Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

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Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.

I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq

Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.

And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.

Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.

The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.

An idealized prediction market could be a social good the same way a frictionless spherical cow is good for making my physics homework easier.

There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous

I think the thing is insider trading genuinely is exactly part of how prediction markets contribute something that was not offered before: a more accurate way for the public to gauge the probability of future outcomes. I, as a rationalist, think there is a lot of good that results from that.

It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).

Yea, like I said. We all understood this as a bad thing and why. Then the rationalists came around and reasoned their way into how vice is a virtue.

Seriously, the so called rationalists seem to be working very hard to be as weird as possible. Some sort of pathological contrarianism.

They know they are rational because they are rationalists. If they decide an idea is good it must be rational.

Before any of their defenders(and I’m including e/acc and most of TESCREAL in this criticism) come at me about how much introspection they do and how they constantly try to question their theories or be LessWrong you’ll have to explain things like prediction markets, Bankman-Fried, or the litany of other warped ideas coming out of this group that are causing harm to society.

How does that even work?

An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.

In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.

The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.

You are empirically correct, but one could likely design a prediction market that resolves this while still making insider trading an informational public good. Unfairness to counterparties is a different axis from non-monetary public forecasting signals.

Because it’s targeting gambling addicts as the rubes.

When you have shit like will the government attack X nation by 9:00 pm on Friday, it takes very little for the insiders with levers to decide if the event in question is going to happen, to make the event happen.

It’s beyond even regular corporate insider trading which was usually predicated on secret information, not the literal ability to decide if an event occurs.

I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.

Prediction market is undistinguishable from unregulated gambling in literally all its aspects.

Gambling is for games of chance, while one can "beat the house" in prediction markets simply by being more intelligent, informed, and better at forecasting.

At least for the non-random-like bets.

Nah, it is gambling. The "intelligent, informed, and better at forecasting is just an attempt to stroke peoples egos so that they gamble their money.

You can beat the odds if you have insider information tho, so I give you "better informed" in that sense.

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