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I know many people strongly believe in rational market theories. For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site: it is the mechanism by wh

I know many people strongly believe in rational market theories. For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site: it is the mechanism by which they engage in understanding politics and their primary means of political discourse. Beyond that, it is also an incentive for their own political engagement. They have several mathematical models that are strongly suggestive that they are right to have this belief. From that framing the government should have no authority whatsoever to take action against PredictIt: doing so is a gross violation of natural rights. To me this seems like an error comparable to restricting freedom of religion, detaining someone so as to prevent them from voting, or the burning of an intellectuals book and the jailing of them so as to prevent the spread of their ideas. It seems an abomination. What is the justification? Just that there was gambling or is there a deeper fundamental problem that I am missing? Gambling to me seems more fundamental to reality than breathing. Everyone engages in it all the time, but we just don't call it that when we think it might be a gambling category which is of benefit to society. If there is no justification - what paths can be pursued to permanently sunder the governments ability to take this sort of action in the future? I say all this with no sense of judgement for the CFTC; clearly this is within their mandate under reasonable interpretations. Rather, I think other mandates - more important ones - supersede theirs and should be restricting their authority.

bequanna 4y ago
The government has no problem with gambling or lotteries. They only have a problem when their percentage of the action isn’t big enough. An alternative theory is that this market was providing information that the current regime is looking to suppress: actual popularity of candidates, policies, etc. Any speech that violates the official narrative is deemed wrongthink and seems to be fair game for law enforcement/regulators.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  > An alternative theory is that this market was providing information that the current regime is looking to suppress: actual popularity of candidates, policies, etc. I don't mean to suggest that this is the intent. I'm saying it seems to me that something worse than that is the fundamental consequence of the decision. Banning the mathematically rational discussion of politics is actually a bit more extreme than say murdering and burning the books of intellectuals; in terms of attacking truth it does so on a more fundamental level, it is like banning the use of addition as a method of counting - an attack on the very process by which things are known, not just a person. You aren't just murdering one person - this kills an entire category of rational agent; it isn't a ban on knowing a particular fact that is inconvenient. It disallows the seeking in a much more general way. To try and maybe get across the nature of the violation: this seems to me about as bad as the government declaring that the scientific method was no longer allowed to be used or that people were no longer allowed to have faith. For sure methods of arriving at the truth can be very dangerous, but I don't think it follows from that that the government ought to be allowed to prevent their use for that purpose. So I'm wondering what I'm missing - or whether there is actually an overstep of authority that ought to be reigned in.
- trebbble 4y ago
  > Any speech that violates the official narrative is deemed wrongthink and seems to be fair game for law enforcement/regulators. I see enough "democrats in disarray" or shitting on the Biden admin (maybe both justifiably! That's irrelevant for this post) from allegedly left-leaning outlets that this seems incredibly unlikely to be true. If it is, they're entirely failing at it. Or have for some reason decided to focus only on minor players while major players, with 100+x the audience (ask around in the real world and see how many people have even heard of PredictIt), carry on as usual.
motohagiography 4y ago
While I am a fan of prediction markets, I understood the main argument against them is that they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes. I wanted to create markets for things like individual airline flight delay insurance, and a futures market for airline tickets, but all of these are regulated as futures with the same barriers to entry that protect stock exchanges, and there are some rules in insurance about not being able to take out insurance on someone elses' property for related reasons. It's a moral hazard. Betting on politics appears to be framed in similar terms, but the counter arguments would be interesting as well. I gave up on prediction markets years ago, but if there were a darkweb prediction market for smart contract cryptocurrencies, that would be the most subversively interesting thing to become real in a while.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  > darkweb prediction market Dammit, I had forgotten about the whole "hire a hitman while pretending to just make predictions" thing. It probably isn't just a spooky theory anymore :/
- theptip 4y ago
  > I understood the main argument against them is that they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes. Is that the line of reasoning CFTC is using though? > if there were a darkweb prediction market I think this is Polymarket / Gnosis right? Or are you looking for something more obfuscated?
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  "they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes" So does the very existence of the media, which will amplify any sufficiently gross act of violence to the global auditorium that would otherwise never hear of it, rewarding the culprit with their 15 minutes of fame and possibly inspiring others to do the same. That isn't a reason to censor journalists, though.
- saurik 4y ago
  > if there were a darkweb prediction market for smart contract cryptocurrencies Assuming you mean "using" instead of "for", isn't this Augur? (That said, I haven't used Augur personally; maybe it sucks.) Building prediction markets is one of the more common and older projects for crypto.
swatcoder 4y ago
You spent a lot of time writing that post and raising questions, but all of the answers are within two clicks of the article. PredictIt linked to CFTC and CFTC explains their original act and their justification for the withdrawal in extensive detail in documents linked from there. If you’re actually curious and not just trading outrage for upvotes (I assume not), I’d love to see how your impression evolves in light of the actual facts available to you.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  I did read that, but it doesn't address my questions. Actually, it doesn't even begin to answer them. On one level - you don't even seem to have recognized what I was asking about. I wasn't asking about the justification for this particular decision: you'll note I explicitly mention that this is in the mandate for the organization. So any reading that thinks I'm talking about that is actually just a misreading of my point. I'm asking if it even make sense to allow the government to prevent discussion of political issues using a mechanism which has some basis in being mathematically rational? It really doesn't seem obvious to me that the government ought to have the power to do so. I'm not asking for the justification for this decision. I'm asking if there is a justification for political oppression of the mathematically minded more generally. That said - even under the framing that the letter answers the misunderstanding of what I was asking about - I still don't find it to have done so. The letter is vague with respect to which particular issue they were breaking; it listed the things not which of the things they contested were not the case. The extent to which it is vague is such that even on the linked page PredictIt contends it still has not broken the commitments. This isn't the extremely specified justification you seem to think it is - at least not to someone who isn't extensively familiar with PredictIt; and apparently given PredictIt didn't acknowledge that it felt it was out of line - it isn't even something that someone with extensive familiarity can easily spot.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Even in the linked PDF (https://www.cftc.gov/csl/22-08/download https://www.cftc.gov/csl/22-08/download) I could only find a claim that "The University has not operated its market in compliance with the terms of Letter 14-130" without specifics. Did you find more anywhere?
vkou 4y ago
The reason we have freedom of religion is because when we don't, we get things like holy wars, massacres, and genocides. It's not because it's some kind of privileged form of understanding the universe. You need to do a lot more work to have your hobby horse hitched to the protections and privileges it receives.
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
"For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site" just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal "i'm not burgling, this is how i engage in understanding economics and the primary means of discourse, and the government should have no authority to take action against me"
- Kamq 4y ago
  > just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The comment you're replying to is an argument that it should be legal. It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    > It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument. It's like when vegans try to stop you in the grocery store for eating meat, which they say is murder. It's actually not murder. That's just an emotional value they choose to assign, and I'm not going to jail for my hamburger. They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The comment made claims that something that's illegal should be legal because some people using it understand things through it. That doesn't really make sense to me. Pick any gross crime, then claim the criminal is using that crime to understand things. It's pretty easy to do this through burglary stories about assembling evidence, or vigilantism stories. Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. The law also doesn't. Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" It's actually not very hard to answer that, and the rest falls neatly into place from there.
    - Kamq 4y ago
      > They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things. Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law. But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing. > Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.
evrydayhustling 4y ago
You could make the same argument about any market. And there is a self-consistent libertarian position that no voluntary economic transactions at all should be limited for this reason. But if you accept any form of regulation, the same arguments apply for regulating any market: historically, many markets have been set up with unfair rules that cheat participants because there is a information imbalance between organizers and participants. The CFTC proactively sets standards of fair play and disclosure to address that gap. Their letter suggests that they were specifically withdrawing the right of predictt to operate without registration. It seems like the discussion can be advanced by registering.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  Thanks. This answer helped me get more clarity.
hackernewds 4y ago
Gambling is illegal for the same reasons drugs are illegal - the exploitative and addictive nature of it. Unfortunately the populace needs to be protected from itself. One need only look at the gambling addicts in New Orleans to see how unhinged other cities could get.
- kodah 4y ago
  Vegas and Reno are whole ass cities and they seem just fine. What's your beef with New Orleans?

bequanna 4y ago

The government has no problem with gambling or lotteries. They only have a problem when their percentage of the action isn’t big enough. An alternative theory is that this market was providing information that the current regime is looking to suppress: actual popularity of candidates, policies, etc. Any speech that violates the official narrative is deemed wrongthink and seems to be fair game for law enforcement/regulators.

JoshCole 4y ago
> An alternative theory is that this market was providing information that the current regime is looking to suppress: actual popularity of candidates, policies, etc. I don't mean to suggest that this is the intent. I'm saying it seems to me that something worse than that is the fundamental consequence of the decision. Banning the mathematically rational discussion of politics is actually a bit more extreme than say murdering and burning the books of intellectuals; in terms of attacking truth it does so on a more fundamental level, it is like banning the use of addition as a method of counting - an attack on the very process by which things are known, not just a person. You aren't just murdering one person - this kills an entire category of rational agent; it isn't a ban on knowing a particular fact that is inconvenient. It disallows the seeking in a much more general way. To try and maybe get across the nature of the violation: this seems to me about as bad as the government declaring that the scientific method was no longer allowed to be used or that people were no longer allowed to have faith. For sure methods of arriving at the truth can be very dangerous, but I don't think it follows from that that the government ought to be allowed to prevent their use for that purpose. So I'm wondering what I'm missing - or whether there is actually an overstep of authority that ought to be reigned in.
trebbble 4y ago
> Any speech that violates the official narrative is deemed wrongthink and seems to be fair game for law enforcement/regulators. I see enough "democrats in disarray" or shitting on the Biden admin (maybe both justifiably! That's irrelevant for this post) from allegedly left-leaning outlets that this seems incredibly unlikely to be true. If it is, they're entirely failing at it. Or have for some reason decided to focus only on minor players while major players, with 100+x the audience (ask around in the real world and see how many people have even heard of PredictIt), carry on as usual.

motohagiography 4y ago

While I am a fan of prediction markets, I understood the main argument against them is that they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes. I wanted to create markets for things like individual airline flight delay insurance, and a futures market for airline tickets, but all of these are regulated as futures with the same barriers to entry that protect stock exchanges, and there are some rules in insurance about not being able to take out insurance on someone elses' property for related reasons. It's a moral hazard. Betting on politics appears to be framed in similar terms, but the counter arguments would be interesting as well. I gave up on prediction markets years ago, but if there were a darkweb prediction market for smart contract cryptocurrencies, that would be the most subversively interesting thing to become real in a while.

jjoonathan 4y ago
> darkweb prediction market Dammit, I had forgotten about the whole "hire a hitman while pretending to just make predictions" thing. It probably isn't just a spooky theory anymore :/
theptip 4y ago
> I understood the main argument against them is that they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes. Is that the line of reasoning CFTC is using though? > if there were a darkweb prediction market I think this is Polymarket / Gnosis right? Or are you looking for something more obfuscated?
inglor_cz 4y ago
"they create perverse incentives for people to engage in extreme acts to profit from the outcomes" So does the very existence of the media, which will amplify any sufficiently gross act of violence to the global auditorium that would otherwise never hear of it, rewarding the culprit with their 15 minutes of fame and possibly inspiring others to do the same. That isn't a reason to censor journalists, though.
saurik 4y ago
> if there were a darkweb prediction market for smart contract cryptocurrencies Assuming you mean "using" instead of "for", isn't this Augur? (That said, I haven't used Augur personally; maybe it sucks.) Building prediction markets is one of the more common and older projects for crypto.

swatcoder 4y ago

You spent a lot of time writing that post and raising questions, but all of the answers are within two clicks of the article. PredictIt linked to CFTC and CFTC explains their original act and their justification for the withdrawal in extensive detail in documents linked from there. If you’re actually curious and not just trading outrage for upvotes (I assume not), I’d love to see how your impression evolves in light of the actual facts available to you.

JoshCole 4y ago
I did read that, but it doesn't address my questions. Actually, it doesn't even begin to answer them. On one level - you don't even seem to have recognized what I was asking about. I wasn't asking about the justification for this particular decision: you'll note I explicitly mention that this is in the mandate for the organization. So any reading that thinks I'm talking about that is actually just a misreading of my point. I'm asking if it even make sense to allow the government to prevent discussion of political issues using a mechanism which has some basis in being mathematically rational? It really doesn't seem obvious to me that the government ought to have the power to do so. I'm not asking for the justification for this decision. I'm asking if there is a justification for political oppression of the mathematically minded more generally. That said - even under the framing that the letter answers the misunderstanding of what I was asking about - I still don't find it to have done so. The letter is vague with respect to which particular issue they were breaking; it listed the things not which of the things they contested were not the case. The extent to which it is vague is such that even on the linked page PredictIt contends it still has not broken the commitments. This isn't the extremely specified justification you seem to think it is - at least not to someone who isn't extensively familiar with PredictIt; and apparently given PredictIt didn't acknowledge that it felt it was out of line - it isn't even something that someone with extensive familiarity can easily spot.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
Even in the linked PDF (https://www.cftc.gov/csl/22-08/download https://www.cftc.gov/csl/22-08/download) I could only find a claim that "The University has not operated its market in compliance with the terms of Letter 14-130" without specifics. Did you find more anywhere?

vkou 4y ago

The reason we have freedom of religion is because when we don't, we get things like holy wars, massacres, and genocides. It's not because it's some kind of privileged form of understanding the universe. You need to do a lot more work to have your hobby horse hitched to the protections and privileges it receives.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

"For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site" just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal "i'm not burgling, this is how i engage in understanding economics and the primary means of discourse, and the government should have no authority to take action against me"

Kamq 4y ago
> just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The comment you're replying to is an argument that it should be legal. It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument. It's like when vegans try to stop you in the grocery store for eating meat, which they say is murder. It's actually not murder. That's just an emotional value they choose to assign, and I'm not going to jail for my hamburger. They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The comment made claims that something that's illegal should be legal because some people using it understand things through it. That doesn't really make sense to me. Pick any gross crime, then claim the criminal is using that crime to understand things. It's pretty easy to do this through burglary stories about assembling evidence, or vigilantism stories. Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. The law also doesn't. Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" It's actually not very hard to answer that, and the rest falls neatly into place from there.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    > They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things. Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law. But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing. > Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.

evrydayhustling 4y ago

You could make the same argument about any market. And there is a self-consistent libertarian position that no voluntary economic transactions at all should be limited for this reason. But if you accept any form of regulation, the same arguments apply for regulating any market: historically, many markets have been set up with unfair rules that cheat participants because there is a information imbalance between organizers and participants. The CFTC proactively sets standards of fair play and disclosure to address that gap. Their letter suggests that they were specifically withdrawing the right of predictt to operate without registration. It seems like the discussion can be advanced by registering.

JoshCole 4y ago
Thanks. This answer helped me get more clarity.

hackernewds 4y ago

Gambling is illegal for the same reasons drugs are illegal - the exploitative and addictive nature of it. Unfortunately the populace needs to be protected from itself. One need only look at the gambling addicts in New Orleans to see how unhinged other cities could get.

kodah 4y ago
Vegas and Reno are whole ass cities and they seem just fine. What's your beef with New Orleans?