[ExI] desperation and passion

[spike at rainier66.com]

I am watching in terrified amusement as the US government wages war with itself.  It occurred to me that some of the oddities which have been recently revealed might be a result of betting on political outcomes.

 

Recall about 18 yrs ago when we were trying to get play-money Ideas Futures going (Robin Hanson did most of the heavy-lifting.)  The first thing we noticed is that the most popular betting memes were political: election outcomes.

 

Now we have real-money betting.  Now political memes are even more popular.  It appears those memes result in more cash changing hands than everything else combined, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us: in the play-money version, we already knew we were tech-geek heavy.  In those days most of ExI were tech people.

 

OK.

 

Play-money Ideas Futures encouraged people to bet on a meme, then try to make it happen.  Insider trading was not only not forbidden, it was encouraged.  One of the originals coined the term “noichahed.”

 

But then it occurred to me that we could have government people in positions where they could bet on the outcomes of elections, then work to make their bets pay.

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20180210/ad1dcccb/attachment.html>