431–440 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[dead]
I would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.
Not even that. It is settling a bet on voting. But you are taking a bet on voting on the right side of the outcome. This is independent on the actual bet - this is outcome voting. You make very little money if you vote on correct outcome, and lose a lot if you vote on wrong outcome. So there is an incentive on voting on correct outcome. https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?". Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several countries and in several languages saying that it was an exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals, or god knows what, while a single US source will say they talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1 month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets, and then people vote based on the combination of factoids they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has already happened, but IME it's rather rare).
Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like, "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-losing option.
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.
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
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.
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats? Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address. Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit. The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.
Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely people who were sending the message for questioning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the heck does the company (Polymarket) have to do with any of this? There's nothing wrong with a prediction market. There are a lot of reasons why they're helpful in judging the probability of future events more accurately than any single analyst, and are therefore a net benefit to society, no different from newspapers and stock markets. These are just individuals making criminal threats. They're the bad guys he…
What are the risks involved with the newspaper versus the risks involved with Polymarket? Answer this and I think you'll discover that "no different" is actually quite different. Regarding the stock market: nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future. People predict the stock market, not the other way around.
I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth teller.
> nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future
I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a better job of predicting the future than the stock market, you will become extremely wealthy. So how exactly do you think it isn't basically the best publicly available indicator of the future, specifically the net present value of future expected profits?
Sophisticated analysts absolutely use current stock prices/market value for modeling the future.
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 not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet. Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
When this existed, it was quite literally done using the prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all this insanity.
I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.
He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course of action for the journalist because there was money on both sides of this outcome. No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.