731–740 of 1001 posts
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I propose odds based on survival tables for other companies of that age (I think for six years, the annual risk is 9 %), which side of the bet would you like to take?
The, uh, earnestness of your reply makes me suspect you missed the subtext. We're not interested in expected value or winning the bet. If anything, it's the opposite: The "goal" is to lose the bet due to a situation caused by the pattern of betting, with something beyond any actuarial tables because it's not an independent event. If I can presume to speak for up-thread commenters, we've agreed the system is inherentl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.
It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalis…
Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how it's a principled one in any way.
Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt", indeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"): > “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so i…
This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.
Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).
Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).
It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>outcome shaping markets I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations. When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the…
> Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2…
Oh, trump made some money?
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It already is not accessible in the US, although ideally it should be in the same of freedom. If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American. Making death threats to a journalist or anyone already is illegal. There is zero reason to ban betting considering the sensible mitigation that was noted.
> If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American. "Everyone I disagree with is Not A Real American and should just leave the country. Who's a Real American? Well, someone who agrees with my personal political views, of course." utterly idiotic worldview
So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.
[flagged]
People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Prediction markets have value for people as a source of reliable information because they tend to be very accurate compared to any other human mechanism for creating forecasts. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
There is no evidence that people betting on whether Iran will strike Israel on March 15th has any benefit. Who would be the beneficiary of that? Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow? Nor there's evidence that providing information about the fact that US will strike Venezuela does it either. What value any of that has? None, especially considering the pe…
I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I just think that on net the information provided tends to be more valuable.