They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.

Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?"

But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.

Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.

Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)

Absolutely horrifying.

Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb.

Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb.

This needs to be banned.

Moral degradation? Buddy think about how much money can be made here. Eye on the ball. Try to think about what's truly important in life: making money by _monetizing every difference of opinion_.

https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...

You will no doubt find some rational sounding arguments in favor of prediction markets here. Lots of useless and harmful things are fascinating. The math behind cryptocurrency, and things like the difference between proof of work and proof of stake are fascinating. But that doesn't make cryptocurrencies good. The genetics of tulip bulbs must be fascinating too.

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.

It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).

By far?!

There's a very long list.

I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos

But wait, there is more: Assassination market

bet that someone will die by certain date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

Cool it with the moral outrage. Even if I did believe that prediction markets are bad, "easily the worst things to grace the internet by far" is such a ridiculous hyperbole that it strains any belief.

I ⤻ predict ⤺ that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction.

- More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction.

- Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.

Sports betting seems worse? Easily lumped in to the same category, though.

Prediction Markets is such an invented phrase.

Its a sports book.

A sports book of alternatives.

It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point

So, a fun historical fact is that insurance markets started with people in coffee houses betting on whether or not ships would sink for fun. Eventually ship owners realized that if they bet on their own ship sinking, that it reduced the financial risk of travel, then betters realized that ship owners were doing that and decided to research before taking the other side of the bet, and so on until you end up with ship insurance.

In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business in that place.

There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance through regulation and business evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774

I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets, per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to and including murder.

Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet.

In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.

Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.

Someone on HN suggested that prediction markets would be interesting if only politicians were allowed to participate. For example, politician says that this bill will make the economy better (insert tangible metric here). Well Mr politician, put your money where your mouth is. If you indeed believe this is best for your constituents, bet on it, and if you're right, you'll reap the benefits of your legislation. If not, you're either incompetent or a liar; in either case, your people deserve to know.

Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.

Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure

I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.

> moral degradation is off the charts

Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.

I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've known about it.

It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.

I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.

We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming. They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you can gamble on.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the bigger picture and start connecting the dots.

"Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse.

Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation.

Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care.

Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP.

Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.

A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.

And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does.

Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true.

So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves.

But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.

Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days

Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?

Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter.

So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.

It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.