371–380 of 525 posts
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“I bet you $500 a month I’ll get cancer.” Insurance absolutely has a societal benefit. It is also absolutely gambling.
The words for this are hedging and speculation vs gambling.
Hedging is a strategy for reducing risk in gambling (or investment).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tHiB8jLocbPLagYDZ/the-online... This less wrong piece by a libertarian who examines the numbers and struggles to reconcile them with his beliefs is one of the best indictments on sports betting. There is a small proportion of the population who cannot handle this. And they become prey to the predators in the sports betting industry. These guys make money off destroying their lives.
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If you made this bet, then got cancer, would you say "hooray, I'm rich!"?
No. But not the definition of gambling. Insurance is hedging. Aka hedging your bets .
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Stocks do not have positive expected return. The return on the average stock is 0% in the US which is negative after fees (this is a common misconception, market returns are positive only because large companies get larger and this is contextual, when this isn't true then even the market will lose money). This is to say nothing of 0DTE options. There is a risk premium but this premium can be positive or negative. It…
If stocks did not have positive expected return no one would invest. What you're talking about is daytrading where there's a large failure rate so much so people call it gambling because of the nature of how swingy and illogical it can be. Besides that, there's also the perspective that options help stabilize the market via hedging.
I am also not sure what you are saying. The return on the average stock is negative, it is a empirical fact.
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No. But not the definition of gambling. Insurance is hedging. Aka hedging your bets .
Appeal to definitions is rarely useful in such discussions. Insurance is not a central member of the category, since people rarely get addicted to filing insurance paperwork, but people very much do get addicted to sports betting.
You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad.
You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.
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My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that. Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a f…
When I was 13 my parents would let me have a (small) glass of wine with dinner. I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.
My experience with raising three kids is there’s a limit to the amount of messaging that gets through with any fidelity. So, the only financial teaching I did with them, was the stocks, bonds, diversification, risk and prudence schtick. I could see the attempted teachable lesson about gambling losses going sideways and crowding-out the rest.
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> If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them I don't think this follows. If an individual is winning a lot of money repeatedly in this way, it is a sign that the bookie should give their bets a lot of weight when adjusting prices. But th…
If bookies want better prices they can pay for prices from places that have good models. Or they can buy / build their own models. What you're suggesting doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.
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Appeal to definitions is rarely useful in such discussions. Insurance is not a central member of the category, since people rarely get addicted to filing insurance paperwork, but people very much do get addicted to sports betting.
“Is insurance gambling” is a question of definition. You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad. You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.
In lieu of re-quoting other parts of the thread, I'll instead ask you to please re-read the arguments people have made, more slowly.