[ExI] trump

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat
Cc: Kelly Anderson <postmowoods at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] trump


>...I know most of us here are old enough to remember the debacle of Bush v. Gore where the Supreme Court picked the president... Kelly


Hi Kelly,

I know it was advertised that way, but as one who had (play) money riding on the outcome of the 2000 election, I followed it very closely, so I can offer a counter-narrative without looking up anything.  

Aside:  I was playing Robin Hanson's Ideas Futures at the time and really kicking butt.  It was such a fun game.  It occurred to me that if one could see the early results from the very high population state of Florida, one could predict the outcome of that state when the polls closed, enough ahead of time that one could make informed bets on Ideas Futures and win a ton of "money."  Back in the day, we took our play money a lot more seriously than we do our real money now.  

(Aside)^2:  In Michael Lewis' book Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried, on page 68 and the following several pages, Sam relates having figured out the real-money version of that same game I was playing in IdeasFutures and later in PredictIt.  Since Sam played games with real money (other people's money of course) he figured out that one could see the first results coming in from Florida, compare to historic early results, figure out which way Florida was going, then bet accordingly.  They did this successfully: in 2016 they watched the early results thanks to voting machines, and speculated that Trump would win Florida which indicated which way the other big swinging dicks would go.

The big difference between me and Sam was 8 orders of magnitude in the size of the bets.  Well, that and the hair.  

The polls showed Clinton way ahead going in, but before lunch on election day in 2016, Bankman Fried's group speculated that Trump would win, even though he was behind at the time.  He wasn't behind by enough.  Bankman-Fried at Jane Street Capitol, bet heavily against the stock market, judging that a Trump win would tank the market.  He was right and he was right.  Trump pulled off a surprise victory and the market tanked.  Jane Street Cap made 3 billion dollars that day.  

But this was a case where two rights do make a wrong: Jane Street Cap was still holding those counter-markets and shorts the next day, when an unexpected thing happened: the market rallied and went higher than it was Tuesday morning.  Jane Street's 3 billion dollar profit went up in a puff of smoke, and turned into a 300 million dollar loss by Wednesday afternoon, which they had to cover (that's a well-known risk of betting on shorts.)  It went from the best day ever on Jane Street to the biggest single-day loss ever for Jane Street Cap.  The wonder-child Sam Bankman-Fried went from hero to zero in one day.  From GOAT to goat, one day.  Ahhhh shit.  Oh that musta hurt.  Bankman Fried and the other traders in his group were uniformly Clinton supporters.  So they lost both the election and 300 million bucks.  Owwwww...

Back to Kelly: the Supreme Court did not pick the president in 2000 (for the Supreme Court correctly ruled that it had no authority to do that.)  The court correctly ruled that the final call on that election went to the governor of Florida, which by a stunning coincidence was the brother of one of the candidates.  The governor said he would go by the numerical result of the voters (hell what else could he do?) which showed his own brother had won Florida by about 500 votes, out of well over 5 million, less than one part in 10,000 margin.  Clearly it was well within the margin of error, and it tipped the national election.

OK then.  I could not tell the difference between the candidates that time: they both looked like over-spenders, which makes them identical twins by my way of looking at things.  But I had real play money riding on that election in Ideas Futures.  I had bet on Bush using the simple rule that still works to this day: bet to the right of the crowd politically.  Put your own preferences aside.  Vote your values, bet your beliefs.  People generally under-account for their own confirmation bias, with the political betting crowd being poster-child examples of that.  The political betting crowd leans to the left of center.  They are doing it even more now than they did then.  Lesson: if you play political betting, bet to the right of the crowd.  I made 73 real-world bucks in 2016 doing that.

Here's a good neutral site for those willing to play the game:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting-odds/2024/president/

No charge for that advice Kelly, my pleasure sir.

spike