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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.
Is that so? Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?
Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them. For example, a Greenlander might bet on the US invading not because they want the US to invade, but because they anticipate that they will require funds to relocate if Trump invades, similar to how Catastrophe bonds (which sadly are not available for US adventurism) works for their sponsor.
Also, I will come out and say that I would have preferred the outcome where the crewman was taken PoW by Iran not because I am an Ayatollah fanboy (I am not), but purely from a utilitarian perspective, because it would raise the probability of a negotiated peace as opposed to Trump deciding to just bomb the shit out of Iran, which seems unlikely to get the regime to budge but will certainly kill a lot of Iranians. If that makes me your enemy, then your world must be full of them. FWIW, I did not bet on it though.
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More generally, your rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." is a fully general counterargument for anything from the enlightenment to LW.
A lot of raising of the sanity waterline pissed off normies. The Copernican model. Evolution. HBD. Abolitionism. Suffragettes. Human rights. Pacifism. (I will grant you that there are plenty of horrible things which also piss of normies. We can't conclude anything about the morality of baby murder or Nazism purely from the fact that it pisses normies off.)
It does not help that your straw normie in your post displays all the sophistication of a sports fan betting on his favorite team. That is barely a step up from the small child who decides to close his eyes to make a scary situation go away, or the imbecile blaming his doctor for having cancer after a screening test.
If you run a society in a way which does not offend the 20% with the least cognitive capability, I think what you might get in the long run is something like Afghanistan. If people want to make a prediction market about things which normies find distasteful (and which might be genuinely distasteful, like when some serial killer will strike next), the liberal answer is to tell them that unfortunately, they are living in a free society where there are limits to imposing their sentiments on speech acts.
Also, speaking of things which normies hate, I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.
If they were allowed to do so, I don't see why not. Of course that would get Polymarket shut down. I would guess that it currently is mostly insiders and anti-US Westerners. There might be front groups or pro-Iranian NGOs betting, but I'd expect that to eventually get Polymarket shut down too.
There was a run on put options on airlines in the stock market just before 9/11.
Normies don't do that. You get a couple of weird people betting based on statistics, and everyone else betting based on who they like or hate. (Plus insiders, if applicable.) The way gambling has worked in practice does not show statistical literacy among the vast majority of people who bet. (And it isn't just the 20% with the lowest cognitive capacity, either.) The only cases where most people who bet on something bet based on statistics (without being insiders) are those which have huge barriers to entry that prevent everyone else from betting.
I reckon you think that normie tolerance for autistic behavior is a lot higher than it really is. They may be offended by the word, but they hold autistically based opinions in contempt.
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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..
i think robin hanson pushed the idea that insiders trading in prediction markets was a feature
It is, the point is to make better predictions, not to create a fair competition ground.
and this introduces all sorts of questions about conflict of interest, perverse incentives, and whether "more information" is necessarily something we want to enable? which in turn leads back to @Jiro's point.
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