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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?"
My brother and friend, I was making these exact objections back then: when money is on the table, prediction markets will be warped towards "how can I profit off this?" and not "how can we best arrive at Truth?"
I never believed in them as a tool for setting policy or the wisdom of crowds or whatever other pipe dreams were out there. That kind of market might work so long as it was small-scale, for very maths-oriented, nerdy people who liked deep-diving into questions. But put money in, and try to make it mass-market because you believe in your innocent little heart that this will be the bestest way of finding solutions to social, economic, and policy problems, and it'll blow up in your face.
I don't think Kalshi are any more evil than anywhere else, I just think the whole idea of prediction markets suffered from - pardon me here - being promulgated by the eggheads with little to no experience of what happens with ordinary people and the likes of the stock market and gambling. "We need to get people involved, so we need to provide rewards and incentives to participate, so money is a good way of doing that". Yeah, and the love of money is the root of all evil: the money becomes the end in itself, not whatever goal you had with regards to widescale adoption of prediction markets.
EDIT:
Some people are sufficiently tough-minded to go "yeah, and so what?" about things like legalising drugs, gambling and so on. Their idea is that there should be few to no restrictions on what an adult can do with their own life, and if someone becomes a drug addict or loses all their money betting, that's on them. Society is not responsible for idiots being too stupid to take care of themselves. Your lack of ability should not restrict my freedom.
I've seen some of that around rationalism, so I think there are indeed a sub-set who considered that, and put it aside as "not our problem if 90 IQ low value human capital get themselves into trouble, the benefits for the rest of us far outweigh any downsides".
This current wave of prediction markets is essentially promulgated upon the age-old question of 'actual sports betting is legal in only roughly half of the States but we can take bets from Californians and Texans if we slap this new coat of paint on it'. That's essentially the real commercial product here.
Sort of suspected it, but the very early promoters online were so earnest about how high-minded it all was, I felt like I was breaking butterflies on the wheel to come out and be all wet-blanket on them.
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