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Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

timesofisrael.com

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Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#141

Post by applfanboysbgon »

rich_sasha wrote: post #127
fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter. So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.

On aggregate, humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as a social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#142

Post by Ajedi32 »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #132
kasey_junk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.

> insider trading is the point Says who?

It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders.

Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#143

Post by base698 »

fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#144

Post by Aurornis »

cannonpr wrote: post #66
fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier…

That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#145

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#146

Post by Yizahi »

hollerith wrote: post #63
somelamer567 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else would one want an end-run around governments and law-enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free?

So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?

Not paying taxes and not declaring your assets is always bad, yes.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#148

Post by proggy »

cannonpr wrote: post #66
fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier…

I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#149

Post by MiddleEndian »

bhouston wrote: post #94

An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/ This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the…

I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#150

Post by amelius »

ipaddr wrote: post #89
Waterluvian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or…

The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.

Even in stock trading you can get away with it for a long time. See Epstein.
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