Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.

I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq

Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.

And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.

Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.

The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.

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harpersealtako 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.

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lovich 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An idealized prediction market could be a social good the same way a frictionless spherical cow is good for making my physics homework easier.

There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous

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meowface 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the thing is insider trading genuinely is exactly part of how prediction markets contribute something that was not offered before: a more accurate way for the public to gauge the probability of future outcomes. I, as a rationalist, think there is a lot of good that results from that.

It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).

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lovich 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yea, like I said. We all understood this as a bad thing and why. Then the rationalists came around and reasoned their way into how vice is a virtue.

	▲	elktown 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Seriously, the so called rationalists seem to be working very hard to be as weird as possible. Some sort of pathological contrarianism.

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intended an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How does that even work?

An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.

In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.

The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Prediction market is undistinguishable from unregulated gambling in literally all its aspects.