[ExI] roaring twenties

[Ben Zaiboc]

On Thursday, 10 September 2026 at 21:05, spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

> ...> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> .
> >
> >>... and look for bets you think disagree with your outlook.  Regarding my
> > notion of Rep. Cortez for POTUS, her shares are at 63 cents that she
> > will run.  I consider this overpriced, but not enough overpriced to
> > compel me to buy a NOT at 32 cents.
> 
> 
> >...Sorry, I don't understand this at all.
> --
> Ben
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> 
> Suppose you estimate that Rep. Cortez has a 30% chance of winning the
> nomination (in 2028.)  You go to the site, see that CortezNom is selling for
> 20 cents a share.  You put up 20 bucks for 100 shares.  If Cortez wins the
> nomination, those shares are worth 100 bucks.  If she loses, they are worth
> nothing.
> 
> If on the other hand, you see the shares selling for 40, then shares of the
> CortezNomNot are going for about 60 cents.  Since you estimate they are
> worth 70, buy some of those.  If Cortez loses, each is worth a buck.  If she
> wins, they are worthless.  It's a game.
> 
> You don't hafta hold for the next two years, and experienced players usually
> don't.  You can sell your shares at any time, and good players do, for the
> price fluctuates.  You can quietly take your profit, or swallow your pride
> and cut your losses, based on developments over time.
> 
> It's a game based on Robin Hanson's IdeasFutures game he invented back in
> the 1980s, where we had so much fun.  That one was a play money version, but
> he developed a real money version once he worked the bugs out of it.


Ok, I had a look at that site because I couldn't make head nor tail of what you're saying, and it says "A prediction market is a marketplace where people buy and sell contracts tied to the outcome of a future event, and the price of those contracts reflects the crowd's collective estimate of how likely that outcome is". Then it says "The maths is simple. If a contract trades at 65¢, the market is effectively saying there's roughly a 65% chance the candidate will win".

So each person must make an estimate of the percentage chance of a candidate winning.

How on earth can they be expected to do that??

Then there's a section on "Prediction Markets vs Polls" which fails to point out that polls give information on who people /want/ to win (not, as it says, what they think will happen. Very few people will honestly answer that, because we all know that surrounding opinions sway people's decisions. If you think that A will probably win, but you would prefer B to win, you'll say that you think B will win. It's a form of propaganda. Everyone does it, not just governments), but a prediction market claims to be able to predict who will win. Totally different things, apples vs. oranges. You can't compare them.

Nobody knows what will happen, all anybody knows is what they want to happen. What they /think/ will happen is irrelevant, and probably impossible to untangle from what they want. Really, there's no such think as what you think will happen, just what you hope and what you fear.

And thinking you can come up with a percentage chance seems to be sheer madness to me. Or perhaps I should call it 'blind optimism'.

I don't see how anyone who isn't steeped in all sorts of information about the elections, and has the ability to make sense of it, and is capable of overriding their prejudices, avoid their biases and think about things rationally (which means very few people indeed) have any chance at all of predicting who will win an election. Maybe an AI could do it. But even if someone or something did come up with a method that worked, it soon wouldn't, for obvious reasons.

And this method assumes that large numbers of people will be be able to make a prediction that isn't more than a wild guess? It's so remotely improbable as to be laughable.

"Markets can beat the pundits. Research comparing prediction markets to polls and pundit forecasts has generally found markets to be competitive, and sometimes more accurate, particularly for events with a lot of trading volume and informed participants"

Can (not Do). Generally competitive (so about the same). Sometimes more accurate (and sometimes not).
In other words, they do no better than random chance. Same as every other attempt to see the future.

All I'm seeing here is another way to make money out of people's gullibility.
It might be fun, if that's the kind of thing you like, and you might even make some money from it, but I wouldn't take it the least bit seriously.



> Ben, as I recall you were around here in the 1990s.  Didn't you recall our yakking about IdeasFutures in this forum back then?


Yes, I was around here in the 90's. Late 90's, anyway. If I did see any posts relating to this, I would have ignored them. Never been interested in gambling.

---
Ben