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Notes -
Polymarket removes prediction market on when the downed F-15 pilots would be rescued.
Yesterday, a two-seater USAF F-15E was shot down over Iran. One of the crew members was successfully rescued. The other is still unaccounted for. This was big news in the United States, and probably across the whole world.
Polymarket, being Polymarket, put up a prediction market on when the pilots would be rescued. United States service members are a sacred class in our society, and so this market got a lot of heat, including from congresspeople.
Polymarket responded by immediately removing the market, citing “integrity standards”.
Of course, the market doesn’t violate Polymarket’s integrity standards. No specific policy or clause is cited. Anyone browsing the “geopolitics” section on Polymarket knows that war markets are allowed. They even provide a helpful note on Middle East conflict markets to let you know what their position is:
It goes without saying that removing the pilot rescue market flies in the face of the principles stated above. Maybe Polymarket never believed in them, and markets on foreign wars involving Eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners was a cynical way to get eyes on their website.
So if the stated rules are fake, then what is the real rule? I don’t think it is, “respect American servicemen,” exactly. I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.
Uh, no, I think the obvious fit is "do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit". This prediction market can almost certainly not impact American combat operations.
Related to that, there's a rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." If you can't do that, you have no business running any sort of a market in the first place. It doesn't matter how much you say "betting against something doesn't mean you oppose it", only a couple of weird guys either think or behave that way.
And not only will normies think that people who bet against the US military don't like the US, that will actually be true because not only are the rulemakers and public normies, the bettors are normies too. The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.
(And if you ask "what's wrong with letting enemies profit from our misfortune, they didn't cause it after all", you a) are a quokka and b) definitely need to talk to some normies.)
There's also the secondary question of keeping operations secret. The whole reason prediction markets like this are supposed to work is that people with accurate information can make money from them, and this is reflected in the market. This is equivalent to "prediction markets leak insider information to the public through the market". Leaking insider information about US military operations to anyone is a bad thing.
The kayfabe behind Prediction Markets is that they're somehow allowing 'superforecasters' to battle into creating stronger opinions through the use of pure logic and whatnot. Actual out-and-out insider trading isn't something that's encouraged or especially healthy for the marketplace..
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Agreed. Prediction markets are trying to go mainstream and be respectable (even if right now they seem to be going for sports betting as the way to get the general public to use them) so pissing off the government is not going to help them. "Oh, you want a licence do you? Well remind me why we should do you any favours?"
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