Isn’t this the motivation behind polymarket? To incentivize those that have information to bet as a signal of “truth”. What I don’t get is why would anyone bet on this stuff that don’t have insider information besides those with gambling addiction.

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carefree-bob a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's not just a gambling addiction, but many people consider themselves smarter than the average person, and nature's way of punishing these people is creating things like stock markets and polymarkets.

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kylestanfield a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s a gambling site. The motivation behind it is to make money through transaction fees. You can bet on sports games too.

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peterjliu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some people have better data, like insiders.

Some have better models that predict with higher accuracy, given the same data.

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conformist a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announcements can be relevant and worth a premium for non-insiders. Where there’s a premium to be collected there are speculators to do so.

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doomslayer999 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because taking high variance slightly negative EV shots is not a terrible strategy when you have a long time horizon.

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tyre a day ago | parent | next [-]

this is the "lose money on every sale but make it up on scale" version for gamblers and I love that for you.

	▲	doomslayer999 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely not. It’s more like either winning a 1B B2B contract or going bankrupt. Like I said above you don’t want to scale up taking high variance shots because it will reduce variance and converge towards the mean

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c22 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like the longer your time horizon the worse -ev games are for you?

I bought one lottery ticket, I don't think my odds are gonna get any better than that.

	▲	doomslayer999 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be clear, I meant the opposite. I meant that if you take a high variance swing and you lose, you have capped downside, so you can rebuild and recover hard long term. Conversely if you win you have a huge head start and can deploy the capital quickly. Of course you DONT want to repeatedly take -EV bets. That would reduce variance and converge you to the mean which is negative by the central limit theorem.

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conformist a day ago | parent | prev [-]

By “not terrible” you mean “bad but not very bad” and not “good” right?

	▲	kibwen a day ago \| parent [-]
		"High variance, slightly-negative EV shots on a long time horizon" is a gambling addict's way of justifying the old adage, "sure, we're losing money on each sale, but we'll make up for it in volume!"

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throwaway-99482 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is for people like me. I'm usually right about things before other people even know about them. Bought BTC in 2011, ETH in 2014 (funded the IPO), Tesla in 2013, Microsoft right when they replaced Ballmer (at $30 I think), Nvidia on the Covid crash day in 2020, learned Rust in 2017, took AI seriously two weeks after ChatGPT 3.5 launched. I never had any insider information. I typically have a good feeling for things.

	▲	fatherwavelet an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are just such a genius. We all stand in awe. Thank you for letting me be in the presence of such towering intellect. Some might even say Dirac like but I so NO, this simply does not go far enough. I will remember this moment for the remainder of my life. Thank you.
	▲	wqaatwt 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> learned Rust in 2017 Seems more like a hobby activity than a decision that would lead to any practically meaningful outcome. Since as you said, you were already a billionaire in 2017 any money you could make by writing software yourself seems insignificant
	▲	ggggffggggg 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		But “making lots of bets” is a measure of your appetite for risk, not your acumen. So unless you are filthy rich (in which case, kudos!) I think you are more proving parent’s point.
	▲	nubg an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		He even created this channel 5 years ago just for this post. Teach, me bro.