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Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

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Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#151

Post by rspeele »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #150
rspeele wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the additional examples. Another good one is the moon landing. I don't strictly know we went to the moon, I don't have direct proof, but based on the evidence available to me and the crappy arguments from people claiming we didn't, I'm pretty confident it happened.

As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to prediction markets, this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#152

Post by Kranar »

rspeele wrote: post #103
Kranar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PredictIt didn't have this anomaly where Trump had a 15% chance of winning. After Georgia called the election the percentage went above 95%.

Oh, it definitely did. Maybe not to the same degree as the crypto markets (never looked at them), and there were certainly spikes this way and that, but you could get Trump NO cheaper than 90c well into December. The Texas v. Pennsylvania case getting swatted down by SCOTUS was probably the last of the cheap shares where it was worth depositing money just to play, but if you already had some money in your account it…

You are correct, thanks for providing those sources.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#153

Post by jeremysalwen »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #124
j4yav wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this path lead to believing anything you like, once you free yourself from the chains of needing evidence? I feel like I'd lose all track of what is real if I used this logic.

My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path, even though they know that sometimes people get away with stealing elections in their countries. I believe they use reason and inference when judging what is real, because all relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.

> My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path

Ah, that makes sense. They would require evidence to believe something. So for example, in an election where there was no evidence of fraud, they would not believe there was fraud. Such as the one which occurred in 2020 in the U.S.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#154

Post by fallingfrog »

fallingfrog wrote: post #35

I think what we’re seeing is that the set of people making bets on political outcomes leans sharply Republican. It’s selection bias. There may be a broader message there about representation too: if you are sitting in a meeting and 8 people think something is going to happen, but you disagree, and they are all upper class men (for example), and you’re a lower class woman, you probably have a better than 1 in 9 chance…

By the way the point I’m making is about echo chambers not women being wiser than men. If you are the only white man in the room the same rule might hold. I feel like people are making an excessively shallow reading of what I just wrote.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#155

Post by UncleMeat »

drdeca wrote: post #141
UncleMeat wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bet…

> 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.

They probably could. The large bulk of right wing legislators and media personalities aren't like this, though.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#156

Post by jtxxwl2 »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #153
jtxxwl2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path, even though they know that sometimes people get away with stealing elections in their countries. I believe they use reason and inference when judging what is real, because all relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.

> My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path Ah, that makes sense. They would require evidence to believe something. So for example, in an election where there was no evidence of fraud, they would not believe there was fraud. Such as the one which occurred in 2020 in the U.S.

Yes, and examples of evidence might include that some election facilities were administered by people with a seething hatred for one of the candidates, and election observers in some areas were prevented from being able to meaningfully monitor the election process. Of course there are many other potential forms of evidence, but those two right there would be enough to give anyone pretty good reason to believe there was election fraud, provided it happened outside of America, since election fraud can't take place in America.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#157

Post by jtxxwl2 »

rspeele wrote: post #151
jtxxwl2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the additional examples. Another good one is the moon landing. I don't strictly know we went to the moon, I don't have direct proof, but based on the evidence available to me and the crappy arguments from people claiming we didn't, I'm pretty confident it happened. As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to prediction markets, this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely…

>this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".

No, that's not what happened. People who believed the odds of the courts ruling in favor of Trump made the payout worth it gave their money to people who believed the odds of that not happening made the payout for that scenario worth it.

Of course, courts only have access to the evidence which is given to them by either side, so really we only know that the evidence Trump's legal team was able to get its hands on on short notice was not sufficient to convince the court to take the very significant step of overturning election results. We do not know who "actually" got more legitimate votes.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#158

Post by jtxxwl2 »

yibg wrote: post #146
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…

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.

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 here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#159

Post by dragonwriter »

jtxxwl2 wrote: post #158
yibg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 here as well. They have courts and inv…

> Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries

I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes), or it usually is quite evident in even the very short-term, and either fails to do enough to change results, does enough to change results but is corrected by institutional processes, or it does enough to change results and is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

There's not a whole lot of modern cases where election fraud is discovered only long-after the event rather than virtually in real-time.

Is vote rigging and conspiracy to rig votes possible in the modern world? Yes. Is it ever both significant and not immediately evident? It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be the case. If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

Re: Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election

#160

Post by jtxxwl2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #159
jtxxwl2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 here as well. They have courts and inv…

> Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes),…

>Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes)

Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?

>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.

By whom?

>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.

Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?

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