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We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

derekthompson.org

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Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#631

Post by jmye »

beachy wrote: post #207
bluetidepro wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired. Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.

Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is - apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.

If they got a job at one of those companies, they could've gotten a job elsewhere. It's a specific choice, and "but I'm only 25, how could I possibly be expected to know right from wrong" isn't really an excuse.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#632

Post by jmye »

hunterpayne wrote: post #408
kakacik wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people when they actually show some proper morals on this forum despite the employment of many members here.

It depends, if the morals cause more harm than they prevent, then no, the people espousing those "morals" don't deserve respect. They should be treated as naive which is what they are. Also, this is why we have the phrase, "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good and seems to exist mostly to make the speaker seem more ethical than they actually are. Ignorance isn't a vir…

> "virtual signaling" which specifically means a "moral" which causes more harm than good

Literally not what that means, at all. What a ridiculous assertion.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#633

Post by gadders »

vincnetas wrote: post #602
gadders wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most addictions will ruin your life - whether it is gambling, drugs or alcohol.

Right, so why advertise gambling or any other of them?

Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#634

Post by DeathArrow »

>I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

After traditions and religion become less important, virtue wasn't replaced by money and market but by status seeking. We are all now comparatively rich to how we were 50 years ago or to people from third world countries. So money doesn't make a big difference, but status does. Followers, approvals, being highly viewed in a particular niche is much more valuable for many people than money.

And even money, when they are important, they aren't important because one can buy good and service, money are important because they can confer status.

So my conjecture is that it's status seeking what might be the end goal for many people in the West and what is provoking big issues for societies, like severely declining birth rates.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#635

Post by DeathArrow »

vovavili wrote: post #561
worldsayshi wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.

With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.

>With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.

It's only gambling when you are betting of completely random events. If you know what the odds are of something happening, even with some approximation, then it is not gambling.

Of course, over 99% people placing bets on Polymarket are gamblers, but some aren't.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#636

Post by DeathArrow »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #611
kiliantics wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.

Extreme events are always poorly priced in markets. For example, there's no point in making a trade for the S&P 500 falling by 90% because if it does we'll be in such a catastrophe that money doesn't matter any more. Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.

>Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.

But a powerful earthquake can't affect the wider system in a country? and yet, people do buy insurances for earthquakes.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#637

Post by appletrotter »

kiliantics wrote: post #609
spacebanana7 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be useful for insurance/hedging purposes. For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price. Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit…

There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.

Very astute observation. Might I even add, as humans we never know when our last day could be. So I find it silly to gamble, since I could easily die in a car accident on my way to pick up my winnings.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#638

Post by rfwhyte »

Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.

We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#639

Post by pdfernhout »

everdrive wrote: post #579

We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.

I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...

    "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

    I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

    There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

    What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."

Re: We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

#640

Post by epolanski »

worldsayshi wrote: post #542
firloop wrote: post #277

> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1]. [0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-1... [1]: https://g…

I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.

Also, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives.

You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen.

We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression.

Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen.

And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.

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