alt Hacker NewsI feel we need a term for these attempts to paint gambling as something other than gambling. Or just proper enforcement for gambling platforms like "prediction markets". Personally I find it disappointing to see so many people wasting their time on this stuff. I'm sure Coplan, for example, could be a productive member of society, but instead chooses to waste his time on stupid stuff like Polymarket.
Prediction markets perform the valuable function of information aggregation, at least in theory. When there is a financial incentive to make a correct prediction, the market should converge on the probability an ideal observer would assign to the event.
Of course in practice, there are issues like low trading volume, market manipulation, etc. And whether or not a particular market is performing better than, say, super-forecasters or experts in a given field is an empirical question.
That said, it seems a bit excessive to dismiss prediction markets as merely gambling platforms that add no value to society.