[ExI] roaring twenties

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat


>... If a contract trades at 65¢, the market is effectively saying there's roughly a 65% chance the candidate will win"...

Ja!

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

Ja.

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

It's a guess, Ben.  Right now, what do you estimate are the chances Andy Burnham will be out of office by jingle bells 2027?  Take a guess.  The betting markets will take you up on that.  I saw on Polymarket the other day shares selling for 31 cents he would be out by then.  If you disagree with that estimate, bet on it.  You don't need to wait a year and a half, for you can sell your shares at any time.

>...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...

Oh you are exactly right, and this is important.  To not suck at futures betting, one must master the basic technique of vote your values, bet your beliefs.  One must estimate how much one's own preferences or values influences one's own beliefs, which is a lot.  No matter how much you think it is, it is more than that, even if you take into account the previous part of this sentence.

>...Nobody knows what will happen, all anybody knows is what they want to happen...

But everyone can estimate a probability of what will happen.  So... what do you estimate the probability of Burnham out before Santa arrives in 27?  Collective opinion 31%.  Your guess, higher or lower?

>... Really, there's no such think as what you think will happen, just what you hope and what you fear....

Fear is good enough.  I am likely soon to bet on something I really fear: Rep. Cortez getting the nomination, for if she does, I fear she will win, by running on stopping all AI research.

>...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'...

Meh, it's a betting game Ben.  Once one gets good at it, one can make money.

>...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....

People can, and do.

>...Maybe an AI could do it....

Good question, but I predict an AI would not be as good at political betting as a seasoned veteran human.  We should set up a contest and bet on the outcome.

>...But even if someone or something did come up with a method that worked, it soon wouldn't, for obvious reasons...

You have discovered one of the paradoxes of futures betting.  If one gets good at a particular area, no one will bet against one, and one makes no money.  I found out the hard way on my expressing a probability over time function as a matrix and integration over an interval, a technique that any mathematician would argue is not valid for predicting Mersenne primes (and the mathematicians would be right) but engineers do that kinda thing all the time, and this one did.  I predicted the time interval in which the next record prime number would be discovered, twice.  I won big in Robin's IdeasFutures, won a great deal of (play) money.  The third time, no one would buy the No shares, and didn't make much of anything.

>...All I'm seeing here is another way to make money out of people's gullibility...

Sure but that almost makes it sound like a bad thing.

>...It might be fun...

It is!

>...if that's the kind of thing you like...

I do!

>...and you might even make some money from it...

I do!

>...but I wouldn't take it the least bit seriously....

I don't!  It's a game.  A fun game.  Analogous to horse racing.  You British lads had that going long before there was a Kentucky Derby, long before there was a Kentucky.




>> 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....

Ja as I recall we created a separate forum, which Robin ran.  We didn't want to clutter up the main list.

>...Never been interested in gambling.

---
Ben

_______________________________________________


No worries Ben, I am interested in it enough to cover the both of us, with change left over.  I keep it under control with a strict rule: I own no more than 100 shares of any one bet, and no more than 1000 shares total at any time.  Then it is just a game, not all that different from when all we had was play money betting.  Back in those play money days, we took th ebetting a lot more seriously.  When it was play money, we were playing to WIN!  Now, it's only money.  I kinda liked the play money version better.  We had a lotta fun with it.

spike