Comment by Buttons840
2 days ago
This is a problem, a net negative and a sign of a weakening society.
But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
It seems hard to be a climate change denier when you're about to gamble on it.
Or maybe people will find a way to gamble while still living in completely different reality bubbles. Probably.
If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000 on the line...
But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
Only in a truth-agnostic sense. Good gamblers in player-banked games (poker; rock, scissors, paper) vs house-banked games (slots) are good at figuring out what the other guy is representing. The actual truth is much less significant.
> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
5 minutes browsing polymarket comments will dispel that notion really fast.
But at least you can make them poorer
Or just ignore all that garbage.
The comments are not the bets.
In fact, they are often opposite.
> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in physical branches and on the website, along with completely transparent information that it is all random, source of randomness was even some government audited hardware. The customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of random numbers would be generated and based on that a new 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4 in hour or something like that.
And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical locations) were often debating the form of the individual 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes, really.
Am I overlooking something, or would that mean it’s super easy for a rational participant to make money?
Presumably it's a negative expected value game - the company running it has to make money after all... so likely not.
2 replies →
Not sure what you mean exactly. If you mean the virtual rates, a gambler has no way to make money by placing bets there (while the real probability is 1/8, the odds the betting company is selling are of course much worse). If you mean in a broader context that it is easy to take these people's money, yes and no - there is a long queue of people wanting to do the same and what they want to do is mostly either heavily regulated or illegal.
Sometimes. Often the sure fire bets have lower returns than the expected annual stock market returns.
You have to watch out for resolutions are don’t depend on the truth or could be abused.
Examples of markets to avoid are those that a single individual can manipulate. They could take the most profitable side and corrupt the result.
pigeon dancing (ala Skinner). Humans love to ascribe meaning to things, we have a real problem with randomness.
> If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000 on the line...
I've seen the comment that prediction markets can be viewed as a tool for making conflicts more intractable.
I suspect that in practice, because a lot of online gamblers spend a lot of time specifically on X, they’re more susceptible than average to fake news.
Source for this stat?
Also hard to be a climate change doomer when you're gambling on it. Don't forget popular opinions can be extreme and wrong too. Prediction markets sound like a way to cut through the social media hysteria, although we already have insurance companies with money on the line about that and perhaps they're doing a good enough job of predicting the effects of climate change.
Good points. I also realized climate change is too slow for prediction markets. Nobody wants to bet on the average temperature in 2036.
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> gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
Crypto bros. Remember when all of them were saying that NFTs were the future?