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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   24751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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this is such bullshit. Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome. Markets "work" because there are rules that everyone agrees on ahead of time. When these rules are changed arbitrarily when money is at stake then people lose confidence in markets. Also, there is not even anything disrespectful about this. A betting market does not imply people do not want him to be found. It's possible to be pessimistic about an outcome in the short-term, while still hoping for an ultimately positive outcome. They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is the arbitrary moral posturing that makes people hate and distrust "big tech "companies. But this is where money is at stake. These prediction a markets are huge, with billions in funding. They can afford to take a stand. Caving to moralistic pressure will mean users losing trust in them.

Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome.

This is something I have wondered about. Did Kalshi advise people that death doesn't count? If so, was it done in a reasonably prominent way or was it buried in the fine print, so to speak? As long as people were notified in a reasonably prominent way that they would not win the bet if the guy left office as a result of dying, this seems fine to me. Otherwise, yeah,

Khomeini one was more absurd IMO since it also raised a bunch of edgecases (like what if he's say injured badly by drone strike and doesn't die but relinquishes the position) and even puts into doubt stuff like if I'm betting into a market and somebody randomly gets taken by a traffic accident or heart attack.

Agreed, this is absolute total bullshit, both the Khamenei market and this pilot rescue market. If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place, not retroactively voiding them. This breaks people's chains of trades where they attempt to squeeze out edge from multiple correlated contracts and also leads to higher spreads and more inefficient markets because now both buyers and sellers have to price in the risk that the market will get voided when quoting prices.

I can understand why people dislike markets on people's deaths (theoretically it can be used to pay for contract killings in a totally decentralized way) and why we might not want to allow them, but what's the reason to remove the market on the missing pilot?

If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place,

I think it's reasonable to have a death exception, but it should be extremely clear. I just checked the "Donald Trump out as president" market on Kalshi, and it actually has a disclaimer on this point:

If Donald Trump leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death)

Presumably the pronoun is screwed up because Kalshi added this provision hastily after the Khamenei fiasco.

Anyway, the thing about the Khamenei situation was that given his age (85) and position (supreme leader of Iran or whatever) the most obvious way he was going to leave office was by dying. So if Kalshi didn't include a prominent disclaimer about death, that's lousy of them and they should be on the hook to pay out all the contracts in full.

It's sort of like those life insurance policies you used to be able to buy at airports. If they don't cover death due to plane crashes, you really should make it very clear to your customers.

Reality giving them a lesson. If they want to go mainstream and grow and involve real money, then they need to realise that they are not, in fact, going to be the mass market wisdom of crowds how to set policy and govern society due to truth seeking oracle they started off with ideals of being, they're just one more big bookies and people make bets to win money and not find the optimum source of agreement on how to steer the economy via real-world feedback from superforecasters.

Prediction markets are a casino in a top hat and a monocle, but with added opportunities for insider trading. Once they grew beyond an niche thing for eccentric techies, it was always going to turn out this way.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is literally every sports betting company. They can ban you if you win too much.

I actually think its such bullshit. If you want to provide bets and be a market maker, you should have to take the wins as well as the losses. Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

You're betting against other people though. The marketplace/exchange doesn't care how much you win.

Not polymarket sports betting

Draft kings sports betting

Having worked at betting exchanges before you kinda don't want people who win too heavily for ecosystem maintenance. Generally that's gonna impact result knowers most of all, whether inside information or latency

Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

Minimum requirement all gambling companies should be required to adhere to.

It's funny since they could but they'd have to dramatically pare back the menu. So majority of people who complain about limits are picking off relatively niche markets which are only offered due to being able to limit counterparties

The problem is that if they're limiting counterparties to losers, then it's inherently fraudulent - they're selling a service specifically, and only, to those for whom it's of negative utility, and thus are reliant on explicit or implicit deception to actually get business.

So yes, it is better that those betting options not exist than be run in that manner, much like how shell games are bad and shouldn't be allowed.

Ok, make them pare back the menu, they won't be making as much money then with their reduced offering which naturally gives them an incentive to get better at pricing their odds so they can access more markets. Accurate gambling odds provide benefits to third parties who can now use them to see what the probability of some future event is. It's the minimum societal good which we should expect from these companies in return fr the societal harm thry cause.

I agree the menu is bloated way beyond sanity by the arms race between the majors (though most of the liquidity still goes to the liquid markets funnily enough). Accurate gambling odds vis a vis the PM thing is a completely different thing since the big PMs are barely moving any money on their original political markets.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit

Isn't that basically what the insurance companies are doing now with Force Majeure? But yes, i agree that sites like Polymarket are at a pretty low level of respectability right now. Its like gambling in some underground mafia-owned casino.

I think people wrongly assume that because it uses crypto that it is more decentralized . this is not the case.

Force majeure is pretty rare and reserved for exceptional circumstances, not that they don't want to pay on a policy. If that's the case, they'll usually find another reason not to pay.

Unilateral declarations of Force Majeure (or Frustration, depending on exactly which class of rules governing the insurance contract you're talking about) can usually be challenged by the other party under arbitration or via litigation where the declaring party risks being under a very serious breach of contract if the case goes against them, hence insurers and others have strong reasons to not declare Force Majeure unless something really serious has happened to the point where they're reasonably convinced that an independent arbitration body would agree there actually was a Force Majeure. None of that exists for these prediction markets.

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