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 2 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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intended 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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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lovich an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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