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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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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:

This "platform" literally held bets on whether Israel would bomb Gaza

This is just straight up unmasked evil

Kalshi users on average lose money faster than on sports gambling. Kalshi is actually just pure evil.

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?"

Scott posted a partial mea culpa last month when he realized that the most common use of prediction markets is negative-sum sports gambling.

Specifically, he said "Degenerate gambling is bad", citing this article from a different person.

Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?

It is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.

That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people.

This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.

In turn, that person cites and rejects a pro-betting counterargument from a third person.

The headline result [of a recent scientific study]: legalizing online betting increases betting by about $25 and decreases investments in stocks by about $50 per household per quarter.

The claim that [the researchers'] evidence justifies stricter regulation on sports betting is far beyond what they can support.

The authors have strong evidence for people substituting investments in stocks for spending on what they call “negative expected value” investments. This name reflects the fact that sports betting is not a reliable way to make money. But neither is buying movie tickets or going out to eat. Sports betting is not an investment vehicle, it’s a form of consumption.

When a new product comes on the market and people decrease their savings to buy more of this product, that is evidence that their welfare has improved! When Taylor Swift came to Stockholm she decreased the savings of people there relative to those in Copenhagen, but everyone was glad to spend their money and go to the concert.

The authors of this paper say nothing about the consumption value of sports betting, so they have nothing to say about the consumer welfare effects of legalization.

The intuition that the authors implicitly rely on, but do not actually argue for, is that “financially vulnerable populations” overestimate the consumption value of gambling and thus make themselves worse off by consuming it.

I've seen people's happiness and welfare increasing in correlation with them going out to concerts. Never as a result of buying new iPhones on multi-year credit plans or taking up sports betting.

I have little patience for highbrowed arguments that actually betting is just another form of consumption. Degenerate gambling, quite evidently, is bad.

I spend probably about 50 bucks on sports betting annually. It’s consumption for me (kind of a fun “try to beat the house” sorts thing). For me it’s consumption.

I do recognize it only exists because others can’t control themselves.

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