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> There are no indications so far that the successful punters have had to return their winnings. However, the data source for Paris’s hottest temperature has si
by ambicapter 6mo ago
> There are no indications so far that the successful punters have had to return their winnings. However, the data source for Paris’s hottest temperature has since moved to a sensor at the smaller Paris-Le Bourget airport.
Here's the negative externality that no one will care about. There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
- AustinDev 6mo ago>There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so. The issue here is you'd need a lot more land because any asphalt near a temp sensor is going to give you bad data.
- naikrovek 6mo agoWhat do you think taxiways are made of? Or parking lots?
- malfist 6mo agoThats just not true. Generally you want to place a sensor 5 feet away from any structure. That's not a lot of land
- sixothree 6mo ago> The issue here is you'd need a lot more land because any asphalt near a temp sensor is going to give you bad data. Ah yes. The way to measure temperature in the city is to move the thermometers outside of the city. Makes perfect sense.
- hrimfaxi 6mo agoI mean, there are plenty of negative externalities that this type of gambling brings that are much worse, but at least in this case it does appear that authorities are investigating. At the very least I would expect some law to be broken if interfering with official weather data collection at an active airport.
- dlenski 6mo agoI agree, but the fact that authorities even have to spend time investigating is a massive negative externality. A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.
- olelele 6mo agoThis is the definitive argument for me against prediction markets. It creates incentives to do really dumb shit.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one. Can this really be said with a straight face? Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capture stuff who wants to make sure it goes the other way. How about tobacco companies? This has been a huge problem for as long as public data has been used to make decisions affecting profits.
- dlenski 6mo ago> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data? No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that. Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal. Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds. Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.
- echelon 6mo agoJust wait until they start killing people to win bets. It's going to happen. It'll happy by proxy too. When they figure 90% of Tesla's or SpaceX's valuation is tied to Elon, suddenly he becomes your mark.
- lostlogin 6mo agoNot sure that he has done wonders for Tesla sales over the last few years, and he collected enemies quicker than most.
- sixothree 6mo agoIt's fine. People quickly forget the "bad stuff".
- dlenski 6mo ago> Just wait until they start killing people to win bets. Quite likely it has already happened. There's been an enormous amount of betting on various military strikes by the Trump administration, much of which looks like insider trading. Almost certainly there have been insiders with money on the line who were financially motivated to launch lethal attacks, which they might have otherwise paused or delayed.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoWhy almost certainly? It's much more effective to make the decision first and the bet second.
- dlenski 6mo ago> It's much more effective to make the decision first and the bet second. What did I say that contradicts this? > Why almost certainly? Because I haven't seen any clear reporting with evidence documented down to the level of individual decision-making.
- 6mo ago
- behringer 6mo agoYou could just sue, but usually gambling is already illegal in most jurisdictions unless licensed in the location.
- dymk 6mo agoNot in the US anymore. Polymarket etc are all de-facto gambling (unless you're insider trading), and the US government isn't doing anything about it.
- ortusdux 6mo agoUsually the TOS of these betting markets prohibits tampering. IIRC, someone bet on a streaker at the super bowl, did the streaking themselves, made 6-figures on the bet, bragged about it publicly, and the market negated the bet and recovered the money.
- mschuster91 6mo ago> IRC, the TOS of these betting markets prohibits tampering. Good luck proving it. > IIRC, someone bet on a streaker at the super bowl, did the streaking themselves, made 6-figures on the bet, bragged about it publicly, and the market negated the bet and recovered the money. Yeah, exactly. Far easier to prove and to even get the idea to investigate that person in the first place.
- ortusdux 6mo agoThe markets make their own TOS and define the burden of proof needed to overturn a bet. They don't want tampering to risk their cash cow, so I'd imagine they are going to be proactive.
- IX-103 6mo agoThey don't want the appearance of tampering. They don't really care about tampering itself because they make their money either way. So as long as you are subtle about it they won't even investigate, as a public investigation would make it seem like tampering was common.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- michaelt 6mo agoI'll tell you another thing that will risk their cash cow - a reputation for not paying out when gamblers win big, because of vague and specious accusations of fraud (which the gambler denies)
- 6mo ago
- thaumasiotes 6mo ago> until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so. A fortified compound would affect the temperature reading.
- j-bos 6mo agoBut why are they only using one sensor?
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoProbably would make sense for polymarket, but otherwise you get things like “mothers on average have 1.9 babies”
- samrus 6mo agoBecause we used to be a high trust society where degenrate gamblers wouldnt mess with scientific equipment to rip each other off
- slackfan 6mo agoCounterpoint, why are we measuring temperature on what is basically a giant radiator?
- dymk 6mo agoBecause that wasn't what caused the problem? The reason it didn't work was some asshole intentionally tampered with the equipment, not because of where it was.
- slackfan 6mo ago[flagged]
- gorjusborg 6mo agoCounter-counterpoint, why are people wagering on an airport thermometer measurement?
- wcfields 6mo agoIt's a catch-22: I already gambled the coin I was going to use for the heads-or-tails bet.
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoThis is an existing problem with physical world sensing. Some data models are already heavily polluted by people manipulating observations for various purposes. Most people who rely on those measurements are just collateral damage. Prediction markets provide yet another incentive. It is far more difficult to reliably get at "ground truth" than I think people imagine. Unlike computing systems, the physical world is a shared mutable environment. It is effectively impossible to lock people out so that you can get a reliable, clean measurement even when people are not intentionally sabotaging the data model. There are ways to robustly clean this up analytically but it is largely beyond the capabilities of current tech stacks.
- pavl- 6mo ago"Some data models are already heavily polluted by people manipulating observations for various purposes" Example of this?
- dymk 6mo agoManipulation of datasets is something that already existed, yes. But what betting markets do is create more incentives to screw with the real world. You're right that this isn't a technical problem, it's a social one. This is why most sports leagues simply banned betting... until recently, now that gambling companies have bought their way in. The players always end up manipulating games.
- functionmouse 6mo agothat argument is insane
- AgentMatt 6mo ago> There are ways to robustly clean this up analytically but it is largely beyond the capabilities of current tech stacks. Can you expand on that? Even just conceptually that sounds really hard, how would you know whether you're measuring genuine (unexpected) changes in the environment rather than the result of (possibly sophisticated and coordinated) deliberate manipulation?
- 6mo ago
- thegrim33 6mo agoSo the "negative" externality is that the data you value has been forced to now be higher quality/reliable? From your perspective, isn't the result a positive?
- bayindirh 6mo agoHow can you know the data is higher quality? In my city, the airport has wildly different weather than the city center, and the data I get has no relation to what I experience, for example.
- uoaei 6mo agoOnly if you refuse to acknowledge the deleterious effects on society from ruining any notion of trust. Being held hostage by bad actors until you fortify your defenses seems to be a very unnecessary technical solution to an easily predicted social one. Normalizing this only means the subterfuge becomes more subtle, not that you remove it entirely. But you preserve the incentives by not changing this system. So you're spending a lot of resources wastefully when you could just... not.
- petcat 6mo agoI'm guessing the point was that the data was already high quality and reliable until these legalized prediction markets introduced perverse incentives to manipulate it.
- Ethee 6mo agoNo the negative externality here is that we've derived a value directly to this data, thereby negatively incentivizing this poor behavior. To further elucidate, it effectively introduces a cat-and-mouse game for the people who actually care about the data itself, they now have to worry about nonsensical third party behavior.
- tedd4u 6mo agoRe externalities, don't they use the temperature to calculate the length of the takeoff roll and other stuff about the flight, fuel load, etc? Maybe they use the plane's own temperature sensors for that though.
- raverbashing 6mo agoThe airport needs to know that by themselves as well because it's part of METAR Now imagine we're can't have this basic resource anymore because some nerd fuckr needs to win a bet on the internet Makes me want to bet on creative uses of a baseball bat
- amelius 6mo agoYes we've got to stop this. Meanwhile dictators are laughing at us while our totally free "thus, awesome" society kills itself.
- nickthegreek 6mo agoI got an ecowitt on a pole in my backyard. I should be safe for awhile.
- leric 5mo ago[dead]