alt Hacker NewsMaking people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though probably not). People might read incorrect information in the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close to equivalent.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.
People can go bankrupt from sports betting, from financial investing, they go bankrupt in lots of different ways through all sorts of bad decisions. If you want to outlaw recreational betting entirely, and restrict things like Polymarket and the stock market entirely to people like "accredited investors" who are supposedly responsible enough not to go bankrupt, then maybe argue for that, but not against Polymarket specifically. And then you're going to have to argue why that doesn't restrict people's freedom -- why should only richer people be allowed to trade on information? Doesn't that disadvantage the average citizen?
> What does that tell you about the future?
Are these supposed to be trick questions or something? They tell you exactly what they tell you. I already told you -- the stock price is a prediction of NPV of future profits. Did you see that in my last comment? Do you understand that? If that isn't a concrete, actionable and valuable prediction, I don't know what is.