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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Polymarket numbers aren't really indicative of anything until that 5 minutes before an official release where all the liquidity is suddenly gooooone.

More accurate the closer things get is true, but they still seem to be pretty accurate at least a few months yet. I don't know if there's been any analysis of longer term prediction accuracy, but short/mid term seems to be fine. The insider trading makes a lot of personal money, but I'm not sure it's ever been enough to meaningfully change the odds. Maybe something goes from 70% to 90% or whatever.

Like consider how even the 580 million in oil futures traded recently is apparently a small fraction of the trillion+ that gets traded each day. At least this is what I get from double checking with ChatGPT "Total notional trading volume is often in the hundreds of billions of dollars per day In active periods, it can exceed $1 trillion+ daily".

The Prediction market thing makes a lot more sense for regularly occurring phenomena like sports betting

Maybe it's more accurate on those but again, still seems pretty accurate on other things as well. The basic idea at least that people are throwing up their money into a wisdom of the crowds and anyone who thinks they know better can go bet against it holds true does it not?

The Trump admin insider traders do love to wait for the last minute but unless they've got it institutionalized and are taking turns or something, and for some reason Iranian insiders wouldn't do their own insider trading, there should be people who try to come in even earlier and eventually cause a race to the bottom on how early you have to insider trade.