and market depth questioned.
|
| Editorial standards need to be improved to accommodate this
| (don't report on very thin markets, acknowledge high amounts of
| uncertainty, signs of manipulation, and provide a bit of market
| structure analysis education to readers. All of this is more
| feasible than ever with good analysis tooling that can be re-
| appropriated from what professional market analysts (and
| gamblers) use to assess their odds.
|
| If journalists want to add market information to their reporting
| then great, just do it responsibly instead of yeeting some number
| from strangers on the internet.
|
| --
|
| Fight back by voting with your dollars and speak up in favor of
| the truth. Boycott garbage sources and platforms that are trying
| to one-shot your friends/parents and support strong investigative
| and local journalism with your money. Talk to your friends and
| family and encourage them to do the same. Voting with your
| dollars and presence is one of the most powerful tools you have
| in our heavily market based society.
| fnands wrote:
| > They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that
| can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of
| backgrounds.
|
| gross. This sounds like a press release.
|
| It's gambling dressed-up as forecasting.
| botacode wrote:
| Your response is very dismissive in that it doesn't engage
| with any of the other parts of my comment that provide a lot
| of nuance and analysis for the issues presented.
|
| My description, and appreciation, for these types of tools
| and their trade-offs comes from reading about their early
| proposals. I don't trade or engage with any of them in their
| current form.
|
| Recommend reading early work on them by Phillip Tetlock, as
| well as the many criticisms and responses that came about at
| the time and basically covered all of the ground we're
| retreading today in these discussions.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| It might be gambling for some, but prediction markets are
| impressively accurate, in a way that I think merits OPs
| comment that the information they produce can improve lives.
| (Other lives will surely be destroyed by gambling...)
|
| There's quite a bit of interesting research done on the
| accuracy, here's a great resource:
|
| https://calibration.city/introduction
| fnands wrote:
| What value does an accurate prediction market bring? I.e.
| how can this information be used to improve lives (other
| than the person winning the bet)? I.e. even if it is sorta
| accurate, is this valuable to anyone?
|
| As I see it it seems to be a way to incentivize insiders to
| leak information, e.g. see the alleged Google insider
| betting on Google actions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boa
| zsobrado/2025/12/04/alleged-...
|
| Great for the person who has insider knowledge, probably
| not so great for Google. I wouldn't be surprized if some
| companies start cracking down on their employees making
| bank off unannounced company actions.
| nusl wrote:
| I've seen a lot of weird stuff out of this. People now get angry
| about things they didn't get angry about before, or get angry
| with people/players where that didn't exist before.
|
| If you're just someone playing a game of Chess, and someone
| decides to bet on you via some platform, and then you lose, you
| now face the fury of random strangers where none existed before.
|
| This applies to all sorts of things. I've seen live streamers get
| bad treatment because people bet on some outcome on their
| streams, like innocent Track of the Day races in Trackmania; not
| even a commercial event.
|
| This sort of thing will suck the fun out of literally everything,
| and then replace that fun with stress/anxiety/anger/frustration
| when outcomes aren't met, and when they are met, dangerous
| monetary/emotional/brain-chemical feedback.
|
| Even disregarding the dangers of gaming the system with insider
| trading or other fraud, the way that everything is increasingly
| having a monetary value attached to it is destroying that thing
| just being itself.
|
| I really, really hate how money corrupts literally everything. In
| part I think the current financial fuck-ups causing living
| expenses to be unsustainable leads many to find other ways to
| make some money, but people have always done this even when times
| were better. So I guess it's somehow human nature combined with
| greed and opportunity.
|
| Other things like Pokemon cards are also increasingly about money
| and not at all about Pokemon itself anymore. People buy packs of
| cards, look for the high-value ones, then throw the rest out.
| It's fucked.
|
| I don't really know where this is going but the Cyberpunk 2077
| feels like a good predictor. Literal corpo hellscape, and much of
| it is self-induced by grubbing for the next buck at every
| innocent opportunity.
|
| Similar to the VC/investment landscape. Take a good
| product/company, add some VC/investment, and now the incentives
| are aimed at satisfying shareholders over providing value to
| customers.
| Yemoshino wrote:
| Its just gambling, for the stupid to loose there money, for the
| rich to have a little bit of fun, for the smart ones to take it
| from others while having some way of moral excuse to justify it.
|
| The stock market at least gives you ownership/partial of a real
| thing.
|
| The depressing thing is, when you see all these cliches in real:
| Go to some casino and you will see the guy having a coke nail
| talking gambling garbage like 'were is the bank teller? My luck
| is coming back' :(
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder if you can bet on stock prices on prediction markets.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Yes, we just call it the "options market".
| thelastgallon wrote:
| > s one viral post on X recently put it, "Got a buddy who is
| praying for world war 3 so he can win $390 on Polymarket."
|
| This is how most people are these days! Or probably thats how
| human nature is!
| louthy wrote:
| It's "these days", because we've exited the period where the
| last world war was in living memory. Nobody who lived through a
| world war would be so crass.
|
| Unfortunately, that also means we're likely due another one any
| time now.
| RGamma wrote:
| Silver lining: We will answer Einstein's question about what
| weapons will fight WW3 in detail. /s
| louthy wrote:
| Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining?
| RGamma wrote:
| I meant there's autonomous drones and space warfare now,
| and Einstein didn't know about those. It's a really
| terrible silver lining, I know.
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| Some of the comments here read like fear of the "wisdom of
| crowds" itself .. i mean yes, prediction markets can be
| manipulated .. but every information system can ...
| tantalor wrote:
| > MoviePass announced that it will begin testing a betting
| platform.
|
| Huh. That's interesting. Given futures markets on box office
| receipts are illegal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Matt Levine discussed this a couple of weeks back: "It's
| probably fine, though; you can bet on Netflix streaming numbers
| or Rotten Tomatoes scores. It is fun to think that everything
| is gambling except onions and movies, but it's probably not
| true."
| tantalor wrote:
| Nice, found that article:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-01-08/mov.
| ..
| arter45 wrote:
| Game fixing is a known crime in many jurisdictions. If you are a
| football/baseball/soccer player and you bet your team will lose,
| you have an obvious way to drastically increase your odds
| (especially if you are a top player) - playing bad. Other people
| are completely unaware of this deal.
|
| Having fire insurance and burning your car is in most
| jurisdictions illegal. Yes, you should be paid if your car is
| burned, but if you do it intentionally, you are obviously
| increasing the chances of getting paid, unless of course the
| insurance company finds out you did it. And so on.
|
| I don't see why these situations would be illegal and, say,
| betting against the survival of a regime when you're actually
| working against it, would be legal.
|
| Things are even harder if you coordinate multiple people. For
| example, let's say 100 people bet that there will be a riot in
| town X by the end of the year. X is normally a quiet town so most
| people bet against. These 100 people bet this will happen 10
| minutes before actually starting a riot themselves. Yes, someone
| could observe last minute trends and might predict reality, but
| last minute or huge bets are not necessarily true - someone could
| bet on random things for a variety of reasons. So it's not even
| useful as a way to get insights into the reality.
| TZubiri wrote:
| In the context of the events talked about the article and
| events covered by these markets, sports are irrelevant, not a
| concern, they influence 0 on how these markets should be
| regulated.
|
| Sports might be fixed? People might gamble with sports? I don't
| give a shit man, these markets bet on democratic elections and
| war, the concerns are whether military action is effected for
| money or leaked for money, everything else is an infitesimal
| rounding error.
| arter45 wrote:
| I agree. What I'm saying is that, especially because way less
| critical applications of this "bet and act to win the bet"
| rule (sport, insurance,...) are notoriously illegal, I don't
| see why worse use cases (bet on a military action and lead
| it) should be ok.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I can give you a concrete example
|
| In chess, it's part of the rules that you cannot use a
| chess engine, a tournament may have a prize money, to enter
| into a tournament you agree to some clauses like following
| the rules of chess and not using an engine. It's a
| contract.
|
| If someone were to use an engine, they would be cheating,
| and in this context it would be breach of contract, and
| possibly fraud.
|
| It would be wrong to assume that because using computer
| programs in this competitive sport, it is therefore wrong
| to use it in more critical applications, like war, or
| health or construction. The core reason being because they
| are by nature very different events with different
| contracts that are entered into willingly and are
| controlled by very different laws, but also independent of
| laws, they are very different phenomenons and will of
| course have different moral and practical impacts. (Duh)
| arter45 wrote:
| Ok but what difference between, say, sport bets and
| "prediction market" is significant enough to allow people
| who can directly influence the result bet on it, but only
| in "prediction markets"?
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think the misconception here is that there is someone
| or some law "allowing people" to do things. It's of
| course the inverse, people by default can do whatever
| they want. What laws or contracts you may find actually
| "forbid people" from doing something.
|
| I think you are right in that often (but not always),
| it's fraud (which isn't the same as being ilegal, it
| could be a breach of contract or fiduciary duty) for
| someone who is working for a purpose, to sabotage it for
| another purpose for some additional gain. But the rule
| being broken is contract law, not criminal law, in this
| case.
|
| Sometimes other laws would have to be broken to
| manipulate the events, like in the case of democratic
| elections, or wars. It's just that these are higher order
| laws and not contracts between parties.
|
| It's entirely possible for an event to be manipulated
| where a party doesn't really break a rule or law or
| contract to win at it, like elon musk tweeting more than
| 500 times.
|
| Furthermore it's worth noting that this doesn't have much
| bearing on the legality of the market itself, one thing
| is for manipulation to be illegal or fraud or somehow
| penalized, the other is the market itself being illegal.
|
| I hope I have helped a little bit, I'm not sure what your
| legal training is, I'm not a lawyer, but since you are
| talking about 'allowing people' I analyzed this from a
| legal perspective based on the knowledge I have.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Didn't read past the paywall, but if your take on this is not
| "Whoah, Greenland might actually be bought by the US" and is
| instead "wow gambling is bad" I'm at awe.
|
| There's potential problems that might come from the benefits of
| prediction markets, like insiders getting incentivized to change
| the outcome or leak info.
|
| But gambling is an old problem which emerges in many scenarios,
| casinos, card games, sports betting, financial markets, crypto.
|
| This take is like a new hooters opening up on the moon and people
| complaining that there's alcohol addiction, food addiction,
| sexism, wage exploitation... yeah I know man, but it's on the
| moon!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "...time, there was a 36 percent chance that the president would
| annex Greenland. "Whoa, way up there!" Enten yells, slapping his
| hands together. "My goodness gracious!" The ticker at the bottom
| of the screen speeds through other odds: Will Gavin Newsom win
| the next presidential election..."
|
| Like reading some kind of Twilight Zone episode script [1]
| starring William Shatner...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/405IKLIMvJo
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Wouldn't these markets be the perfect "crime crowdsourcing"
| platform? Let's say a bad actor wants XYZ to happen so they
| organise a bet on XYZ not happening. Then make sure as many
| different accounts that they control directly or indirectly bet a
| lot of money in the same way. Now anyone willing to win the prize
| can decide to make sure it does happen and get the money (at
| least a high multiplicator of what they bet themselves).
|
| Am I missing something? Maybe it's already being used in that
| way... in that case, it would be quite scary.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
| djeastm wrote:
| Could be the plot of one of the Bond movies
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| I believe there are valid critiques to be made of prediction
| markets, particularly on the morality of allowing bets on events
| with serious/market outcomes (the market could create an
| incentive for an insider to actualize that bad outcome, hence we
| should ban the market as it increases the odds of a bad outcome
| occurring) or on the negative repercussions of gambling
| addiction. Instead of making either of these valid arguments, the
| article instead decides to critique the epistemic value of
| prediction markets. It comes off to me as ill-informed
| handwringing and tribal signaling, rather than bothering to
| engage critically with the topic and offering a meaningful
| critique.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Prediction markets to me are a natural consequence of the post-
| truth world we live in.
|
| For one, it creates insanely imbalanced systems where two sides
| of a 50/50 market have completely opposite world views that when
| the market resolves may have access to sources, whether
| completely fake or misinfo'd, that lead them to believe the
| market should be settled in their favor. This then puts the
| prediction market in a place where it is the "arbiter" of reality
| - in a world where media has become so corrupt and full of noise,
| finding out _what actually happened_ can be really hard.
|
| So then, a market such as this seems inevitable to me because you
| can then point to markets and say "see, it resolved this way." It
| does not perfectly align with _truth_ but with market forces
| would probably lead to more truth than a reality where you just
| cherrypick whatever biased source that makes you feel good does.
| And of course, the market itself can become corrupt.
| elcritch wrote:
| If those prediction markets can be used as an alternative way
| to put resources into "reporting" then it could be valuable.
| The downfall of journalism has been preceded by the loss in
| economics from newspapers with M&As causing cultural
| inbreeding.
|
| Stock markets aren't too different in that they help predict
| which companies will be valuable in the future.
| alphazard wrote:
| Your criticism applies to any epistemic institution. Prediction
| markets are far more robust than any epistemic institution that
| humans have come up with so far.
|
| Contrary to what you insinuate, we don't have 2 parallel
| markets for each issue, where each groups bets in their own
| echo chamber market to feel good about their beliefs. The law
| of one price holds and we have a single market per event, and
| it almost always resolves such that >> 50% of people agree with
| the result retrospectively. The resolution mechanism affects
| the price. If the market is expected to be biased towards a
| certain outcome, then that outcome will trade at a higher
| price.
|
| You could easily prove your theory by giving an example of two
| markets about the same issue, with different arbiters, where
| the price significantly diverges. Or where the arbiters
| disagreed after the fact. There will be examples, but how much
| Volume traded in those markets, compared to the markets where
| it didn't happen?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I don't know why you're reacting to the parent comment as a
| criticism - it is just observation. I have spent a lot of
| time over the years in similar markets. A trivial example -
| "Will Hillary be the Democrat Nominee?" Yes/No market on
| PredictIt for the 2020 election.
|
| Even though the market basically settled in 2019 as she
| missed filing deadlines, a whole group of conspiracy
| theorists in the "Yes" market descended in the comments, and
| there was 10-15% on "YES" even til the very last hours they
| closed the market, which was like a ~week or two before the
| actual election.
|
| Every news event was interpreted by this group as a "sign"
| she was secretly running, and they provided their own
| sources. I was arbitraging this market for the whole year on
| any "new" hillary news, so paid very close attention to the
| discussion circles happening around it - I checked in after
| the market closed and many of the genuine "YES" people
| putting up as much money as they were able to concluded
| PredictIt was incorrect and that Hillary was still the
| "phantom" nominee. It would not at all surprise me if a few
| of them still believe she actually ran for president. They
| probably should have closed the market several months before,
| but they kept it open. If they had closed it at any
| reasonable point beforehand a huge chunk of the "YES" market
| would have lost their minds.
|
| People are goofy and prone to conspiratorial thinking. If you
| want an example of something that there isn't a market for,
| but just an example of how much 2 groups of people's thinking
| can diverge - Ask 100 random people what happened to an ICE
| officer in minnesota that was involved in a shooting very
| recently.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| _natural consequence of the post-truth world we live in_
|
| We _currently_ live in. Truth and trust are older than
| computers. They will outlive computers, too. Computers and the
| system we have built will eventually yield to truth, not the
| other way around.
|
| One can get a credit card and say they are living in a post-
| scarcity world until they hit the limit, but that doesn't make
| it true.
| jppope wrote:
| > Prediction markets to me are a natural consequence of the
| post-truth world we live in
|
| My best strategy for dealing with people who have been
| radicalized is to make wagers. Even making the wagers is hard
| because they are often about individuals who's job it is to
| gaslight their constituents... but its still been working
| pretty well. I'm up probably $1000 off of these little bets and
| they have helped me win later arguments.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I haven't found many cases of this.
|
| The only one I know of is the bet on whether Venezuela would be
| invaded, which PolyMarket didn't resolve as yes arguing that it
| technically wasn't an invasion. So it isn't that there's two
| realities really, it's just a very inconsequential word play on
| how we describe reality, and the only ones concerned with it
| are those who made the bet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I consider myself a progressive because I strongly support
| taxation and redistribution, but the modern media's tendency to
| pearl-clutch over every new technological/market development is
| pretty alienating to me. Nothing in this article seems at all
| catastrophic.
| topspin wrote:
| Is this better or worse than a world in which "news" becomes
| about "tweets?"
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| It's stupid gambling, nothing more and nothing less. Sports
| gambling is at all-time highs, also, because people have money to
| waste and haven't faced consequences for their poor decision
| making. When people have less money - and understand, this is
| imminent, at least in the US - they'll have less ability to
| stupidly waste the money they have.
|
| Prediction markets have gotten attention lately because it's so
| easy to manipulate them with small amounts of money and get
| signal amplified in subsequent reporting of the prediction
| markets "counterintuitive" signals. It is a form of reality
| shaping.
|
| To that extent, they'll continue to exist, with just sock-puppet
| level activity until they are ignored.
| alphazard wrote:
| The headline is part of a widespread trend of the word "gambling"
| being used as synonymous with "betting". This new use isn't
| constructive, as it makes it difficult to talk about either
| precisely.
|
| Betting (risking something known for a payout which is
| uncertain), is ubiquitous in life, and really any game where the
| participants don't have perfect information. You are betting even
| if you don't realize it. You can't opt out, it's part of the
| human condition.
|
| Gambling refers to taking on risk for the feeling it brings. The
| fact that humans can gamble reveals a quirk of human neurology.
| If we evolved to be more rational, then the phenomenon probably
| wouldn't exist. We know the feeling is valuable (to gamblers)
| because they are willing to place negative EV bets to bring about
| the feeling.
|
| Anytime people criticize betting, it looks to me like some kind
| of utopian scheme, where everyone can have everything without
| risk.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > Anytime people criticize betting, it looks to me like some
| kind of utopian scheme
|
| This is how I feel, too. Life is all about risk management and
| a life where you take _no risk_ is one where you have nothing.
| People make bets all the time: areas they move to, people they
| ask out, jobs they take, what foods they eat, etc. which is
| clearly different than going to the casino and putting it all
| on red.
| II2II wrote:
| > Gambling refers to taking on risk for the feeling it brings.
|
| Is there much of a difference when it comes to placing bets on
| the news?
|
| To play off the article's opening example: investing in mineral
| exploration in Greenland, with an American invasion opening up
| opportunities for resource extraction, would be taking a risk
| with an unknown payout due to imperfect information. That is to
| say, it is taking a risk to build a business. A business where
| the payout may exceed what is going in. Betting on the news is
| just an exchange of money, with the intermediary taking a cut.
| Risks are being taken, but no value is being created. It is all
| about emotional involvement.
| alphazard wrote:
| Investing in a business is also a bet. The capital you
| provide is a known quantity, you risk it for an uncertain
| outcome (the future value of the shares).
|
| If your informational edge is just America invading
| Greenland, let's say you _know that for sure_. Then you could
| invest in the business, but you might actually be diluting
| your edge if you don 't know more than the market does about
| the fundamentals of the business. The business could already
| have a lot of debt, and unable to get more to finance an
| expansion into Greenland. It would be less risky in that
| instance to just bet on the invasion, since that is where
| your edge is.
| arretevad wrote:
| I think by your own definition the headline is warranted in its
| use of gambling. The act of betting on predictions is in
| service of "being right" ostensibly. But is really just about
| the monetary reward. I don't see betting on predictions serving
| any other purpose. Other risks in life have other purpose, in
| which the risk is accepted because of the reward of the other
| purpose. Gambling is risk without any other sort of side reward
| or effect.
| alphazard wrote:
| It depends on the person making the bet. With sophisticated
| enough brain scanning technology, we could distinguish
| between "placing the bet to achieve a feeling" vs. "placing
| the bet because they believe it is mispriced".
|
| It's not possible for a 3rd party to, at a distance,
| determine why someone placed a bet in a prediction market. At
| a casino, it is possible. Most of the games are negative EV.
| So if someone plays any of the games, then it can't be
| because they are trying to maximize EV, it must be for some
| other reason (like a feeling).
| arretevad wrote:
| I guess I'm trying to say that in both cases you outline,
| the purpose of the act lies solely in the risk itself.
| Believing something is mispriced simply means the perceived
| risk is very low (or even negative) but the action is taken
| _because_ of the risk itself. No other purpose is served.
| Unlike other monetary instruments which could be consider
| stores of wealth. or other life decisions which have
| outside intrinsic values in which the risk is a
| consideration but not the primary object.
| alphazard wrote:
| > Believing something is mispriced simply means the
| perceived risk is very low (or even negative)
|
| That's not what risk means. Risk is the amount you stand
| to lose, and expected value is the mean outcome
| (calculated by integrating across all possible outcomes).
| The EV can be positive or negative, and that corresponds
| to a mispriced asset. Risk can only go to zero, but it
| can also be arbitrarily high.
|
| Managing risk is its own thing, but to give an intuition:
| How much should you bet on repeated fair coin tosses that
| pay out 3:1, if you have $100? More than 0, because it is
| positive EV, but definitely not the whole 100. Risk
| management is about playing vs. not playing and bet
| sizing.
|
| Gambling is taking on risk without positive EV. A 1:1
| cointoss is the quintessential example. EV is 0, you
| won't make or lose anything in the long run playing this
| game. But it adds uncertainty, you could have twice as
| much or nothing. Gambling is risk-seeking, the variance
| of outcomes has value (to a gambler) on its own.
| butlike wrote:
| I agree with this
| tech_ken wrote:
| > If we evolved to be more rational, then the phenomenon
| probably wouldn't exist.
|
| I strongly disagree here, I think the phenomenon is in fact
| part and parcel with the evolution of our rationality. Betting
| (as you accurately describe) is an intrinsic part of life, and
| rationality (as I understand) is our evolved response to
| wrangling that uncertainty. It shouldn't be surprising that the
| evolutionary reward mechanism for acting rational (big oxytocin
| hit when you predict something correctly) could get
| miscalibrated for a subset of the population; that's just
| biology.
|
| I also think you're making a massive error by conflating
| criticism of betting with criticism of betting markets, though.
| Nobody is upset about people dealing with the natural risk of
| day-to-day life; the problem is that people are now being
| incentivized to take on additional risk (beyond the day-to-day)
| which they are poorly equipped to reason about. The systems
| governing the dynamics of geopolitical events (or other things
| you can estimate in a betting market) are staggeringly complex,
| and assigning credences to them is an epistemological nightmare
| that even the most seasoned experts struggled to do reliably.
| These market brokers are using a framework of
| rationalism/"wisdom of the crowds" as a cover to sucker non-
| expert consumers into what truly is _gambling_ in the sense
| that you describe it. In principle a person could probably lay
| accurate odds on a horse race too, but the average punter is
| never doing that and the same is true of the majority of
| polymarket users.
| FromTheFirstIn wrote:
| Found the gambler!
| nomilk wrote:
| I find predication markets the most accurate form of 'news'. For
| example, if I want to understand if a claim (e.g. a news
| headline) has merit, I check the prediction market and easily
| dismiss/confirm it. Recently it has been useful to understand the
| situation in Iran. It has also informed my travel decisions to
| other countries based on geopolitical dangers.
|
| Are prediction markets perfect? Of course not. But the difference
| is in prediction markets someone has something to lose (real
| money), whereas legacy news values sensationalism over accuracy
| and sobriety.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| The realer the money, the more incentive there is to "make it
| so".
| volkk wrote:
| i don't know much about prediction markets aside from just a
| very high level view but i bumped into a thread on twitter that
| talks about how game-able they are as well if you have a decent
| chunk of money. e.g i throw 100k into "yes" and now bots/people
| think some insider has real info, and more shares get thrown
| into "yes" and then last minute the bot undoes the trade and
| throws a bunch of money into "no" and no resolves and they made
| a lot more money.
|
| again, i don't know enough about prediction markets, but this
| feels like i can't really trust lower liquidity "predictions"
| (i guess very similar to penny stocks).
|
| One can argue that main news headline predictions will have so
| much volume that it's impossible to rig it this way, but what's
| stopping state actors from manipulation?
| tehjoker wrote:
| It really will become about rich people swaying narratives or
| even making reality comport to their desires when practical.
| Poor people without insider info will just lose their savings
| on gambling. A cheaper stock market.
| rohit1729 wrote:
| we need a black mirror episode on this
| hephaes7us wrote:
| Sounds like we might have a new way to fund reporting!
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Prediction markets are another way to monetize attention.
|
| The typical notion of the "attention economy" is that you build
| your audience by getting attention--doesn't much matter how--and
| then you get paid to advertise things to them. Could be white
| label retail like supplements or hats, or could be "content
| partnerships," or just straight up ads a la "this episode brought
| to you by Squarespace."
|
| Prediction markets only make real money if there is attention. I
| can predict when my neighbor will take out their trash cans, but
| without attention, no one will take the counter or put up funds.
|
| Conversely if something does have a lot of attention, then
| literally anything about it can be predicted, bet, funded, and
| fulfilled.
|
| I can't think of a way to stop this, any more easily than I can
| think of a way to stop people from getting paid to shit-post
| ragebait slop on YouTube, X, TikTok, etc.
|
| Attention is the complement of free expression. If we let people
| say whatever they want, then people can also pay attention to
| whatever they want.
| clpmsf wrote:
| my mental model:
|
| guess about the future (no money involved) = "prediction"
|
| guess about the future (money involved) = "gambling"
| sureglymop wrote:
| How is it not obvious to the players how much more easily
| corruptible these markets are?
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