My attention span is greatly reduced for example. I have a much harder time reading physical books than I did as a kid. It should be the opposite as you age
Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? Now me, as someone who doesn’t have access to insider knowledge, can know that there’s a noticeably increased chance of what’s going to happen. I do think maybe there should be some sort of feature to prevent last minute bets that utilizes insider knowledge, and I do admit there are considerable negative externalities to this system but it’s not clear to me that this is for sure bad.
The same logic can be used the opposite way, you can, with large amounts of money, manipulate events or people's responses to them.
* you can place large bets on events you have influence on the outcome for and make large amounts of money
* you can place large bets on events and then threaten people who have influence with a big stick
* you can place large bets expecting to lose money in order to change the outcome or a related outcome expecting people to look at the odds and change their behavior
And probably lots of other ways.
It corrupts events and on a world stage with unethical government in vogue... it's not impossible for people to manipulate a war in order to make bets go their way.
There was recently a story about a reporter who faced threats because their reporting contained a detail that while not significantly impactful (although about a literal impact) in it's own right changed the win conditions on a prediction bet.
I think prediction markets worked as an idea to provide a wisdom of the crowd view when they were being used in good faith, but rewards cause people to prioritise winning and gaming the system pays better than playing fairly.
There is no unfairly or fairly playing a prediction market. That's kind of the point. They don't work if you try to regulate them like they are a stock market or sports betting market. If you place money on one as a layman, you should consider yourself the dumb money. Lots of folks have convinced themselves they "know better" though, so it's a very easy psychological sell.
You either allow a free for all, or they should be simply outright banned. I mean, they should probably be banned either way - but without the prediction part this is not a single redeeming factor for them to exist.
The consequences for someone betting on classified information would need to come from the agency/government/etc. that finds out their staff is engaging in betting on privileged information. The market itself is simply taking bets and doing what it's designed to do. The bettor gets to decide if the risk is worth it.
This was one of the theoretical points of betting markets.
But there are two large concrete betting markets now. And they advertise not as a "world state discovery system" but as a gambling platform for people to try their luck on. They are also large businesses that are making their owners rich. Falling back on "oh we are just interested in the intellectual exercise of information discovery" is not tenable at this point.
Can we at least debate the obvious externality that an insider might skew their advice or actions to personally profit instead of doing whatever they think is most appropriate for their job?
Yeah I agree that there are big negative externalities and this is one. I’m more talking about is someone with insider knowledge but not the ability to influence - is that a bad thing specifically for these type of markets?
Eh what? It’s literally the only reason for prediction markets to exist. Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
The only way you get more wisdom from “the crowd” is if it teases folks who hold non-public (or at least less public) information into the market to refine the odds towards what they should be.
Without insider information the entire concept is dead on arrival.
Yes randos are gonna gamble because they either don’t understand the game they are playing or are simple degenerate gamblers who want something else to gamble on. Others are going to think they know better or have limited insider information that isn’t worth as much as they think, or is not as accurate as they believe. And the delusional who simply think they know better for no logical reason but have convinced themselves otherwise.
It seems like two different definitions of 'point' are getting mixed. Yes, for many participants it feels like gambling. But structurally, prediction markets are closer to price discovery systems -like financial markets - where the side effect (or goal, depending on your view) is better forecasts, not just entertainment
> Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
People find gambling fun. Owners of gambling services make a lot of money. The prediction markets both run ads that present themselves as gambling products.
Both of these things are points that can sustain large businesses.
That would go under someone who thinks they have more information than they think they do. Perhaps you are great at mathematics and think you can estimate much better than the average bidder. The person who filled the jar is going to have even better information than you do. Or perhaps not. Maybe they miscounted or their manager added a handful before they screwed the top of the jar on.
If the market that is taking the bet also filled the jar, then sure it’s just outright fraud at that point. But the market exists to get the real information into the open. Betting that an insider just isn’t going to play is a variable you consider when placing your bet imo.
A "market" is hypothesized to be "efficient" at price discovery.
An efficient "prediction market" would more quickly resolve to its expected outcome due to not only skin-in-the-game bets by experts, but also the influence of insiders.
Furthermore, bets are likely to shape outcomes. Betting someone will be assassinated (not allowed on Polymarket) would likely increase the probability of that outcome had there been no bet at all.
I’ve heard this assassination thing said, but I don’t see it. Someone still has to kill said person and somehow profit from the unlikelihood of this outcome. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m just saying that it’s never happened and maybe never will.
There is no assassination market to test it against.
If there was, I think you'd see quite a few public figures on the list.
And I think it _would_ cause folks to die. Which is why it's banned or regulated. (I'm actually not sure what the legal status is, just that Polymarket and US prediction markets disallow it.)
Polymarket is not fully in the US and its betting on oil prices is not a CTFC-allowed market. This is after all a bet on a commodity, which is already regulated and already a product available on ICE. Technically Polymarket doesn't need to care about the assassination market rule (which is a CFTC rule for prediction markets), but I presume they adhere to it out of respect for the reasoning behind the rule.
Openly corrupt markets that feature insiders with secret knowledge taking money from gambling addicts and rubes is actually good cause the crowd is now wiser.
Unironically yes. Someone bet a mid sized amount and now we all share in that potential insider knowledge. A small scale example is my spouse said that the election odds from her home country were not realistic because all the westerners were betting a candidate would win but weren’t accounting for corruption that she felt was guaranteed to happen. Turns out she was right.
Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before.
Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping you get too big before the regulators catch up.
If athletes didn't face consequences for manipulating betting markets, I think you'd see people become less and less likely to bet on sports outcomes. People naturally don't like a rigged game, you don't have to tell them not to play it.
With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets? Because I'm not sure anyone you are moralizing at is taking up the argument that it's critical that they exist.
Sports betting is specifically not a prediction market precisely because the players are banned by both law and extreme consequences from their leagues for participating.
You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.
I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
Also the bad times can be a great time to build good habits. I’ve tried and failed to develop an exercise routine many times, but it wasn’t until I was laid off for 6 months that it finally stuck. I had a friend who went to the gym every day in the middle of the day so I didn’t really have a reason not to go. 6 months was long enough for the habit to stick and fast forward years later and I still have the habit. It’s been so good that I regularly think about how good it was that I had the opportunity to be laid off.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
I don’t know the finances, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their margins are low enough that their profit comes from advertising and data gathering post sale. So all this bloatware and advertising is subsidizing a high quality product and if you can strip out the unwanted stuff you’re probably getting a good deal at the expense of the company
Often what you buy is either all you can afford or all that that has been made available to you. There are plenty of companies, industries even, which refuse to give consumers what they'd prefer simply because it's more profitable for them not to. Too often consumers are left with choosing the best of terrible options or just making due with what they can can.
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
All of continental philosophy since at least Hegel is intellectual bankrupt and it is a miscarriage of education to seriously teach it as anything more than a footnote that needs to be left in the dustbin of history.
Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
Yes that’s correct. We didn’t cover things such as Locke or Hume, Adam smith, etc…
Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later
Bit of a shame that it didn't directly cover Marx. Many of Marx's works are reactions to and critiques of people like Adam Smith. I think Marx even calls him delusional at one point.
Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.
Is the problem that right-of-center philosophy literature is generally too religious or obviously political? Your "later I realized" sounds like cover for the teacher.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
Difficult to say without knowing what part of the world history of literature was covered, but it is somewhat difficult not to somehow discuss Marx in some way, since the anti-capitalist socialism has politically been a large factor shaping the major modernist art movements as a response eother for or against. But if it was say modernist literature and there was jo TS Eliot’s conservatism, it would strike me a bit odd.
Leftist academic thought has however had huge influence on modern art movements. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
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