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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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