Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.

> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.

They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.

Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.

It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.

I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.

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dbspin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets

I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?

Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.

	▲	0dte 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think a good toy example here could be a market on a coinflip. Let's say heads pays out $1 and tails pays out $0, and people can buy and sell contracts that resolve this way. Naively, people might think that this is a 50/50 outcome, so if anyone wanted to buy or sell this contract for some reason, they'd likely be able to find someone to trade with them around the price of 50 cents. Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy. So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price. From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate. Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made. Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money. Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.

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jt2190 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.

Isn’t that what’s actually happening though? Traders are making real money from bad predictions?

“These are the Sharps actually making money on prediction markets” Odd Lots podcast (Bloomberg) 2026 https://youtu.be/MFAnQpdgkZE

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lkey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Christ, just say you are conservative and don't like unions and their political stances. 'Accuracy' doesn't matter at all when it comes to assessing harm, but the existence of a market signal itself can change outcomes, and then much vaunted 'accuracy' becomes a mechanism for fraud in a new and different way.

Even taking your nitpick a little bit seriously, behold:

> Retail prediction market traders pick winners 51.3% of the time yet lose money; automated traders achieve coin-flip accuracy yet earn $133 million.

The entire enterprise exists to move money from gamblers to companies. The externalities (suicide, social degradation) of this transaction is bourne by society.

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Zigurd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.

	▲	woah 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again, this union doesn't seem to take a position on gambling at all in this statement

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tlogan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And that's the problem with current journalism. They use terms like "facts" and "proven" way too loosely. Everything is way too biased.

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beepbopboopp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Politics is the act of organizing people.

Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.

This point being mealy mouthed is by design.