google will lose, and I'm surprised they are even trying. hiQ v. LinkedIn already settled this: scraping public web pages isn’t “unauthorized access,” even if the site says no via robots.txt or ToS. Those aren’t locks.
Why should we want prediction markets to be fair? I want them to reveal facts about the world.
They only need to be fair inasmuch as it serves that goal. I don't think it wouldn serve that goal to forbid insider trading?
(Why do we forbid insider trading in the stock market? Not because it's unfair. Because it makes the market worse at doing what we want it to do, which is funding the most productive enterprises).
>Why should we want prediction markets to be fair? I want them to reveal facts about the world.
I do not think this is a reasonable position. The problem is that predicting "real facts about the world" creates a situation where you could take out an place a sizable bet on your neighbors house burning down. Allowing prediction markets is, thusly, inherently problematic. Allowing them to be anonymized with insider information, and you've a recipe for disastrous externalities.
And to spell it out, you can then go burn your neighbours house down and profit from it. Predictions markets don't just predict, they can cause "unlikely" things to happen because they give a way of profiting from making "unlikely" things happen. This is a problem with plain old stock market insider trading too, and with sports betting when the participants take out bets on themselves.
You can say you don't want prediction markets and that's fine. It's not responding to my comment though which is saying that if we have prediction markets, the goal should be for them to reveal facts about the world.
If you think prediction or stock markets should be "fair" then you have a very bizarre definition of fair (one that's compatible with a game that only rich people can win).
Also desiring "fairness" implies that to imply the market's primary purpose is as a game. If it's just a game, it's nothing but toxic gambling.
ANYWAY: pointing to one possible case of misuse and then leaping to "inherently problematic" is pretty weak IMO. Hopefully you can tell I'm not a prediction market booster, there's a lot about them that I think it's pretty suspect. But this is a pretty lame line of reasoning IMO.
"Someone might shoot people with it" -> valid reason for gun control. Guns are for shooting people.
"Someone might stab someone with it" -> not a valid reason to ban knives. We already ban stabbing people. We take precautions to try and mitigate the dangers of knives, because they have a very big upside.
> It's not responding to my comment though which is saying that if we have prediction markets, the goal should be for them to reveal facts about the world.
My point is you can’t have this without creating a massive incentive for people to create events, and it’s inherently easier to create disorder, which hurts everyone in a free society.
> pointing to one possible case of misuse and then leaping to "inherently problematic" is pretty weak IMO.
This is like saying nuclear weapons are “one possible case of misuse of nuclear technology.” Yes, obviously, but it’s serious enough to justify massive regulation of nuclear technology.
I’m not saying prediction markets should be illegal. I’m saying that they should have a very small maximum wager, require public disclosure of who is taking which bets, and it should not pay out if the actor has any connection to agents that create the change in the world.
Sports gamblers have known about how problematic this concern is forever. Organized crime used predictions markets they could influence (sports betting) as a major source of revenue throughout history.
The result was not, and could never have been, known a priori. All sorts of random things could have gone wrong with the operation causing the raid to fail and Maduro to remain in power. Trump could have just randomly changed his mind, or postponed the raid to beyond the end of January (the cutoff for the betting market). The person placing the bet was still taking a chance, but it was an informed chance that shifted the market probability more in line with reality.
If it helps, you can think of the money made as the payment to a confidential informant for information that contributed to a more complete picture of the world. It just happens via a distributed algorithm, using market forces, rather than at the discretion of some intelligence officer or whoever. The more important the information you have to share, the more it moves the market and the bigger your "fee". It's not being a "grifter" to provide true information that moves the market correctly. In fact, this mechanism filters out the actual grifters - you can't make money (in expectation) by providing false information, like traditional informants sometimes can.
This "intelligence gathering" function is the primary goal of a prediction market. It's the only reason it makes sense to even have them. If you turn it into some parlor game where everybody who participates has access to all the same information, then what are we even doing here?
> This "intelligence gathering" function is the primary goal of a prediction market. It's the only reason it makes sense to even have them. If you turn it into some parlor game where everybody who participates has access to all the same information, then what are we even doing here?
If everyone has the same information, then whoever does better analysis wins. That's far from a parlor game.
Ideally people with good info and people with good analysis can both make money. (And ideally nobody takes real-world actions to make their bet come true.)
> The result was not, and could never have been, known a priori.
This is a level of solipsism not worth discussing.
Yes, Superman could be a real person and we all had our minds altered to think he’s a superhero.
Yes, when someone pulls the trigger of a gun pointed at someone’s head, it could misfire and explode in their hand.
The point is that someone influencing prediction markets can push this probability to very, very near zero. So much so, as to make the outcome effectively certain for all intents and purposes.
Literally everyone can burn their neighbor's house down! Everyone has access to "valuable predictive information" when that information is being created by the person making the bet.
Get the last word in if you must. We're going in circles.
OK, I see now that you're specifically referring to the case where someone places a bet and then actively goes out and causes the event to happen themselves. I was specifically replying to the people who were saying it was unfair for insiders to profit on the information they already possess.
I agree, I can see how that's a potential edge case, though I don't think it's as likely to happen in practice as you do. Certainly, anybody who commits a crime to cause a payout should be barred from receiving that payout, though you can tell a plausible story where someone manages to conceal it. I also really really doubt that that's what happened in this particular case.
I mean, yes, unironically. If the goal of a prediction market is to find out the truth about the world, that's what will get you there faster.
Google might feel differently about whether it's OK in that case, but that's their prerogative.
Ask yourself: If the CIA really needed to know in advance what the top search result was going to be with as much accuracy as possible (for some weird reason, doesn't matter why), how would they go about doing it? Would they spend a bunch of time evaluating all of the public information, or would they just bribe (or otherwise convince) an insider at Google to tell them?
Given that inside information makes prediction markets more accurate, why do you believe it doesn't make stock markets more accurate?
If, say, Enron insiders could've shorted their own stock, that would have improved accuracy and thereby diverted more funding to more productive enterprises.
I guess there could be second-order effects when insiders can actually change the outcome, which is why athletes aren't allowed to bet on their own games.
> I guess there could be second-order effects when insiders can actually change the outcome
You don't need to guess. That's exactly why it's illegal: It creates bad incentives, similarly to e.g. taking out a life insurance policy on a random person you have no financial dependence on.
> Given that inside information makes prediction markets more accurate, why do you believe it doesn't make stock markets more accurate?
He didn't say that it doesn't. It obviously does make stock markets more accurate.
But it tends to drive down the total amount of money available to be invested in stocks, which is compatible with the claim that it makes the market worse at funding productive enterprises.
> But it tends to drive down the total amount of money available to be invested in stocks
That seems like a big claim. For most market participants, there's always a counterparty that's so much more sophisticated that it doesn't make a difference if they're an insider or not.
The only "facts about the world" revealed by prediction markets are facts about what people betting in prediction markets believe. Which I guess is interesting in itself if you're a sociologist. Otherwise, not so much.
In this case the insiders only made their bets a few hours before the kidnapping was publicly announced, so it's not clear whether the betting "revealed facts about the world" in any publicly useful way.
Lol. Why should we make car ownership fair? I want cars to reveal facts about the world. I don't think it would serve that goal to forbid people from stealing your car.
One of the criteria for being open source is no discrimination against fields of endeavor. This license clearly discriminates against any field of endeavor other than (non-commercial) research.
Your suggestion is to not use the platform as intended, and to understand the source code of the extension. That advice is not actionable by non-technical people and does not help mitigate mass surveillance.
Still sidestepping around the inherent need for some level of technical capability and motivation. The average person has no idea what "source code" is, and an LLM is not going to make them meaningfully understand in one conversation. If the LLM just says, "trust me bro you're good", now we have just moved the problem of trust to something even more inscrutable.
Ok, should we just use the provided 'app' and assume things are fine? FAANG or whoever take our privacy and security very seriously, you know!
The only reasonable approach is to view the code that is run on your system, which is possible with a extension script, and not possible with whatever non-technical people are using.
I don't know what point you're trying to make, but I already expect OpenAI to maintain records of my usage of their service. I do not however want other parties to be privy to this data, especially without my knowledge or consent.
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