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Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

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Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#141

Post by drdeca »

UncleMeat wrote: post #49
Aqua wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Crypto was always about freedom, and as things stand the right is advocating for freedom more than the left (gun rights, freedom of speech, smaller taxes). Crypto was always about freedom, you're liberated from the dependence on your country, bank, or whatever else it may be. Your fate is in your own hands, your wallet, your funds.

> right is advocating for freedom more than the left (gun rights, freedom of speech, smaller taxes) immigration, religious tolerance, lgbt rights.

There are multiple kinds of freedoms, I suppose. For immigration, yeah, being free to move somewhere seems clearly freedom. A freedom to do something.

Not being forbidden from practicing ones religion is also a freedom to do something.

Being free from being discriminated against on the basis of religion is a different kind of freedom, I think.

There is a similar way to split the third kind.

I suppose the boundary between “the freedom to do x” and “freedom from being treated badly for doing x” is kind of fuzzy. It would be absurd to say that “we have freedom of immigration, it’s just that basically anyone who comes in we happen to shoot.”, in such a situation, people are clearly being forbidden from immigrating.

But if someone is endlessly harassed by people, and treated with extra suspicion by the police, in response to their practicing their religion, yeah, that is kind of going against freedom of religion kind of in the first sense, or perhaps somewhere between the two senses, even if officially by law there is nothing forbidding it, and another law says that no law can be made which does forbid it.

But, even if things like this show that the distinction between the two senses is kind of fuzzy, I still think that the distinction is still somewhat relevant and somewhat reasonable.

A self-consistent rightist could very well support nearly-open borders, and legal protection of the practice of other religions, and oppose attempts to criminalize or otherwise legislate against LGBT things, on the basis of freedom, while at the same time also being somewhat discriminatory on a personal level against one or more of those groups.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#142

Post by tialaramex »

dragonwriter wrote: post #76
fairity wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are cash-based markets like Predictit where you could've made a similar bet. Predictit charges 5% withdrawal fees + 10% of profits, but if you expect a 15% ROI, it's still profitable.

The fiat-based prediction markets tend to limit the number of people in a particular markets, the size of positions in the market, and a number of other aspects of the market in a way which make it difficult to seize apparent opportunities and to limit the possible returns from doing so, even before considering the way that their fees eat up returns.

These limits are because the ones you're thinking of are research projects, not in fact betting markets (even though as an individual you can treat them as betting markets just fine). This makes them accessible (legally) to US residents.

Betfair is a British gambling firm, and isn't a research project, when Betfair's "Did Donald Trump win the US presidential election?" and "Did Joe Biden win the US presidential election?" closed it had hundreds of millions of pounds of bets across those two questions.

I got paid, as in I put cash in and a couple of weeks later more cash was paid out to my bank account when BetFair closed it, for knowing that Donald Trump did not win that election in December.

It was even possible (though of course risky) to buy the lows and sell the highs as MAGA rallied when they thought the Kraken had been released, or when Rudy was going to prove everyone wrong, or whatever other nonsense.

I was actually underwater for more than 50% of the two weeks between placing my "bet" and the cash returned, because MAGA were bidding up the "Donald Trump won" position even as it became increasingly obvious that they'd lose everything.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#143

Post by drdeca »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #134
drdeca wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove the putting of stupid words in others’ mouths from this (great going there, btw), the only thing that remains is “but the courts could have not gotten the evidence”. But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. You have to explain why people claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the courts don’t have enough evidence for it to be even claimed in the cour…

>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One s…

> One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”. An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation.

Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally considered__ evidence, or isn’t “evidence” in the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it wasn’t presented it court?

I have to admit that I’m not particularly clear on what kinds of evidence are and aren’t considered “evidence” in the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar with the criteria that make the distinction?

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#144

Post by rspeele »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-President (who also was notorious for inventing fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence in the same election) is currently at the center of a criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard evidence, and his political party is trying to change the Georgia State Constitution to derail the investig…

>No, they aren't Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it…

It's kinda like how Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster could be real, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that they are almost certainly not real.

Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much reason to take them seriously.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#145

Post by pwinnski »

as300 wrote: post #117
pwinnski wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that PredictIt offered similar options for all-cash users, and they were also still at 15% for Trump winning after he had clearly long lost. This was not solely, or even primarily, a crypto thing.

This was addressed in the article, though. PredictIt odds could've been skewed by: * Maximum of $1000 being able to be invested on the platform * A small fee being taken by PredictIt out of every bet.

So PredictIt odds were skewed by bet limits and fees, but you assert that the crypto markets, skewed to almost exactly the same degree, were instead skewed by the contrarian nature of crypto users?

Occam's razor suggests that when two different sites correlate so closely, their reasons are likely not so completely different.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#146

Post by yibg »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-President (who also was notorious for inventing fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence in the same election) is currently at the center of a criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard evidence, and his political party is trying to change the Georgia State Constitution to derail the investig…

>No, they aren't Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it…

Big difference between the general statement of "vote rigging is impossible" and "this last election wasn't rigged". The usual claim is the latter, not the former.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#147

Post by jtxxwl2 »

drdeca wrote: post #143
jtxxwl2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One s…

> One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts. The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”. An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation. Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally con…

In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the evidence presented, and issue various different degrees of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge would require a rather high standard of evidence.

I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.

Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#148

Post by crazygringo »

xalava wrote: post #137
crazygringo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Prediction markets" is a fancy word for gambling. Hard disagree. Gambling is set up with the principal aims of a) making money off the spread and b) getting participants as "gamified" as possible with exciting events and the ability to bet lots of money. Prediction markets are set up with the principal aim of crowdsourcing intelligence from a diverse set of minds. They can be set up by academia, think tanks, resea…

Theoretically, that might exist. I recommend that you open each platform mentioned in the article and apply your definition.

I recommend you simply read the Wikipedia article for prediction markets. It even has a list of prediction markets you can visit yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

Clearly there's nothing theoretical about it.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#149

Post by elwell »

hatsunearu wrote: post #2

I considered myself pretty in-the-know and knew about Predictit, all kinds of crypto, and therefore I thought I was up-to-date on the crypto news but I did not even know that there was a crypto clone of Predictit. >blockchain-based markets are highly niche Not sure if he means if the whole of blockchain is highly niche or blockchain-based prediction markets are highly niche, but if it's the latter, I definitely agree…

I had heard of Augur but not PredictIt.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#150

Post by jtxxwl2 »

rspeele wrote: post #144
jtxxwl2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, they aren't Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it…

It's kinda like how Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster could be real, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that they are almost certainly not real. Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much reason to take t…

It's also kinda like how Al Capone might not have ordered the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he probably did, even though no one could definitively prove it.

And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he is almost certainly not.

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