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This is a problem, a net negative and a sign of a weakening society. But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news.
by Buttons840 9mo ago
This is a problem, a net negative and a sign of a weakening society.
But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
It seems hard to be a climate change denier when you're about to gamble on it.
Or maybe people will find a way to gamble while still living in completely different reality bubbles. Probably.
If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000 on the line...
- sowbug 9mo agoBut, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe? Only in a truth-agnostic sense. Good gamblers in player-banked games (poker; rock, scissors, paper) vs house-banked games (slots) are good at figuring out what the other guy is representing. The actual truth is much less significant.
- mminer237 9mo agoWell, assuming they're paid out truthfully, it does incentivize learning the actual truth. Unless you're saying that the oracles are falling for fake news? Or you're saying people are intentionally buying the wrong option, getting other people to believe it, and then selling before it becomes worthless? That seems harder than just buying the right option unless you already have a ton of influence to burn.
- sowbug 9mo agoCloser to the second than the first, but traders probably have less agency than the way you're putting it. They benefit from misdirection, but they don't need to be the ones doing the misdirection. Their special skill is recognizing the effect of misdirection (or simply how events unfold) sooner and more accurately than others.
- andrepd 9mo ago> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe? 5 minutes browsing polymarket comments will dispel that notion really fast.
- pyrolistical 9mo agoBut at least you can make them poorer
- daveguy 9mo agoOr just ignore all that garbage.
- paulddraper 9mo agoThe comments are not the bets. In fact, they are often opposite.
- tpm 9mo ago> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe? Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in physical branches and on the website, along with completely transparent information that it is all random, source of randomness was even some government audited hardware. The customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of random numbers would be generated and based on that a new 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4 in hour or something like that. And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical locations) were often debating the form of the individual 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes, really.
- reillyse 9mo agopigeon dancing (ala Skinner). Humans love to ascribe meaning to things, we have a real problem with randomness.
- ManuelKiessling 9mo agoAm I overlooking something, or would that mean it’s super easy for a rational participant to make money?
- gpm 9mo agoPresumably it's a negative expected value game - the company running it has to make money after all... so likely not.
- pyrolistical 9mo agoPrediction markets don’t need a bookie. Each bet has another real person taking the other side. It’s more like the stock market brokerages. They just take a fee on each trade and don’t need to give you a spread over the stock price
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000 on the line... I've seen the comment that prediction markets can be viewed as a tool for making conflicts more intractable.
- mcintyre1994 9mo agoI suspect that in practice, because a lot of online gamblers spend a lot of time specifically on X, they’re more susceptible than average to fake news.
- tempaccsoz5 9mo agoSource for this stat?
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- otikik 9mo ago> gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe? Crypto bros. Remember when all of them were saying that NFTs were the future?
- foxglacier 9mo agoAlso hard to be a climate change doomer when you're gambling on it. Don't forget popular opinions can be extreme and wrong too. Prediction markets sound like a way to cut through the social media hysteria, although we already have insurance companies with money on the line about that and perhaps they're doing a good enough job of predicting the effects of climate change.
- Buttons840 9mo agoGood points. I also realized climate change is too slow for prediction markets. Nobody wants to bet on the average temperature in 2036.