The logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

24 pointsripe12 comments

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NYT gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/magazine/gambling-predict...

archive.is link: https://archive.is/fkhaL

Would have liked to see a mention of poiymarket website which was made for streamers to fake winning on polymarket.

Swapped the l for I (eye) and it’s almost impossible to tell until they evaluated the winnings.

Great. But they are playing Russian roulette with my kids future.

This article's argument in a few sentences:

* Silicon valley gave us DraftKings, Polymarket, and crypto.

* Modern business planning and venture capital firms make "bets" based on the expected value of investments, i.e. probability of success.

* LLMs compute a probability distribution on the next token.

Therefore everything that silicon valley does looks like gambling and shame on them. Sad times seeing stuff like this in the paper of record.

All gambling is probability-based, but not always the other way around. I think it is important to distinguish gambling as a hobby vs risk taking in a crowded market when running a company in the Valley. The article from what I can tell doesn’t really try to separate this, and that is certainly worth lamenting.

I agree. Sports betting and a founder’s decision to invest in an unproven market are both technically about probabilities, but the former is a form of entertainment with a likely negative expected value, whereas the latter is a business endeavor with a positive expected value where someone influence the outcome.

I have less issue with a founder's decision to invest in an unproven market than I do with a VC or PE fund choosing to dole out money to those founders because those investors are convinced that they can win big if they pick the right horse. You're gambling your time and livelihood that you succeed, sure; hopefully you have a solid business plan. But the people around you are gambling (probably with other people's money) that you make them fabulously wealthy.

I mean it’s true but it’s not newsworthy. Everything has been probability based for ever, just now it is so explicit and everyone talks pseudo stats like. Example p hacking, bayesian.

And let's be clear, these claims are nonsense.

DraftKings was founded in Boston and funded by Boston and other East Coast VCs.

Polymarket was founded in New York with funding from all over the world.

Crypto wasn't created in any particular place, and crypto companies are probably the least geographically concentrated kind of tech company there is.

Venture capital and modern business planning weren't invented in Silicon Valley, either.

Statistical models have been around for hundreds of years.

This is "not even wrong" territory.

This is the classic Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in action. Seems to happen pretty frequently when one read the New York Times

I was ready to say "NYT should be shut down but I must admit that the addiction-based mechanisms in tech are causing genuine problems in my life". But tbh sounds like they're just up to their usual luddite dumbassery.

Journalism, papers of record and professional opinion havers can't be replaced soon enough.

When the geniuses at NYT discover quantum mechanics also uses probability.

“Breaking: The logic of gambling undergirds our reality!!!”

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