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Notes -
NBA Superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo announces that he is now a shareholder in prediction market Kalshi. Looks like prediction markets are finally breaking into the mainstream. Let's see what the normies think of this:
Some of these comments are also in response to the Kalshi CEO's now infamous quote that, "the long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion."
Turns out people hate this. Scott posted a partial mea culpa last month when he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling. I don't think the rationalist community has fully internalized how bad this makes us look. Not that we should be overwhelmingly concerned with optics, there are a lot of good things that are very unpopular, but I do wish that when the theory of prediction markets was being hashed out we had gotten more objections like, "theory implies that this machine will systematically extract money from stupid people. Are we prepared to deal with the social consequenses of that?"
The fact that prediction markets got tethered to sports betting is terribly unfortunate. It's like if Kalshi took its crypto elements as an opportunity to "diversify" into crystal meth. There's a lot of value in being able to see the odds of elections or political events at-a-glance. I hope the entire ship doesn't go down as a consequence of stupid people doing stupid things, and then society blaming the platform while holding the stupid people as helpless victims.
Why is it unfortunate?
If we are going to allow people to bet on the outcome of an election or a war, why should it be treated any differently from betting on the Super Bowl?
One difference is that people can act on predictions of real-world events like elections. The information that the prediction market reveals has value. There's not really anything you can do with knowing which football team will win the Super Bowl.
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