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This story went viral A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall.
In the comments, one thing I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading. Here is the highest-upvoted comment on Hackr News:
"Using insider information is how you are supposed to win these. Otherwise it's just random gambling. This is not the stock market. There are no public reporting rules for the weather, song lyrics, what Kim Kardashian eats tomorrow."
Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.
My comments of course were downvoted. They always are. I could make a comment along the lines of the "Pizza tastes great" and I would be downvoted by every pizza hater on that site and no upvotes by everyone else who enjoys pizza, as is the counterintuitive nature of online voting patterns. Writing good comments is an art in and of itself.
The difference in values between what I imbibed growing up (and yeah, I probably read way too much chivalric literature) and modern morals is such a gulf, I almost don't recognise the people on the other side of the chasm.
Cheating is okay, stealing is okay, things that in the past were considered dishonourable are okay, because honour? pfft, that's a joke! The only thing that matters is if you get caught, and unless you're a fool or stupid, you can wiggle out of that with some excuse or plea.
Story out today about an Irish academic who was both editor of some economics journals and co-author of papers which got published in those journals. Sees no conflict of interest there at all. He did nothing wrong. This was recognised practice in the profession. (I'm tempted to make snarky remarks about economists, but let's not). Other academics have come to his support with "yeah, everyone did/does this":
There is a value to letting previous decisions stand. For example, if Congress impeached the president every time his popularity sank below 50% of the voters, that would badly affect the stability of the political system.
There is a difference between saying "given today's policies, we would not let you publish that article" and actually retracting an article. The central example of an article being retracted would be due to fraud or plagiarism: someone having deliberately deceived the reviewers about their results or originality is enough to overturn the status quo.
Now, if it appears that he had broken explicit rules of conduct which existed at the time he published, e.g. not appointing a reviewer despite protocol calling for a reviewer, that would be grounds for retraction.
Unfortunately, we do not know that.
Given that we do not get the report of that team, that parses to me as "secret evidence was enough to convince the star chamber of his guilt".
I think it would be ok to keep their report secret if at the end both parties agreed on the retraction, not every piece of dirty laundry needs to be aired in public. But given that the validity of the retraction is under dispute, it hardly seems like Lucey could object if they published everything.
In general, one could debate how much power the owner of a journal should have to enforce retractions of articles. Suppose a political activist billionaire bought Elsevier, and proceeded to retract articles matching some pattern (perhaps articles without minority co-authors, or articles authored by Jews, or which argued for/against anthropogenic climate change). Or perhaps ether theory proponents could buy Wiley-VCH and retract Einstein's Annalen der Physik papers on relativity.
Of course, this would not change the scientific consensus about Einstein one bit. After all, the power of a retraction comes from the fact that scientists and appointment committees treat them as real, but they do that because most retractions are solid, not because they are sworn to do so.
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I also think that undeclared conflicts of interest and quid pro quo understandings in scientific publishing are likely very common. Most scientific fields are rather narrow, there are perhaps a dozen professors in your niche, not tens of thousands. Editing a journal or reviewing articles is (generally unpaid) work taken up by academics, and while I am sure that some of them have the best interests of their field in mind, these are also good positions to gatekeep and increase your own standing. "That manuscript is okay except that it is missing a citation of an essential publication" seems like a fairly easy way to boost citations of your own articles, after all. When people say that science advances one funeral at a time, I think that gatekeepers refusing to publish anything which contradicts their own pet theory are a big part of that.
While it is clear that the dysfunctionality inherent in the system should not excuse any particular dysfunctionality cultivated on top of that, I do not have a great solution to the underlying problem.
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The idea that traditional vices are in many cases actually good for the economy goes back to at least the 18th century, see The Fable of the Bees. Published in 1714, with the subtitle "Private Vices, Publick Benefits", arguing that traditional ideas about honesty and virtue are bad for society and society benefits more from selfish individuals pursuing personal gain, rather than virtuous individuals pursuing the common good. This idea is still pretty prominent in certain types of libertarians and ardent defenders of capitalism, as you can see some of the reactions in this very thread.
As a fellow enjoyer of premodern literature, I am with you however. I find this attitude completely incomprehensible.
I find it pretty comprehensible. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug, especially when cut with philosophies like materialism, individualism, and deconstructionism.
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Was this meant as a top level?
It could have been more explicit but I think the idea was to draw an analogy between the academic journal and insider trading cases, as both being examples of the sort of thing he decries in the first part of the post - dishonorable behaviour being defended or even celebrated.
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