181–190 of 193 posts
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When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, do you really care about PR?
Yes? Nobody cares that they killed a bunch of Cuban body guards. Taking down a civilian airliner would have been a big deal.
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Wouldn't the counterargument to this be that if the poor grunt is willing to betray his country for money in the prediction market, he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing? With the prediction market, there is a financial incentive for people on the opposite side of the bet being motivated to uncover the malfeasance.
If you're a grunt trying to contact Russia or china you're much more likely to end up talking to an FBI agent posing as a foreigner. Prediction markets make it easy and anonymous.
> When the topic is dry and quantitative (Finance), the market is efficient. When the topic allows for tribalism and hope (Sports, Entertainment), the market transforms into a mechanism for transferring wealth from the optimistic to the calculated. I get that the finance market is _more_ dry and quantitative than sports, but certainly not immune to hope and tribalism,
>I get that the finance market is _more_ dry and quantitative than sports, but certainly not immune to hope and tribalism where is your paper?
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You could see USAF and navy air power operating in venezuela on ads-b. I was shocked seeing F15s. You'd think there'd be no way the military would have ads-b activated while performing military operations.
When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, what choice do you have? There are civilian aircraft up in the sky. Having a fighter jet run into one and kill a bunch of civilians is a bad PR situation.
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This gets into a philosophical point about what a prediction market actually is. If it's a device for anonymously aggregating fragmented group information into a coherent accurate prediction, the lopsided bets are a feature; the only point of the market is the price signal, and the lopsided bets true up the price. But most of us understand that prediction markets aren't that, no matter what Robin Hansen said when he…
I think of them as "Accountability" markets. Someone who can influence the outcome is encouraged to make a public bet on their success, and define what the success criteria is. The bet is then a means to hold them publicly accountable for doing what they said they would do. The market then becomes a voting machine for the public to decide if they think the person will succeed or not.
Which would be great, if the mechanism and prize for "voting" were something other than people's basic means of survival.
Gambling addiction isn't bad because there's something wrong with predicting outcomes, it's bad because it causes people to lose all of their money.
"Kalshi, but with a maximum order size of $1" would be great. Kalshi, with a maximum order size of oh crap I can't pay my rent this month, is very bad!
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If you're a grunt trying to contact Russia or china you're much more likely to end up talking to an FBI agent posing as a foreigner. Prediction markets make it easy and anonymous.
Are they really anonymous? I’m not meaning to disagree, that just surprises me. I would have thought they need to follow KYC requirements.
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> POSIWID Everyone can make up a silly purpose. Against POSIWID: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
Oh, I suppose one could interpret it as literally as possible, and arrive at that essay's conclusion. I have always considered the following to be basically synonymous: * In the absence of info, consider the intended output of the system to be what it is measured to be * The output of the system is best determined using observation vs reasoning Most of the examples there are moreso about two systems colliding. Yes, t…
Selecting a single measurement is the same as selecting a purpose.
Either way, we see people can choose a nonsense root cause, to argue something specious by defining a nonsense POSIWID.
There's also a crossover with the human tendency to try and attribute causes to the bosses of a system. Sometimes systems are emergent and are not designed/run by any specific person. Especially when hallucinating benefits to specific people e.g. "follow the money". I'd like to define this as "agentic reification of emergent systems" however unfortunately modern times are creating noise around each of those words.
In general I find it interesting to see how people argue about systems. From what I see, very few people understand the systems they comment upon - instead most people rely on political memes and shallow analysis instead of any deeper rational thinking. I've been decomposing my own thinking about mortgages for a while and I'm still terribly ignorant about that system!
Aside: and thank you: I found out about the Glowies meme while writing this comment, meme seeded by Terry Davis https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TerryADavis
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The way I imagined it, the maintainers wouldn't be considering a commit whose author was not willing to bet on its success. This thought experiment took part in a world where the web was significantly worse than our own: hoards of malicious AI's and precious few humans trying to not be mistaken for a malicious AI. Of course a pre-existing trust relationship is much better, but ideally there'd be a way for untrusted a…
However, your bet against it being merged incentivizes contrarian behavior by the maintainer in order to claim your wager for himself. Similarly, betting that a public figure will still be alive a month from now is functionally equivalent to putting out a hit on him.
As far as using prediction markets to put a hit out on people... How does that differ from how it's done now, except that the flow of money becomes part of public record where it's more likely to appear as evidence against you in court?
Anyhow, like most online media, moderation will be necessary. If we can't game-theory our way to a nice solution, we can just do the normal thing and ban the activity we don't like. I just think that where possible, designs that align incentives are likely to be more successful. Prohibition is generally ineffective, expensive to maintain, or both.
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With the venezuela attack, the real trade wasn't on Polymarket or Kalshi. The trade was going long the 3x Oil&Gas ETFs the trading day beforehand. There was huge buying for absolutely zero perceived reason...then boom we just straight up kidnapped Maduro.
It's not necessarily illegal use of secret information. There exists "alternate data", some companies monitor all kinds of stuff, satellite pictures, etc, some of these companies surely saw the inevitable asset positioning just before such a big attack (150 planes). Just like the Ukraine invasion was first visible on Google Maps as traffic jams !!! at the border at midnight https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2…