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Comment by vovavili | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It also creates a lot incentives for creating unpredictable chaos as an insider.

I explicitly accounted for this incentive with my first three words.

I'm curious what positive externalities you're thinking about? Being able to make plans for the future?

Again, as I said, "aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms".

That's vague enough to be more or less meaningless, where specifically do you see positive externalities outweighing the numerous negative ones?

If that strikes you as vague, I strongly recommend you to read at least an LLM summary of "The Use of Knowledge in Society".

A male in a country that is about to enter a war could decide to leave to avoid conscription, depending on the odds

Doesn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows

What constraints and how do you enforce them?

Ah yes, vague non-solutions.

They will be uttered in response to criticism and then quietly ignored until the inevitable. Rinse and repeat. A true mark of a grifter.

> With proper constraints,

load bearing phrase there

nothing about the US currently can be characterized as having proper constraints

generic "bet on anything" betting markets massively encourage corruption and market manipulation via shock events and insider trading. false flag attacks, etc

>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.

Why does knowing the odds make it not gambling?

The odds are known in a game of roulette, is that not gambling?

You can calculate the odds in games like blackjack to attempt to gain an edge, is that not gambling?

Randomness does not imply the uniform distribution

There are much bigger negative externalities: see e.g. all the enshittification driven by number must go in the global gambling system.

v. edgelordy

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