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Polymarket seems to have, quietly and without announcing it, completely stopped putting up any new instances of the primary obvious Iran War markets ("Ceasefire broken by [date]" etc), or any proxy particularly close to them. Only relatively peripheral and imprecise markets remain.
I presume this is most directly in response to heat from Congress about insider trading (which probably was happening) potentially leaking national security secrets (surprise attacks), on top of other more general anti-prediction-market threats and noise of the types you'd imagine.
I personally feel a bit blinded now, like I've had a sense badly dulled. The price of oil is a shitty low-resolution proxy with too many confounders, vs a high-volume prediction market directly asking the actual question.
Is the Iran war about to resume, like bombs start falling again? I dunno, maybe. It kinda seems like it might, and it kinda seems like it might not. Some people (who seem like they might have some greater insight than me) say so, other people (who seem like they might have some greater insight than me) say not. How am I, just some guy, to weigh them? I'd now have to personally be a private superforecaster to do much better than a flat "I dunno, maybe", since the public collective superforecast has now been taken away.
re insider traders:
This is almost always much more uncertain, lost in the noise, and if at all only in retrospect than the reporting makes it sound.
Like it's very likely in most cases to just be hindsight bias + a combinatorial near-guarantee that someone will be right on all of some small set of markets or make a big buy at around the right time, with enough people participating (and there are a lot of people participating in the these)
They don't show you the overwhelming proportion of false-positive "insiders", there are huge whale buys from users with no history all the time and they usually turn out to be wrong, just dumb gamblers; and there are users who are right repeatedly on such topics, in some combination of large-sample-size survival-bias chance + people who are actually very smart and good at this + probably, but usually loseable in the noise and volume, actual insider traders.
But if you bet against the market based on such "insiders", whether betting on the prediction market or "betting" as an actual first-party participant in the events the market is about, you'll probably be wrong and lose from it more often than not.
That is the point. Insider traders who bet on secret war plans are leaking information in the form of market prices in the same way that traditional disloyal civil servants leak information in the form of off-the-record briefings of journalists. If the government can keep secrets, it is more militarily effective, but also less accountable to citizens. In the case of short-term war plans like the date of a surprise attack, the US as a whole is better off if the government can keep secrets, which means that running a prediction market which allows government officials to insider trade is a hostile act.
Or to put it even more bluntly, the enemy has had their senses dulled in the same way you have.
As opposed to the traditional way to start a war which is to talk about the war for months to “build consensus” and give your enemies months to harden their targets and plan a defense. I get that you don’t want to leak your very specific war plans (date, time and location) but most wars are not that surprising to anyone with access to American cable news. I think there’s either a reasonable compromise here, or that a lot of people should be in jail for leaking info in previous wars.
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