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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

#161

Post by caminante »

user982 wrote: post #137
caminante wrote: post #100

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines. Here's the actual headline: > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What editorialized message are you accusing the shorter "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story" of inserting?

For starters, no mention of re-write option. The HN headline makes me assume pre-emptive death threats instead of escalation over dialogue to re-write.

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

#162

Post by bitmasher9 »

ratg13 wrote: post #79

One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn’t have some plans of their own. A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.

A million dollars is high stakes, but not extremely high. We’ve seen much much higher wagers.

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

#163

Post by waffleiron »

varjag wrote: post #134
defly wrote: post #21

FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...

(as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank)

ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment this. Classic lowbrow dismissal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

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

#164

Post by shell0x »

mickwe wrote: post #4
pydry wrote: post #2

The level of censorship in Israel right now is off the charts: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/ I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.

But the Times of Israel reporter reported that a missile hit - and where. The censor tries to prevent reports like that, for (ostensibly) security reasons - telling the enemy where their missiles hit.

Is there a trustworthy independent source? I don't trust anything coming from Iranian or Israeli news outlets.

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

#165

Post by rwmj »

cjonas wrote: post #139
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.

How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders place massive bets immediately before the event resolves. Does gaining this information a few hours early provide value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war, politics, etc.

Can you make massive bets if there's no one to take the other side of the bet? In a prediction market that allowed insiders, if you don't have insider knowledge you shouldn't bet very much because you're probably going to lose to someone who is an insider.

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

#166

Post by bhouston »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #149
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.

Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?

This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.

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

#167

Post by arrrg »

epolanski wrote: post #30
pjc50 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists do not normally work like that. That might be how beefs are fought on social media, but of course screenshots are easy to fake anyway.

I don't understand what your point is. What is the reader assumed to do about an article that does not bring any proof? The video of the missile exploding is also easy to fake, but it's an important element behind the reporting.

Making up sources as a journalist and being found out will result in a professional death sentence. It’s simply completely irredeemably unacceptable. That’s why it can be a convention that journalists don’t provide their raw sources.

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

#168

Post by caminante »

tantalor wrote: post #159
caminante wrote: post #100

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines. Here's the actual headline: > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story > Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.

You're saying that after having read the article.

A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an article leading to death threats.

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

#169

Post by astura »

Aurornis wrote: post #144
cannonpr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>There is a whole class of urban legends like that.

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

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

#170

Post by yyyk »

Waterluvian wrote: post #43
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 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…

>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting...

>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight

The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.

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