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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.
There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.
Nobody is worried about the former. Iran can certainly hire foreign superforecasters to predict all kinds of things, which should work just as well as a prediction market without insider info. This is certainly useful, and presumably every military is doing something like this, but at the end of the day you will only get quantified uncertainty, just like a prediction market for a poker hand might contain a broad range of possibilities.
With insider trading, you get something like a poker market which settles at 90% full house because some of the bettors have seen the hand.
Of course, with this administration, it feels like the primary purpose of Polymarket is to get paid for leaking classified intel. Of course, there are different levels of despicableness. Betting on Trump announcing tariffs an hour before he announces them is bad, but the demonstrable harm is limited. Leaking military secrets regarding ongoing operations tends to be the thing which gets you executed.
From a purely amoral point of view, I would not risk it. A gain of a few tens of thousand dollars seems insufficient compensation against any unknown risks, and if someone close to you makes even more than that, the deed becomes blatantly obvious. Not only would the USG have every incentive to block the payout, even if they could not convince a jury of your guilt, you would still destroy your career and get on the shit list of the USG.
Still, pushing for a ban of that market is basically admitting: "people who have classified intel have the incentive to leak, and we can not fix that."
Given that the US lost a 115M$ Hercules in the rescue, the obvious way to handle this would have been for the CIA to just take over the market. Spending a million on making bets which seem well-informed but are wrong to feed wrong intel to the enemy would probably be worth it.
There's an implied third way of actively swaying the outcomes being bet upon. In sports, this is uniformly against the rules (see federal charges against MLB players recently), but it's less clear how the rules work for other prediction markets: there's lots of discussion about whether "predicting" deaths is functionally an assassination market, but I'm not sure where I'd want the boundaries to be in the general case. Futures markets look a lot like (some) prediction markets, but it's downright encouraged to look at long-term oil futures pricing to decide whether to invest in new drilling and exploration, and it's not "unfair" that futures market members raise production elsewhere and at least temper the futures pricing impact of Gulf shipping woes.
A bet on sunshine next week and the electric grid spot price are pretty related, but the ethics of engaging in (legal) cloud seeding to change it isn't a clear "wrong", IMHO.
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