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'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#171

Post by pocksuppet »

jgeada wrote: post #108
Analemma_ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you put two locks on your door? Clearly you deserved to get burgled if you only used one. Building Byzantine fault tolerance into absolutely everything is expensive, and makes everything we do and buy more expensive. It would be better and cheaper to rely on social trust, if that's possible-- and it was possible before these gambling sites. Prediction markets are burning social trust as fuel to make profit…

Prediction markets and all the market manipulation are the symptom, not the cause. Our society used to have real consequences for breaching public trust, but with our mere decades old "money is speech" legal system, there have not been any consequences for moneyed interest in quite a while. And as long as there are no consequences, they keep trying more and more egregious violations of public trust to establish where…

Money is speech - but speech isn't speech. What's the latest thing a US citizen said in the US that got them arrested? They said in a private WhatsApp group that Benjamin Netanyahu should come and bomb their school to get them out of an exam. Benjamin Netanyahu was not in the group chat, but they got arrested anyway.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#172

Post by dlenski »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #125
dlenski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the fact that authorities even have to spend time investigating is a massive negative externality. A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.

> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one. Can this really be said with a straight face? Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capt…

> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data?

No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.

Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.

Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#173

Post by sixothree »

Analemma_ wrote: post #92
j-bos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why are they only using one sensor?

Why didn't you put two locks on your door? Clearly you deserved to get burgled if you only used one. Building Byzantine fault tolerance into absolutely everything is expensive, and makes everything we do and buy more expensive. It would be better and cheaper to rely on social trust, if that's possible-- and it was possible before these gambling sites. Prediction markets are burning social trust as fuel to make profit…

It's not like there aren't literally hundreds of sensors across the city.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#174

Post by dhosek »

ianferrel wrote: post #74
ipython wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense, that's already happened. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kalshi-sued-over-o... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-... > Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces.

It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.

On the other hand, given the regime’s desire to keep internal communications secret, maybe the causality does stem from the bet.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#175

Post by LanceH »

johnhamlin wrote: post #127

Remember when it was just common sense that letting people gamble on things would undermine the integrity of those things?

The critics of prediction markets needs to decide if they are against the markets because they are gambling, or because they aren't gambling.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#176

Post by dlenski »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #153
dlenski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the fact that authorities even have to spend time investigating is a massive negative externality. A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.

> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. I have bad news for you. The manipulation of weather sensors for profit has a history that long pre-dates prediction markets. You just weren't paying attention until now.

> The manipulation of weather sensors for profit has a history that long pre-dates prediction markets.

Okay, I'm intrigued about what I've missed. Give me more information about this history, please.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#177

Post by pocksuppet »

thimabi wrote: post #10
guyzero wrote: post #2

I don't understand who is taking the other side of all these insane Polymarket bets. Is Polymarket doing it?

I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything? The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.

They're banned in the USA and Europe, so you can't "just" make an account - you have to use a VPN.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#178

Post by RIMR »

logicchains wrote: post #23
ctime wrote: post #7

Between this and crypto cryptocurrencies (which obviously can be used to make bets) I don’t know which is more destructive to society

How is it even remotely as destructive as casinos, where the odds are always against you? From a probability perspective Polymarket is much more fair, as you actually have positive expected value if you have an information advantage.

I don't understand this logic. If people with information advantage get to cheat and win, then everyone without that advantage gets screwed. I struggle to see how this is even remotely "fair". It's like playing poker, but some players get to see what everyone's cards are.

Even humoring your logic begs the question: Why is monetizing an "information advantage" valuable to society?

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#179

Post by tedd4u »

ambicapter wrote: post #9

> There are no indications so far that the successful punters have had to return their winnings. However, the data source for Paris’s hottest temperature has since moved to a sensor at the smaller Paris-Le Bourget airport. Here's the negative externality that no one will care about. There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a…

Re externalities, don't they use the temperature to calculate the length of the takeoff roll and other stuff about the flight, fuel load, etc? Maybe they use the plane's own temperature sensors for that though.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#180

Post by amelius »

ambicapter wrote: post #9

> There are no indications so far that the successful punters have had to return their winnings. However, the data source for Paris’s hottest temperature has since moved to a sensor at the smaller Paris-Le Bourget airport. Here's the negative externality that no one will care about. There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a…

Yes we've got to stop this. Meanwhile dictators are laughing at us while our totally free "thus, awesome" society kills itself.
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