351–360 of 517 posts
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...but many people in positions where they can start a war or cause some other highly visible event of any sort probably will start turning to Polymarket to make money in the course of their work
Which makes the prediction market more accurate.
See also: one can have very high economic efficiency with very high inequality, war, disease, misery, etc.
I read the article but failed to grasp what exactly the disaster is that America would be walking into. Is the reliability of Polymarket predictions overhyped? Sure. Is there manipulation of Polymarket odds by some people? Most likely there is. But to say that this is a disaster that America is walking into is nothing else but clickbait.
There is a large disconnect between the amount of combined effort and thinking that goes into prediction markets versus the glibness of which so many people write about them. It is almost as if people lose the plot — in capitalist countries, many financial flows are heavily informed by futures markets which share many of the same characteristics as prediction markets.
[1]: also: fraud investigations or other areas where rigor is expected
[2]: Even the better sources such as The Atlantic are somewhat advertising fueled, driven towards “engaging” content, prioritizing interesting ideas rather than practical relevance, dumbed down to maybe a high school reading level, hardly a trace of showing one’s methods. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any backing analysis in the form of a spreadsheet or (heaven forbid!) source code of a simulation. This is not meant to point fingers at writers or journalists; we just have to recognize the context they live in. If we want detailed and careful analysis, we need to find ways to build system systems that provide it. What we have now is a joke compared to what is possible.
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That is one of the takes I've ever read. There is a reason gambling is so tightly regulated worldwide, and it's certainly not because governments hate easy vice tax revenue. Gambling debt destroys family units, increases poverty rates (most notably for the children of gambling addicts -- the consequences are not localised only to the person making the bad decisions), and increases violent crime rates. Gambling is mas…
Do you know of any studies that can accurately show the correlation between gambling and societal costs? On the surface the link makes sense to me and seems like it should be right, though I'm not sure how we could have tested it in a controlled way to really know the link exists.
There's potential problems that might come from the benefits of prediction markets, like insiders getting incentivized to change the outcome or leak info.
But gambling is an old problem which emerges in many scenarios, casinos, card games, sports betting, financial markets, crypto.
This take is like a new hooters opening up on the moon and people complaining that there's alcohol addiction, food addiction, sexism, wage exploitation... yeah I know man, but it's on the moon!
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> They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds. gross. This sounds like a press release. It's gambling dressed-up as forecasting.
It might be gambling for some, but prediction markets are impressively accurate, in a way that I think merits OPs comment that the information they produce can improve lives. (Other lives will surely be destroyed by gambling...) There's quite a bit of interesting research done on the accuracy, here's a great resource: https://calibration.city/introduction
As I see it it seems to be a way to incentivize insiders to leak information, e.g. see the alleged Google insider betting on Google actions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2025/12/04/alleged-...
Great for the person who has insider knowledge, probably not so great for Google. I wouldn't be surprized if some companies start cracking down on their employees making bank off unannounced company actions.
Game fixing is a known crime in many jurisdictions. If you are a football/baseball/soccer player and you bet your team will lose, you have an obvious way to drastically increase your odds (especially if you are a top player) - playing bad. Other people are completely unaware of this deal. Having fire insurance and burning your car is in most jurisdictions illegal. Yes, you should be paid if your car is burned, but if…
Sports might be fixed? People might gamble with sports? I don't give a shit man, these markets bet on democratic elections and war, the concerns are whether military action is effected for money or leaked for money, everything else is an infitesimal rounding error.
> The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout.…
You enable different enemies to crowdsource for your bounty, and as soon as it is deemed worthy by a hitman, they might take up on the job by placing the opposite bet.
It's a very specific example but the mechanics work for most events in a similar fashion.
It is for this reason that event creation is not open to the public, but rather handled by the regulated markets themselves
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If the prediction market is for a non-trivial amount, it's likely someone is going to kill you in exchange for the money the prediction market offered them . The prediction market isn't acting as a prophet here, it's acting as a plausibly deniable murder for hire service and you are its victim. The people "betting against" you dying just paid to have you killed.
This was discussed on polymarket with the Galve Goat burning bet and assume it's why Essentially it's a big straw goat in Sweden that vandals sometime set on fire. Right towards the end as the probability approaches zero there's a huge profit incentive, "done deals" usually go under well under 1¢ meaning 100-200x returns. A US man once traveled to Sweden to set the goat on fire, he was caught, fined $20k(?) and then…
I'm kind of surprised the article doesn't spell out why these are "prediction markets". They're prediction markets because it used to be that what they were doing was illegal. It was illegal to just set up a gambling website in the US and so these "prediction markets" were the same thing as crypto, masking what was really happening behind some tech speak. In the same way that in the crypto market you regularly get be…
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> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society. This isn't true. each 10 per cent increase in gambling expenditure in NSW results in more than 4,500 additional assaults 2,800 additional home break-ins 1,300 additional break and enter (non-dwelling) offences 1,400 additional motor vehicle thefts 2,300 additional stealing from motor vehicle thefts 3,800 additional fraud offences each year https…
Is that NSW = New South Wales? I'm asking because Wikipedia lists New South Wales as a population of only 8.5 million, and those crime numbers are insanely huge relative to that.
The part the article OP linked to would be based off the line:
To put these percentage changes in terms of interest to policy makers, a 10% decrease in gambling expenditure in NSW would result in 4579 fewer ASS offences; 2867 fewer BESD offences; 1380 fewer BESND offences; 1398 fewer MVT offences; 2361 fewer SFMV offences; and 3793 fewer FRD offences 2 each year