8 ms·
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gamblin
by worldsayshi 7mo ago
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
- Spacecosmonaut 7mo agoThere is genuine value in a wisdom of the crowds assessment of future events that is only sharpened up by the requirement to put money on the line.
- nsvd2 7mo agoI think you're right broadly, but when that wisdom is applied to e.g. how many dildos will be thrown at WNBA players, I don't know how much actual value is created.
- amfarrell617 7mo agoThat… that actually seems like something which society should want to predict with more precision so that we can hire someone with a net on a stick.
- dgabriel 7mo agoIt's also a real world event that can be influenced by the existence of the bet.
- automatic6131 7mo agoThere is definitely value in that, but that value is outweighed - dominated, even - by the incentive produced to fix outcomes, incentivized by that money put on the line.
- Breza 7mo agoHow dare you impugn the mystical powers of the wisdom of the crowd. Why would anybody fix outcomes? Wait a minute, you can bet on pro wrestling? OK I'm out of ideas. https://www.betus.com.pa/sportsbook/entertainment/wwe/ https://www.betus.com.pa/sportsbook/entertainment/wwe/
- jappgar 7mo agoIt would be useful to predict things like earthquakes and tornados. Gambling on what politicians and celebrities will do is not science it's degenerate court gossip.
- super256 7mo agoGame theory can be applied to these problem, and if you can correctly model reward, cost and motives, you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not.
- meta_gunslinger 7mo ago> you can predict decisions of politicians more often than not What makes you believe this? The performance of economist/sociology experts using game theory to make predictions has been worse than a coin-flip up to this point. It also has done enormous damage.
- taeric 7mo agoEven granting the idea that game theory can be applied successfully here; that does not really help with one-off events. Consider, knowing the odds of a coin flip does not grant you any real help in knowing what the next coin flip will be. This is also ignoring that game theory of partisan games breaks if any of the participants knows what the other will do. Is one of the more famous ideas. To that end, if you want to predict what someone will do, more often than not you are best looking at their experience doing said thing.
- Breza 7mo agoI don't think Nash envisioned politicians and their aides being able to profit from making decisions. Do you launch an attack on Eastasia? Well the market right now says there's a 40% chance, so I guess it's a good idea to grab your crypto keys and make some bets before you call the Joint Chiefs.
- Spooky23 7mo agoMy understanding of the world is enhanced immensely because suckers can bet on how many times the president will reference the lips of his press secretary in a speech.
- michaelbuckbee 7mo agoGenuinely asking: has there been a case of the prediction markets being "right" or valuable about something outside of the norm?
- TFYS 7mo agoThere's value in that only if assessments made by people using the prediction for something aren't better than crowd wisdom. I would guess that a large part of prediction market participants are simple gamblers whose assessment is worse than the prediction of someone doing it because they need the information for something. So if people who need predictions for decision-making start relying on prediction markets with a lot of low value gambler predictions and opinion manipulators (wealthy participants can use the platform to mislead people as well) the value of these things might be negative.
- jkubicek 7mo agoOr if decision makers start using the gambling markets to drive their decisions, the value of these things will go extremely negative. The headline bet in Polymarket right now is on when US troops will invade Iran. If some unscrupulous official can pull some strings to get boots in the ground in the next few days, they stand to win a significant amount of money.
- malfist 7mo agoThat's why the metaverse happened. Lots of money bet on it's success
- doginasuit 7mo agoThe often-repeated "wisdom of the crowds" justification is misapplied to online betting markets. Like people, crowds can either be wise or unwise depending on the situation. Famous experiments like guessing how many gumballs are in a jar work because each person who can see the jar has a source of valid information, and in aggregate that can be surprisingly accurate. You can't assume that the majority of individuals participating in betting markets have a source of valid information. Given the destructiveness of these markets to both individuals and society, the aggregate wisdom of the individuals participating in these markets is highly doubtful. Any meager value above more traditional forecasting does not justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions.
- kqr 7mo agoNobody says this on assumption. It's well-evidenced. https://polymarket.com/accuracy https://polymarket.com/accuracy https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoPlease show the dollar/realized benefit to society VS (in response to OPs statement) the results don't "justify the cost, corruption and a loss of trust in institutions" along with a breakdown of the cost/negatives to society that result from those factors. This isn't big oil (yet) you can't just externalize all the downside and say the product is a net benefit.
- Terr_ 7mo agoPish tosh, my dear sir, it's simply common-sense that there are oodles of people out there with secrets that would be completely ethical to distribute and would undeniably better all humankind, but they're sitting on them purely because they haven't figured out how to make a profit from it. /s In other words, the overlap between these is too small to justify the idea that prediction markets are a net-benefit by default: 1. Is valuable 2. Not already known 3. No current reward mechanism exists (e.g. patents) 4. Not criminal or unethical to disclose
- jon-wood 7mo agoWisdom such as the mass purchase of GameStop shares, temporarily inflating the value of an ultimately doomed company?
- well_ackshually 7mo agoThere's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others * The insider trading ones that will never lose money * The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money * People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc. When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
- vovavili 7mo ago[flagged]
- doctaj 7mo agoNote that #1 will get kicked off the platform immediately. Even non-inside traders who win significantly more than expected will be kicked off. If you’re on the platform, you’re losing.
- vovavili 7mo agoAt the moment being, Polymarket has an enormous reputational incentive against behaving like a predatory gambling company. People rely on it as a kind of decentralized alternative to New York Times. Distorting this effect would be very short-sighted.
- HelloMcFly 7mo agoI believe they are incentivized to discourage insider bets and essentially "rigged" wins. I do not think they will ever be able to control the problem of insiders leveraging guaranteed knowledge to take money for the poor suckers who don't know the game they are playing. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but at this point I don't see how anything but a pessimistic view is warranted.
- vovavili 7mo agoWith proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agov. edgelordy
- worldsayshi 7mo agoIt also creates a lot incentives for creating unpredictable chaos as an insider.
- vovavili 7mo agoI explicitly accounted for this incentive with my first three words.
- worldsayshi 7mo agoI'm curious what positive externalities you're thinking about? Being able to make plans for the future?
- spacebanana7 7mo agoIt can be useful for insurance/hedging purposes. For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price. Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.
- kiliantics 7mo agoThere are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.
- spacebanana7 7mo agoExtreme events are always poorly priced in markets. For example, there's no point in making a trade for the S&P 500 falling by 90% because if it does we'll be in such a catastrophe that money doesn't matter any more. Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.
- DeathArrow 7mo ago>Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system. But a powerful earthquake can't affect the wider system in a country? and yet, people do buy insurances for earthquakes.
- spacebanana7 7mo agoPerhaps I should’ve said financial system plus some system that allows you to spend money on things you’d like.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoBuy a movie ticket and that money is gone. Throw $20 on a parlay for the weekend sportsball and thats actually interesting, something off script might happen. And that money might not actually be gone.
- epolanski 7mo agoAlso, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives. You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen. We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression. Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen. And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
- bit-anarchist 7mo agoAnd the naysayers would be right. They come from two approaches: - Property rights: bettors are waging using their own property at their own direct risk. To prohitbit such a thing is to violate their property rights, plain and simple; - Information aggregation: prediction markets originally appeared to help make informed decisions about an event by proof-of-stake. If I'm not mistaken, this idea was originally developed by NSA/CIA/FBI for this purpose. You mentioned misincentives like hold information (which isn't actually related to prediction markets, but more so to NDAs and similar) and "making stuff happen". The latter is functionally the same as policemen/judges/prosecutors/prisons having an incentive to create more criminals. Really, most goals people have may be achieved via criminal means. We don't outlaw free will because people have an incentive to achieve their goals via criminal means, we increase punishments (increasing potential loses), improve tracking/prevention (reducing success chances), etc.
- epolanski 7mo agoNo, they would be wrong. Have them have a prediction market on whether their house will be arsoned tomorrow or they will be hit by a car and instantly they will recognize the danger of the incentives and the bs of "information hedging based on price discovery". Cause way worse events allow betting and profiting. Give me a break, we're at the complete decadence of society and its intellect. Nobody can recognize right or wrong anymore let alone understand why insider trading, betting, etc, has been outlawed and prosecuted forever. We live in the vilest era I remember since I was born, this is beyond disgusting.