I've been quite successful trading weather prediction markets.

The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win.

The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies.

"Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.

I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything?

The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.

There are communities larger than you'd expect around just about every topic imaginable. I'm certain there are temperature enthusiast groups, especially given its adjacency to climate stuff. It's probably going to be people mostly betting on something they have better than average knowledge of. I'd be interesting to compare the 'normal' majority temperature predictions from polymarket to local weather station predictions. I'm betting polymarket wins, by a wide margin.

For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.

It sounds like the other side of the bet was the actual winning bet when compared to Truth. Maybe they have great climate models and actually make a bet that they have an edge on. Maybe they have a gambling problem. Either way, they are the victims here.

gambling addicts is the answer

There's quite a lot of ways to interpret this question... but for that day's daily bet:

>A temperature of 18C was seen as a 99.6pc probability before the temperature spiked later in the day.

99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. And at least one of those 0.4% (by value? count? idk) decided to cheat.

If polymarket were staking wagers on its own platform, then it would have to worry about the integrity of the contracts, which is a nonstarter

Nope the only money on the line is the people betting. Polymarket gets their cut and has "no monetary risk"

Casinos are purpose built to make you lose.

People still show up compulsively everyday.

People with cryptocurrency and no idea what to do with it.

People that haven't read Black Swan and bet on every "sure bet" they can see