Vaccine mandates are more difficult. If this mother's freedom wasn't violated then she would only risk herself and her baby. If somebody doesn't take a vaccine they place risk on many other people (mostly children) who can't be vaccinated by weakening herd immunity.
You're defending a government using force to prevent terminally ill people from voluntarily experimenting on themselves to find a cure and further our understanding of disease. It should not be easier for a layman to design and build a targeted mRNA vaccine then it is to navigate a regulatory maze.
> prevent terminally ill people from voluntarily experimenting on themselves to find a cure and further our understanding of disease
Those seem like a good starting point for standards: Is it voluntary? Are they of sound mind? Are they giving informed consent (to themselves)? Is the experiment likely to yield useful results?
There are many things you can't voluntarily do, such as experimenting with cures that involve opiods. Should we allow vulnerable, uninformed people to take dangerous drugs because they saw a YouTube video saying they would help? Try random gene editing?
The truth is, you probably could do those things and few would care unless you hurt someone else.
The animal is terminally ill and the vaccine's slated purpose is to cure that illness. If you're rich & terminally ill these kinds of regulatory mazes are less of a burden, but if you're poor you'll likely die before you can get approval.
Prediction markets have value for people as a source of reliable information because they tend to be very accurate compared to any other human mechanism for creating forecasts.
There is no evidence that people betting on whether Iran will strike Israel on March 15th has any benefit. Who would be the beneficiary of that?
Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?
Nor there's evidence that providing information about the fact that US will strike Venezuela does it either.
What value any of that has? None, especially considering the perverse incentives on the other side of acting on the outcome probability for financial gain which has already happened. US executive insiders have definitely bet on US attacking Venezuela on Polymarket.
You see this as "information discovery", I see it as the fact that I can lobby for dangerous events to happen just for financial gain.
Future markets have some value in some scenarios where you can hedge the outcome.
E.g. a farmer hedging crop prices can de risk his operations.
There is a hedging and the hedge works as insurance.
What's exactly the value of betting on elections or military strikes? What's being hedged?
How can you not see the financial incentives?
We have a long history of regulating both futures, derivatives and betting for very specific reasons.
But now we've relabeled it all as information gathering and price discovery.
How can you not see how the financial incentives here are speedrunning terrible events to happen?
I'm gonna rephrase it like that: would you like for a contract to exist on whether you'll be sent to hospital tomorrow in a crash accident?
Are you gonna tell me: "well, it's information discovery and it's valuable that I can wake up knowing the odds have increased!" while ignoring that there are now people out there financially motivated to make this happen?
I think people & companies get value from these markets because they are able to plan on the basis of accurate forecasts for scenarios like potential wars and election results.
I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I just think that on net the information provided tends to be more valuable.
> Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?
Yes, of course! If you had some advance warning your home town was likely to be struck with missiles soon, are you seriously saying you can't think of a single thing you could do to prepare? I would, at a minimum, make sure I was stocked up on first aid supplies, water, and food that I could eat without needing power or gas to cook it.
I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN now even though it's just past midnight here. Because it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming. Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on that.
More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I
made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.
> That there are economical incentives to make it happen just to make money?
I don't see how there is. The liquidity in a prediction market is not high enough to compensate for the expense of going to war.
The war was going to happen irregardless of the prediction market. The prediction market only let us know when it was going to happen with some hours to spare.
Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
If there was a prediction market for whether I'll be hit by a car tomorrow, and it was lucrative enough that it would actually be worth anyone's time to deliberately hit me with a car, I'd stay home and bid on "no". Pretty sure I'd make more than enough to cover the cost of ordering pizza.
There are already perverse incentives to commit arson, like insurance. And it's entirely possible that prediction markets can make insurance even more cost-effective.
> Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
Not your money, you can be just a random in the executive and lobby for it.
Marginal revolution has been talking up prediction markets since before they existed. In fact polymarket probably was created after its founder read Cowen's thoughts on prediction markets.
It may be cherry-picking, but I think some commenters misunderstand this (or maybe I do).
The implication seems to be "12 hours before the resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets, just what I understood from the blog post.
1. As pointed out in the comments, you can inflate your prediction success rate by predicting things that are 100% to happen. There are plenty of 99.9% bets on Polymarket with degens betting on some 0.01% lottery event trying to strike a jackpot against the odds, and those will inflate the perceived accuracy.
2. All you're really doing is paying insiders to leak information a few hours ahead of time. Insofar as Polymarket is unusually accurate on things that aren't ~100% to happen, it's likely because in the 12-hour-window that post measures is when all of the insiders place their last-minute bets telling you what will happen. This is extremely bad for society. It's wealth redistribution from stupid people to unethical people[1], and it could completely compromise national security when eg. an insider tells you 12 hours ahead of time that the US is about to launch an invasion of Venezuela. There is no societal benefit to this.
[1] Even if you have no sympathy for idiots who bet their life savings on markets without having insider information, gambling addiction has extremely detrimental effects on society and directly results in increased crime rates, divorce rates, etc. as people lose all of their money and do bad things in desperation, so it is a problem that becomes everyone else's problem.
Vaccine mandates are more difficult. If this mother's freedom wasn't violated then she would only risk herself and her baby. If somebody doesn't take a vaccine they place risk on many other people (mostly children) who can't be vaccinated by weakening herd immunity.
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