The full rules do specify "after Issuance", which is "on or after October 21, 2021", so it's not free money.
(It's also based on a NASA announcement, which would seem to technically cover NASA issuing a a press release about magical travel to the moon on April 1, 2024, and it resolves the question "yes" even though everybody knows they didn't. But that possibility is probably is covered by "Additionally, as outlined in Rule 7.2 of the Rulebook, if any event or any circumstance which may have a material impact on the reliability or transparency of a Contract’s Source Agency or the Underlying related to the Contract arises, Kalshi retains the authority to designate a new Source Agency and Underlying for that Contract and to change any associated Contract specifications after the first day of trading".)
The blip in Putin's chances of remaining president around Sep 12th corresponds to the major counteroffensive Ukraine pulled off in Kharkiv oblast around that time, when they liberated tonnes of territory.
Thanks again to Substack for offering to support Manifold embeds, and to Scott for embedding them into this post! It's super gratifying (and humbling) to see our markets becoming elevated into the discourse around a bunch of current events; as always, please let us know if you have thoughts on how our site and our markets could be improved~
Also, for those of you specifically interested in the midterm elections, my teammates Stephen and Fede have created this neat election map, visualizing the markets for contentious senate and governor races: https://manifold.markets/midterms
You're right. There are several graphs in the post, but none of them match what I would expect - I bet I'm misunderstanding something. I'll eave it out for now.
I think the first graph of this type from that post (which has the same numbers in the key as the one you had here before) accurately depicts their "1 year staggering times" summary table.
Also, the link for the Manifold Market team's endorsement of Kalshi is wrong; it's trying to go to a local file on your computer.
16% chance of the Iranian regime collapsing by EOY 2022, 20% by 2023, and 34% by 2024? That seems like either a market that shouldn't be trusted or a bunch of predictions that it's especially unlikely to happen in 2023 specifically, no?
Apparently there's multiple manifold markets about me now, and they also spell my name different ways. Is there some rule that if I'm mentioned more than once the spelling must be different each time?
Of course! The Eisenberg exclusion principle -- no two Eisenberg markets can use the exact same spelling simultaneously within a single prediction system.
Edit -- or the Eisenberg uncertainty principle. The more certain you are about the probabilities, the more uncertain you must be about the spelling.
As for how to square that with the events in 2016 and 2020, a few possibilities:
* Polling error is random
* Polls have a systemic pro-Dem bias these days *and* an element of random error.
* Polls have a systemic pro-Dem bias when trump is on the ballot
An related question is, why didn't pollsters fix the issues from 2016 to 2020?
I seem to remember people complaining, after 2016, that the issue was not weighting by education, such that the polling models had a higher portion of the electorate be college grads than what the norm was. And they would post examples of polls still making this mistake in the run-up to 2020. Perhaps they fixed it now, or perhaps they will stubbornly refuse to ever fix it (or perhaps they compensated but then simultaneously the problem got worse).
I would factor in whether there are any incentives regarding poll results. For example, I would imagine Trump opponents would want to read a poll saying Trump didn't stand a chance of winning.
What doesn't seem to be factored in is the potential effect pol; results publishing might have on the vote. For example, if someone trusts these numbers and live in a swing state, they might not prioritize voting if Trump has no chance of winning whereas if he did, whether or not tp vote might seem to take on more importance. Living In New Jersey, I feel its "safe" to vote for a third party as the state will almost certainly "go blue" in the federal elections.
On incentives - I think wishful thinking is one for people on both sides, but I would imagine that for most pollsters, getting it right is the number one thing. Especially because I think it's lucrative to be an internal pollster, and I don't think the campaigns themselves want polls based on wishful thinking.
Campaigns want a good number accurate polls, but they also want some noisy polls, so that they can leak one of them that promotes the message they need at that moment. This is why fivethirtyeight generally doesn’t include campaign-sponsored polls in a lot of their calculations, because the ones that are public are often selected for noise.
I've always assumed that the ones that are released are a small portion of the internal polls that exist overall, and are a natural byproduct of doing a lot of polls, so what the campaigns want is accuracy and the noise piece will take care of itself.
I suspect something like that is basically right. But I would not be surprised if they conduct a poll as a sample of 1500 people over 3 days, but then report a "poll" consisting of just the 500 people sampled on one of those days - they get the advantage of large sample size for their own internal accuracy, and of small sample size for the possibility of noisier individual results for reporting.
For those of you more into prediction markets: Why are they suing to challenge laws instead of seeking to comply? The notice I read specifically mentioned safe harbors they could take advantage of. That wasn't just them being polite. That was the regulatory agency explaining what they needed to do to be allowed to continue to operate.
Prediction Markets are not gambling or investments. They're clearly games of skill with rewards at the end which are definitionally not gambling. Alternatively, if they must continue to operate as investments, CFR 17.2.227 provides another safe harbor but one with somewhat more complex tax implications.
Also, if the rationalist community somehow takes down the Administrative Procedures Act it will instantly become the hero of libertarians everywhere. Which would basically be necessary to argue that this finding was invalid. Chevron deference and all that.
What safe harbors are you thinking of? My impression was that their notice was just https://business.cch.com/srd/22-08(1).pdf , which whatever you think of Administrative Procedures does seem kind of sparse and ill-explained.
I read something more substantial elsewhere on this blog iirc that cited specific laws. Might have been comments. Regardless, this is the relevant section: "without registration as a designated contract market, swap execution facility, or foreign board of trade, and without registration of its operators." Plus the list of terms below. This is all actually pretty boilerplate and while it sounds dry they are being nice. If they wanted to hurt this they could go much farther.
In short, they've said: We offered you certain terms. You failed to comply so we are withdrawing those terms. If you want to continue to operate under our authority then you must register as a contract market, swap execution facility, board of trade, etc. That's not an exhaustive list. They're saying you could register and operate as one of those. Implicit in that is you could also operate in some other legal structure but they decline to spell that out.
Here's three ways I can think of off the top of my head:
1.) Register as a CFR 17.2.227 platform and instantiate crowdfunded entities per bet.
2.) Operate as an UIGEA exempt entity and emphasize that it is a game but a game of skill.
3.) Register as a Section 5 DCM and basically run the thing as an actual contract market/board of trade.
I'm sure I could think of more. I'm not sure why such options weren't explored. Maybe they were but I can't immediately think of why they'd be a bad option. #2, for example, is incredibly established law because of all the times places like Draft Kings or Fan Duel were sued. #1 is more experimental but was specifically made to get around things like accredited investor requirements that would limit participants otherwise. And so on.
As far as I can tell the backers wanted to carve out their own regulatory niche and change law rather than seeking to find an already compliant structure. Which is a very Silicon Valley attitude to have. And there are payoffs to getting your specific carve out. But the downside is that stuff like this happens and the law might just not change. Someone closer to the prediction market crowd might be able to tell me why in a less speculative way. It's entirely possible they have fancy lawyers who did an analysis. And that'd be interesting to me.
PS: If you think it's sparse keep in mind that is a result of Administrative Procedures Act + Chevron Deference meaning they get an assumption of being correct. They don't have to prove they're right. You have to prove they're wrong. And they get to be their own judge. Which is why rather than laying out a case they just said, "You are no longer allowed to do X. Good day." Suing that they're not allowed to do that is either going to fail or overturn the basis of the entire administrative state. And my money's on failing.
I can see why. It was an interesting read, thank you. For what it's worth, my point is that "break the rules and try to force a new status quo" is a perfectly good strategy. But this could have been done within the rules as well. They CHOSE to try to break things and now are getting upset the government is trying to regulate them. This is, at best, naive.
And it's hypocritical if they aren't libertarian/anarchists. Scott endorsed Elizabeth Warren back when her big push was to make all these regulations even more powerful, more vague, and more in bureaucratic hands. It's weird to see him simultaneously complain about the specific legislation she wants to expand as her keystone policy and to have warm feelings toward her. To pick one example. And it's particularly frustrating because there's very much a Silicon Valley idea of, "Yes, we need a regulatory state. Wait, no, not like that. No, not for us! The rules are for OTHER people!" Which is again what this article reminds me of. I'm very much on the side of less regulation. But both for prediction markets and everyone else.
One argument I got into a few years back was pointing out that the people who want to tear down these barriers are mostly Republicans and if this is really the biggest most important thing then Prediction Markets should go all in on Koch style financial deregulation. And I got replied too with basically, "Republicans icky." Well, fine. I'm not a Republican either. But it says something about the priorities of the movement.
PS: They mention educating orphans. I've never seen anything EA does for orphans and I've looked. Is there something I missed or are they giving themselves credit for stuff they didn't do?
Just because a game involves skill doesn't mean it's not gambling. Poker is gambling but has strategy and skill. Sports betting is gambling, but it's literally the same skills as a prediction market - you're being asked to predict the outcome of an event based on your knowledge of the teams playing.
Draft Kings and Fan Duel and the like are legal and hold themselves out as games of skill. In fact I mentioned that specifically, that the precedents that declared that relevant created a legal safe space that's not being used. As to poker, because the deals of poker are fundamentally random it counts as a game of chance.
Isn’t it deeply in Putin’s interest to have the West/NATO think the likelihood of a nuclear retaliation to any intervention is extremely high? Therefore, I imagine (if he ever thought other decision makers were looking at the prediction markets) he has various hackers/spammers manipulate those markets? Compared to the resources of e.g., Cozy Bear / Fancy Bear it doesn’t take much to manipulate most of these markets.
>he has various hackers/spammers manipulate those markets
Or worse, he does real world things to move the markets which in consequence raise the actual odds. (I don't see this as a real risk now, but in the future, if prediction markets really catch on, there is a chance they do more harm than good for this type of reason.)
But he would do those things even without a prediction market? A big part of politics is using your power to take actions that create the perceptions you want in the minds of your rivals. For example, even without prediction markets he might put nuclear submarines (does Russia even have those?) into position closer to Ukraine, or have nuclear bombers (do they have those?) fly over the country as a provocation, increasing the perceived odds of nuclear attack in the minds of other pols (unless they see through the actions as saber rattling.)
If he cares what the prediction markets say, which is your OP, he (or some other theoretical head of state) might decide that it's easier to manipulate the (future, liquid) markets by, say, firing a nuke into the sea than by trading activity.
This, then, puts NATO on a higher level of alert, raising the risks of accidental escalation.
Sure, but he could already do that. Isn't the point that the prediction market gives him an additional, covert lever? (Assuming a future where policy makers paid attention to prediction markets, but underestimated their potential to be manipulated.)
Scenario 1 -- World with No Prediction Markets (PMs)
Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
.
Scenario 2 -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risk of Russia using nukes rising per PMs, mutters "Excellent" forming a pyramid with his hands and rubbing tips of fingers together.
.
Scenario 3 -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risks of Russia using nukes didn't rise in PMs. Yells "Buy twenty million shares of 'Yes, Russia will use nukes before March 31st 2023' at the market!"
3. Putin sees risk of Russia using nukes rising per PMs, mutters "Excellent" forming a pyramid with his hands while rubbing tips of fingers together.
.
Scenario 4 -- -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risks of Russia using nukes didn't rise in PMs. Yells "Buy twenty million shares of 'Yes, Russia will use nukes before March 31st 2023' at the market!"
3. Odds of Russia using nukes doesn't rise in PMs. Putin says, "Time to day-trade, boys! Let's nuke the Latptev Sea and then buy back half our position in an hour. May as well make a profit. Put all the proceeds on "Yes, Ye will buy Parlor."
.
So I'm saying doing something in the real world to move the markets is a potential *in addition* to manipulating the markets through trading, which, yes, is *also* a lever that wouldn't exist without prediction markets.
AHH, I see what you're saying...so the market creates an incentive to act unpredictably or conceal your true intentions, if you are a well-known figure with high-volume prediction markets that hinge on your behaviors. Of course, this may interact with object-level incentives in complicated ways, and the market may very rarely be big enough to make a significant impact on the real world...but it could happen. It has a "burning down your house for the insurance money" feel to it.
Sometimes, making things legible is worse. There is a whole school of "strategic ambiguity".
If you think there is a substantial chance that enemy is going to launch a first strike despite MAD, moreover you think the probability is rising, the MAD logic strongly suggests that you should launch ASAP in hope of getting a successful pre-emptive strike through.
On the other hand, if you think there is a negligible enough -- effectively zero chance of the enemy launching a first strike (say, they credibly committed to No First Use), you should take the opportunity to launch a conventional / no-nuclear attack.
So what would be the optimal prediction market market probability you'd want to see?
If he wants to make people think the risk of Russia using nukes is high wouldn't the absolute simplest and easiest way just be to say that it is? And yet according to Scott, "the Russians deny it, and saying this is all just Western propaganda intended to scare people." (Although there's no citation there.)
Why he might not want to raise the perceived risk is another question. One possibility is that the Chinese wouldn't like it.
I wouldn't even know in which *direction* to update when Russia denies something.
I remember them denying the planned attack on Ukraine in February 2022, and denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Crimea a few years ago. Which seems like it would make sense to update in the *opposite* direction, but of course this may a selection bias.
What Putin wants is the West to think that odds of him using nuclear weopons are high while Russians thinking that it's low. What he doesn't want is to have an actual comitment to use nuclear weapons.
As soon as he makes a direct and non-plausibly deniable threat - he failed in every regard other than the first one, so he doesn't actually do it.
Sometimes, the way you get your opponent to believe you’ll do something is to say you’ll do it. Sometimes, the way to get your opponent to believe you’ll do something is to repeatedly deny it in contexts where a denial isn’t relevant. Sometimes, you do something else entirely.
On the midterm election, I would point out that our most reliable source of election data, Ann Selzer's Iowa polls, point to a larger Democratic victory than either prediction markets or election forecasters, so count me strongly in the camp of "prediction markets are getting this one wrong".
Ann Selzer's final polls in 2016 and 2020 were both massive outliers, both predicted a large Trump victory, both had articles written about how you shouldn't believe outlier polls, and both were right on the money. Looking all the way back to 2008, she has a better election prediction track record than Nate Silver does: https://secondhandcartography.com/2022/10/15/ann-selzer/.
So when her most recent poll shows the incumbent Republican with only a 3 point lead, I think should make you significantly update towards the Democrats keeping control of the Senate.
If she predicted a large Trump victory in 2020, she is not the most accurate. I hope she is right this time around about the Democratic victory being larger than other polls predict, but she is just one poll.
Why do you say that? In 2020, she polled Trump in Iowa at +7 when no other poll had shown him above +2. He ended up winning Iowa by 8.2. Ignoring everyone else and just using her poll would have you do much better than 538 in Iowa. I don’t know what will happen this year but I’m definitely interested in what she’s saying.
> One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?”
The link to Dynomight at the end of the post is titled "Prediction market does not imply causation". Seems like Scott's interpretation here does rely on causation, and now I'm wondering if prediction markets are useful at all in informing decision making where the decisionmaker intends to affect the market outcome.
The Dynomight post suggests a number of ways for decision makers to use prediction markets.
As another concrete application, in March of 2020 we could of done the following
1. Have the CDC propose 20 policies (e.g. mandatory masks on public transit).
2. Have the CDC construct and subsidize prediction markets for the conditional utility* of adopting and not adopting the policy
3. Have the CDC promise to randomly pick one policy. And then choose to follow it if a random number is less than f(policy_name, utility_implied_by_prediciton_market)
4. Now the CDC can otherwise follow all the recommendations or not. Only pay out the randomly selected market.
The big concern here is that the CDC might choose a policy like "Kill all babies" during the random stage. You can mitigate this in two ways
1. Don't choose absurd policies for consideration.
2. You can choose a good "f". For instance, the naive choice if f(x) = 0.5. However, you might choose f(n, x) = 1/(1+e^(x/1000)) so that if the market says a policy will cause 1000 more deaths, its odds of being enacted are 27% rather than 50%. If it would cause 2000 more deaths, this drops to 12%; 3000 deaths to 5%. The CDC could also change it based on the policy - so if they really wanted to check the "kill all babies" policy, they could multiply the "f" for that policy by 0.001 or something.
* define it as something like (all-cause deaths) - (real GDP) / (10 million)
The quoted language from the PredictIt complaint is boilerplate. The reason it asks the court to say that the CFTC's actions were "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, [and/or] otherwise not in accordance with law" and “without observance of procedure required by law" is that those are literally the phrases in the Administrative Procedure Act that describe when a court should vacate an agency's actions (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706). There are other grounds for doing so -- if the agency isn't authorized by Congress to do what it's doing, if the agency is acting unconstitutionally, etc. But these are two of the most important ones: that the agency's decision was irrational or that it didn't follow the procedures it was was required to. So I wouldn't read too much into that part of the complaint; that section of any complaint challenging any agency action will read similarly.
I'm a liberal Democrat who has sworn off answering telephone polls of any kind. I used to do them and enjoy the process, but the pollsters have abused my hospitality. They ask long and interminable series of picayune questions a hair's-slice distance in topic from the surrounding questions, on topics on which I don't have a strong opinion and hardly know how to answer, especially when the same question is turned to show a different crystal facet. And they aren't allowed to skip or abbreviate a single thing, even if it's the same list given the Nth time. Or the questions are meaningless or too multivalent to answer, like "Do you approve of California's direction?" What does that even mean, anyway?
One time a pollster was asking me an endless series of picayune hair-slicing questions and my brain was getting tired out by the mere process, and I finally burst out, "How much longer is this going to go on?" The pollster assured me were we almost done. Turned out we were indeed almost done - with that section. There was at least one more whole section as long as the first to follow.
At that point I said, "No more," and hung up. And swore never to answer another telephone pollster, even if they beg me, which they have.
Funny how the pollsters are the same across the world. I'm Czech, sometimes the pollsters call me and yeah, I would be ok with answering meaningful questions which do not drag on and on...
But when they ask questions like the one you mention or when they ask questions mechanically like when they asked me about whether I knew a certain local politician (I think he was the local hejtman which is the title used here for the governor of what roughly corresponds to a county in the US) and I said I didn't know him, they then proceeded to ask me whether I though he was doing a good job...I interrupted and said "How can I answer that if I don't even know the guy?" and they insisted in reading the list of possible answers before I had to explicitly say that my answer is "I don't know"...ugh.
At risk of sounding like an idiot, can anyone explain to me how prediction markets are functionally different from sports betting in any meaningful sense? I’ve been wayyyy out of the loop on this, but from what I gather the %chance moves based on where people place their money just like the point spread in a sporting event would. Is this correct or am I missing something? At least on the surface where I stand as a newbie, It’s always explained in a language that makes it seem like a more complex system than what it actually is.
Yes, they're fundamentally the same. They're expected to be an accurate measure of a betting community's net prediction for that event, because if the stated probability is above or below what an individual better believes the true probability is, then betting on it is +EV, and if this happens enough the market probability will shift accordingly.
So if the odds of a X happening at the time of putting your money down are st 50%, then you put your prediction at 60%, are the payouts a reflection of how confident you were when “X” occurs? I.e a person who said there was a 99% chance would theoretically win the most money if X occurs right?
No. Generally, the payout is $1 if X occurs and $0 otherwise. You don't tell the market what you think the odds are. You just buy or sell. If the price of an event is 50¢ (the market thinks there is a 50% of the event occurring), and you think there's a 99% chance, you would buy. It only costs you $0.50 per share, and there's a 99% chance you'll get $1, giving you a profit of $0.50 per share (and a 1% chance you lose your money). The price changes based on what people are willing to buy and sell for.
Ok, so as more people place bets with confidence that the event will occur, that 50cent price will creep upward, and reduce the profit in the $1 per share payout? But then what about if you believe the event *wont* occur? If the odds of an event are placed at 65%, can I place a bet that it won’t happen a 35cents per share and get 65 cents profit?
> how prediction markets are functionally different from sports betting in any meaningful sense?
I have not actually used either, but I think the sport betting works like "the system provides you the probabilities; you decide which of the two options you vote for", while the prediction market works like "you decide the probability of the two options".
From certain perspective, it is the same information used in a slightly different way. If you believe that X happens with probability 30% (and non-X with probability 70%), on a prediction market you specify "X with probability 30%"; on the betting market you check whether the provided probability is smaller than 30%, in which case you bet "X", or greater than 30%, in which case you bet "not X".
But from the perspective of "extracting information from users", the prediction market is clearly more efficient. First, you do not need to provide the probability the users will bet against; the users provide all probabilities by themselves. (Thus, better for voting on things where you have no idea what the actual probability is.) Second, you extract more bits of information from each user.
(I think there are also some betting systems where you only choose the side, and then the money is distributed proportionally to how many people chose either side. Like, if 100 people choose "X" and 200 people choose "non X", then if X happens, the former will win $1.99 for each dollar spent, and if X does not happen, the latter will win $0.49 for each dollar spent. Here, no matter how good you are at predicting X, your outcome still depends on what other people do. So this is completely unlike the prediction market.)
Yeah I guess “the system provides probabilities” is the only real difference. The betting system where you “only choose the side” is a money line, and the odds (and thus payouts) will shift based on what the market is. This is opposed to a point spread, where the odds stay the same but the spread gets bigger or smaller to reflect the information the market brings.
Most sports books today set the initial odds using advanced computer models, are there any prediction markets that set the initial odds of current events based on what an AI says?
Right; that second kind of betting is called parimutuel betting, and it's how North American horse racing works. I think in other countries there are fixed odds, which can change quickly as more bets come in, but in those cases you'll get the payout you were offered a the time of the bet, which is how most sports betting models work.
So prediction markets don't work for something like a full scale nuclear war. Theres no reason to bet on that because even if you win, you can't collect anyway.
You need to structure the bet differently. The person saying "no nuclear war" starts by sending some money *now* to the person saying "yes we are doomed"... and a few years later, if there was no nuclear war, the latter sends *more* money back to the former.
That way, even if there is a nuclear war and we all die, the person who correctly predicted it had some time to enjoy the money.
Funny thing, a person strongly believing that we will all die soon, does not even need a prediction market to place the bet. They can simply borrow as much money as possible from a bank, and spend it without worrying about paying it back. (Of course they lose lots of money if the prediction was wrong.)
Are there any predictions being marketed for "full-scale nuclear war"? There's certainly reason to bet on limited nuclear wars, but if everybody is being strictly rational about that, the positive wagers should be interpreted as ("nuclear weapons will be used against X in timeframe Y", and "there will not be a global nuclear apocalypse shortly thereafter"). Thus the probability of nuclear war will be somewhat underpredicted
> One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: 'Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?'
I'm having doubts about the IR theory baked into this.
Imagine that NATO decision-makers were using forecasts to calculate expected utility like that, and Russian spies found out. Couldn't Russia then announce that its nuclear missiles will launch automatically, if its satellites detect any shipments whatsoever crossing from NATO countries into Ukraine?
Prediction markets would react dramatically. With those new forecasts, wouldn't NATO decision-makers then cut off supplies to Ukraine?
Russia could then extend the same automatic launch procedure threat to another neighbor, then another, and so on.
Nuclear blackmail seems like an issue where maximizing expected utility is not achieved through calculating expected utility but through 1) acting on a qualitative understanding of how threats and credibility work, and 2) making a sharp distinction between defending the status quo and going on offense.
There's no requirement that they mindlessly follow the market's prediction, and market participants are allowed to notice that Russia announces a lot of things of gaseous nature.
What is the overlap in prediction markets for people who made bank on the Trump win of 2016? I feel like Prediction markets, especially the small volume ones that are around now, might be a little more right wing biased.
How accurate were the prediction markets in 2018/2020 vs. the result?
One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?”
--------------
Will that ever be possible? inasmuch as whether you get a nuclear war or not, it's a binary outcome and we're not (from a practical standpoint) in a multiverse with a distribution of results.
I kind of feel the same way when poll results are translated into "Trump has 17% chances of winning". "Oh that's almost a guaranteed loss" says the amateur. The role-player I am knows it's actually not that low - it'll happen. But how is it really helping when Trump actually win? Did he really have only 17% chance and got lucky? Or were the odds far higher?
We don't run elections thousands of time anymore than we run nuclear wars thousands of time. We either get one or we don't.
Here, the whole thing rests on 3 elements and 3 elements only. Will Putin use a nuke to try and save his regime? Given that he escalated to mobilisation rather than accepting defeat/declaring victory and go home, it seems quite possible.
If he does, will his generals follow his orders? Given that, apparently, at least a significant % of his inner circle is more hawkish than he is, that's not impossible at all.
If they do and detonate a nuke in Ukraine, we've been quite clear that NATO would intervene and, at minima, wipe out all Russian forces in Ukraine (though some uncertainty remains around that).
Would Putin (and/or his circle) accept defeat then rather than escalate to nuclear Armageddon? IDK.
> Suppose Russia is losing very badly in Ukraine. Putin, fearing a coup or revolution at home if he gives up, decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon, ie a “small” nuke more suited to winning battles than destroying cities. He nukes a Ukrainian battlefield position.
Haha, no, typical Western nonsense. You guys have no idea how Putin thinks. Why would he nuke Ukrainian soldiers in a war he is going to lose anyway? That does not make sense at all.
*If* he is going to drop a nuke on Ukraine, he will drop it on *civilians* instead. Conditional on the nuke being fired, 80% probability it will be fired on a city with population 50000 or more. That would bring him much greater popularity at home than destroying some ultimately irrelevant battlefield.
Putin actually claims that Ukrainians and Russians are a single people, and this not-war is to get rid of a Western-propped nazi regime, so an obviously civilian-targeted nuke wouldn't win him much approval at home. If things ever get truly desperate I'd sooner expect an outrigh all-out attack against NATO instead.
Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale, and the Russian people, insofar as their opinion even matters to the Russian elites, approve by a majority. Ukrainians evidently refuse to become Russian again, so they had it coming.
In any case, the Russian political system no longer depends on the approval of the masses, and the rational choice for the average Russian is to agree with whatever the leaders decide to do. Under the current political system, only the approval of the elites matters, and their preferences are vastly different from those of regular people.
>Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale
Not something you'll remotely hear from Russian propaganda, and Russians generally don't have easy access to anything else.
>Russian political system no longer depends on the approval of the masses
Every system does, in the end. When millions go out into the streets, it's no longer feasible to suppress them. I'd agree that it's unlikely that Putinism is going to end that way, some sort of elite coup would probably happen first, but I'd expect Putin to preempt that by a suicidal move either way.
Yet you hear Russian talking heads suggest all sort of things you'd be forgiven to think came from someone like Goebbels.
They talked about hanging uncooperative Ukrainians as a warning to others, they openly discussed the need to "re-educate" the entire Ukrainian nation (and kill those who won't comply / send them to Siberia), some actually advocated nuclear bombing of Kiyv. They are celebrating the indiscriminate V2-like bombing of Ukrainian cities with Irainian drones that's currently going on (albeit they are presenting that as targetting military infrastructure).
Those in Russia who strongly oppose this are ... well, mostly not in Russia any more. Those who just keep their heads down and hope it all blows over without them being drafted (the majority of Russians who are still in Russia I'd guess) will only care about this insofar as it endangers them personally. They are completely apathetic and won't probably care all that much even if Russia loses.
Then there are the Russian nazis, the ultranationalists, I don't know how many of those there are but I'd guess something like 20-25% of the population (to varying degrees)? Those are the ones calling for "re-education of Ukrainians", hanging etc. and they would be cheering if Putin sent a nuke on civilians. They literally are just like the German Nazis, they see Ukrainians as lesser people who can at best hope to be re-educated to become Russians "again" or who they believe need to be exterminated. This is also Putin's political base. Some are even more extremist than Putin is himself, but he needs to appease these voices first, because if someone is an immediate threat to him it is these people in case they stop seeing him as their leader.
If Putin nuked a Ukrainian city, these people would cheer and the "silent majority" would not not try to overthrow him for that. However, the Russian army might. Or rather they might decide to overthrow him if he every gives such an order without complying with it.
The Russian (conventional) army is probably already quite angry at Putin. They are being micromanaged, scapegoated (although they probably actually are very incompetent and corrupt) and they are suffering the brunt of the war. They know that if Putin nukes something in Ukraine, the likely western response is a massive (conventional) bombardment of all Russian positions in Ukraine by NATO and probably also NATO boots on the ground and that this would wipe out the Russian army in Ukraine in a month or so. Some might also be afraid of a possible further nuclear escalation and people usually value their own lives and the lives of their families over ideology.
So I'd say that if there is something preventing Putin from nuking Ukraine, it is only the fear that the Russian army simply would not comply (out of fear of a western retribution). And also the Russian relationship with China would probably get a lot colder after that too and Putin probably doesn't want to lose his only powerful semi-ally.
>Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale
What is the evidence of this? Aren't they just like, conducting a war? These days we say conducting a war *is* an atrocity, but fundementally what are the supposed atrocities that are different from what went on in other wars of conquest between industrial nations?
I can never get straight if there is actually anything to this atrocity charge byeond "civilians and powerplants and stuff are getting targeted/hit sometimes", or "some soldiers did some nasty shit when they thought they could get away with it", which umm yeah that is what war is.
Imo the Bucha massacre counts as an atrocity. It did involve the killing of >50 civilians (including children), rape (also of children), torture and the mutilation of bodies. That's not quite My Lai perhaps but pretty bad still.
That all sounds like a bunch of politicized nonsense other than the Bucha thing. Once again under that schema nearly every major war involves massive atrocities on both sides. In which case what work is the word actually doing other than signifying that they are the enemy and we would rather they just surrender.
I would rather save the word for actual atrocities so that we can better identify them and preserve some of the function of the word.
The rhetoric about "single people" is just an excuse for annexation. If Ukrainians are in fact merely Russians in denial, then there is no war between two nations; it's just Russia sorting out its internal affairs. And it is not a cultural genocide if you ban a language that didn't truly exist anyway, or destroy museums and textbooks which only contained fake history.
However, let's not forget that Ukrainians are collectively guilty of being Nazis. And it is a self-evident truth for all Russians, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with killing Nazis. Kill the ones who resist, then reeducate the rest.
Therefore, if a nuke drops on an Ukrainian city, it will be reported as "thousands of Nazis destroyed", and no one in Russian media will challenge this fact.
I don't exactly disagree with any of this, provided that nuking would actually lead to an unconditional Ukrainian surrender, which will be accepted by the West. Everybody loves a winner, a victory makes people forgive and forget many things, but I doubt that even Putin is crazy enough to seriously expect such a turn of event.
In what sense is having all his prediction market content grouped up in a regular series with “Mantic Monday” in the title not already what you asked for?
Thanks for pointing that out - to my embarrassment must admit that I had not realised that this is what "Mantic Monday" is about, and at first glance I thought some of the short links at the end were not related to markets.
> I am not a lawyer, but it sounds kind of like they’re saying “the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things”. I am split between the part of me which hates government regulators doing bad things, and the part of me which feels like this is how you get a cover-your-ass-ocracy that never does anything at all without fifteen layers of paperwork and ten trillion dollars per action.
Weird. I don't agree that the argument here is "the decision was bad, and you're only supposed to do good things". There are plenty of laws that specify that only good things are allowed, and bad things will be illegal because they are bad. But I don't think this is in that category.
But I agree with the conclusion; this is exactly how you get a bureaucracy that isn't capable of doing anything except generating protective layers of non-action. I think the argument being made is "there's a process for changing the rules, and you didn't follow it, so your decision never actually took effect". And the validity our system bestows on that complaint ensures that the maximum speed at which things can happen is essentially a stop.
The APA isn't my primary area of expertise or practice (and so if anyone who practices with it more regularly wants to weight in please do)., but it's a little glib to summarize the allegations made under the APA as "the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things” -- while that's invariably the *driver* of these types of Complaints (and they are a source of significant bureaucratic friction), the specific complaint here is very much about procedure and touches on a pretty core part of the APA: specifically, that agencies generally can't just decide to do stuff without publicizing their rationale and, typically, having a period of public notice and public comment prior to issuance.
Agencies changing course on a whim are said to be acting in a manner that is "arbitrary and capricious" -- the basic idea is that agencies have a great deal of legislative power but they can't exercise it without jumping through enough hoops to indicate that there's a genuine rationale behind their decision and, moreover, one that amounts to at least a little more than "the president wants more / less regulation."
In practice, this can can easily amount to just requiring a lot of generation of paperwork and public comments that can be ignored, and the agencies can get away with a great deal so long as they do enough ass-covering, but in theory it's designed to limit *exactly* what PredictIt is alleging here -- random reversals in agency policy seemingly done at the whim of executive branch officials to whom a great deal of legislative power has been delegated.
Particularly in instances in which an agency pulls a complete 180 without any compelling factual developments indicating why the previous policy was inappropriate, courts are going to be generally be more skeptical of agency behavior and treat this as an instance in which throwing sand in the gears is salutary, and a court may end up reversing the agency's decision. In practice this can end up just being "come back with better documentation," but delay of implementation (e.g. until the next administration replaces all the top personnel with people who might have different ideas) can often be a win for the challenger in a practical sense.
In theory, the shortcut for agencies trying to get things past APA review instead of being stuck in APA-Complaint hell for four-to-eight years is to basically have an ironclad set of well-documented rationale for its decision, abide by notice and comment procedures, and then show these to the court who tells the plaintiffs to pound sand. Sadly I can't speak to how well that actually works in practice, but it seems that we do, in fact, get new regulations from time to time. The Executive seems to be basically the only branch of government that actually *does* anything these days.
This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, etc. etc.
I would like to add another prediction market source about the Senate elections, on Futuur only 41% believes the Republicans will flip the US Senate elections
In short link link number four [0], one solution offered for some scenarios is to resolve a small number of prediction markets selected randomly. The downside is that a market which will get resolved 5% of the time will probably not offer a good ROI even if you can predict the outcome much better than your competitors.
One way to solve this would be to allow people to place their money on multiple markets at once and insure them against the case where more markets resolve than they have money for. If the probability of the market resolving is fixed in advance (like "we will fund 5% of the startup ideas randomly just to resolve the markets"), it would be trivial to calculate odds.
So an investor with 1$ could either invest 20$ in one market which resolves with p=5% (and lose everything 95% of the time) or they could place 1$ in 20$ different such markets (and pay some insurance to cover the case where more than one market resolves and they would be on the hook for more than 1$).
Good luck convincing anyone that this is not gambling, though.
Edit: also, could conditional markets for event B (nuke) given some event A (no fly zone) be modeled by just having markets predicting A, B, A AND B?
The Dynomight link in number four is by far the most interesting and important point here. The short summary is that conditional prediction markets just give correlation and if you want to use them to make decisions, you want causality. Seems obvious in retrospect. They also discuss how to work around this maybe.
The NASA market (that they'll land someone on the moon before the end of 2024) is utterly bonkers - there's not a snowballs hope in hell of NASA getting someone to the moon a year BEFORE they plan to.
Could metaculus not solicit donations (or some other way to acquire money) and then divide up the donations and award them to the best forecasters on a regular basis? Or is this loophole still blocked by law somehow?
> I am also the founder and former CEO of the business intelligence software company TIBCO Software, which was one of the first companies to facilitate instant communication in financial markets. In 2016, I founded an early stage investment firm called Bow Capital. I have a long time interest in the domain of business prediction. In 2006, I wrote a book called The Power to Predict about the importance of anticipating the future for business success. In 2011, I followed up that book with The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future–Just Enough. This belief that predicting the future is absolutely crucial to commercial success has convinced me to support Kalshi’s submission to the CFTC to list contracts on the outcome of Congressional elections.
I still don't understand how you measure prediction accuracy of percentage predictions for unique events. An event will either happen or not happen. You can say whether the event will or will not happen and then determine whether you were right or wrong. But if you say there is a 75% chance the event will happen and it does, do you say you were 50% right? Is this considered a valid measurement of success?
You basically can't measure it for single events. What you can do is measure the accuracy of different *forecasters* over many events. The most common way to do that is to say E=0 if the event doesn't happen and E=1 if it does. Then, if you gave it a probability of P, we say that your "error" is (E-P)². If you and I forecast many things and you have a lower average value of (E-P)², then you can claim to be better than me. You can also decompose this "Brier score" into things like calibration/refinement or calibration/resolution/uncertainty.
Well, always making predictions of 50% will give you an average score of 0.5²=0.25, which isn't the worst possible score! But if you're able to go closer to 100% on events that do happen, you can do get much better scores. With clairvoyant predictions of always 100% or 0% you can have an average score of 0.
I suspect the rise in "NO" in September 12 is somehow connected to Russian regional elections (they lasted from September 9 to September 11). But it is really strange, I'd update in the opposite direction: the results of these elections really favoured United Russia (the party that has the majority in Duma, which supports Putin, and is the most popular). It is not fully clear to me what caused these results: changes in minds (according to polls, the support of UR has grown with the beginning of the war), arrests of oppositional municipal deputies (and denial of their registration) or falsifications (distant electronic elections might be easy to falsificate). Maybe people, who bought "NO" expected post-electoral protests?
(Please keep in mind that English isn't my first language, I'm sorry for the mistakes I make.)
I have observed some ... interesting behavior with 538, lately, in which the list of polls used as supporting evidence appears to be getting modified retroactively, and a tendency for the adjustments made to the polls to be -away- from the mean of the polls (which if you're being rigorous, you don't change your methodology midway through, so great - but also, maybe this is a sign that your methodology wasn't great to begin with).
My personal guess at the moment is that Republicans are going to do far better than the polls may currently suggest, and the polls will show an apparently-mysterious sudden Republican shift over the next couple of weeks. (Basically, I think pollsters are telling people what they want to hear, but this can only continue until we get near the election, when they will correct - possibly even overcorrect - so they appear accurate after the fact.)
Can you clarify what you're referring to with 538? They generally don't change their methodology in the middle of an election season. Do you have a specific example in mind?
I have taken screenshots of their polling data one day, then checked it again the next, and historical (non-current - as in, four or five days previous) polls have been added / removed from their lists.
Started paying attention when their graph showed anomalous behavior with respect to the list of polls - going up/down when the polls were basically holding static.
Insofar as the list of polls they cite as evidence for their graphs are evidence for their graphs, retroactively adjusting evidence isn't a good look.
"Tactical nukes wouldn’t really be useful in Ukraine; the battle lines are too spread out and there’s no single place where a nuclear explosion could take out a substantial portion of Ukraine’s forces. "
This is misleading. It's been about thirty years since tactical nuclear weapons were expected to destroy enemy forces on or near the battle lines. Tactical nuclear weapons are expected to be used against logistics hubs, command centers, airbases, and other such targets behind the battle lines. I would expect that Ukraine has been trying to spread those out, but many of them are tied to things like roads, railroads, and runways that are built in peacetime to exploit economies of scale and concentration.
We've seen Russia's offensives grind to a halt because the Ukrainians kept blowing up their headquarters and supply depots; Russia hasn't been able to do the same because they're critically low on precision-guided missiles to do it with. But if they can achieve the same results with missiles that don't need to be precise to be devastatingly effective, they can plausibly stop Ukraine's counteroffensives and then some.
If you want to argue that this sort of thing is "strategic" rather than "tactical", you can, but you'll be using different definitions than most of the people you are talking to and that leads to unnecessary confusion.
That's an interesting point. Of course, this also means that using tactical nukes is not actually an instant win (like destroying 90% of the enemy battle forces would be).
The Russian narrative that the Ukraine is basically a part of Russia taken over by some Nazis seems not particularly effective in othering the Ukrainian population. Nuking a faraway country of evil foreigners would be an easy propaganda sell, nuking what you consider to be your own territory which you are trying to liberate from the yoke of some evil renegades would likely hurt morale.
Meh, the United States bombed the crap out of a whole lot of France before liberating it, and in the process killed more innocent civilians on D-Day alone than we did in every drone strike in the entire War On Terror. Nobody, nit even the French, ever gave us much grief about it. If you're bombing a place that's full of Nazis, people generally give you a pass on just about anything else.
As for nuclear weapons as an instant win: nuclear weapons plus an army capable of effective offensive action, is likely to be a near-instant win against an enemy without nukes, because an army without supplies or command or air cover is not going to be resisting for very long. Nobody's really had much cause to consider the case of "nuclear weapons but buffoonishly inept army" before, and I hope we don't have to learn that one by experience.
Fwiw, reading this on October 21, some of the prediction markets no longer match the text, which presumably will become more and more true. Is it too annoying to put a screenshot of the market at the time as well or write the probability in each case (you did in several). Or maybe it doesn't matter because this isn't meant to be read days or weeks later?
Since this goes so far back, I can't credit that it's because R's distrust pollsters. (In 1980, what had they to fear?) Or poll fatigue, which I think really kicked in in 2012. Or undersampling cell phone users. It's just guessing, but I suspect discrepancies in poll results is from the already known phenomenon that R voters are more likely to actually get to the voting booth on Election Day. So D's would show up stronger in polling. Then of course we can expect news sites to be more likely to highlight polls if it makes their side look strong. If you were really doing your best to report accurately, and get proportions of D's and R's and I's right in your polling, you still couldn't very well adjust for D's being less committed to voting except by weighting D's answers less, which looks pretty unfair. So I'll tentatively attribute the difference to, well, not malice.
That NASA market seems to be poorly named, as I'm pretty sure that NASA will have landed a person on the moon before 2025. Say, about 55 years before.
Yeah.
The full rules do specify "after Issuance", which is "on or after October 21, 2021", so it's not free money.
(It's also based on a NASA announcement, which would seem to technically cover NASA issuing a a press release about magical travel to the moon on April 1, 2024, and it resolves the question "yes" even though everybody knows they didn't. But that possibility is probably is covered by "Additionally, as outlined in Rule 7.2 of the Rulebook, if any event or any circumstance which may have a material impact on the reliability or transparency of a Contract’s Source Agency or the Underlying related to the Contract arises, Kalshi retains the authority to designate a new Source Agency and Underlying for that Contract and to change any associated Contract specifications after the first day of trading".)
The blip in Putin's chances of remaining president around Sep 12th corresponds to the major counteroffensive Ukraine pulled off in Kharkiv oblast around that time, when they liberated tonnes of territory.
or maybe just someone trying to make a big profit with the higher odds
Thanks again to Substack for offering to support Manifold embeds, and to Scott for embedding them into this post! It's super gratifying (and humbling) to see our markets becoming elevated into the discourse around a bunch of current events; as always, please let us know if you have thoughts on how our site and our markets could be improved~
Also, for those of you specifically interested in the midterm elections, my teammates Stephen and Fede have created this neat election map, visualizing the markets for contentious senate and governor races: https://manifold.markets/midterms
Bonus: we're hosting a $500 forecasting tournament on the 2022 midterms! Check it out here: https://manifold.markets/group/us-2022-midterms/about
> The owner of the Sacramento Kings, for some reason
Fun fact! The owner of the Sacramento Kings, Vivek Ranadive, is the father of one of Manifold's investors Aneel (https://www.somacap.com/member/aneel-ranadive/)
The samotsvety graph seems wrong/confusing? i.e. the pink section is way bigger than 1%
You're right. There are several graphs in the post, but none of them match what I would expect - I bet I'm misunderstanding something. I'll eave it out for now.
I think the first graph of this type from that post (which has the same numbers in the key as the one you had here before) accurately depicts their "1 year staggering times" summary table.
Also, the link for the Manifold Market team's endorsement of Kalshi is wrong; it's trying to go to a local file on your computer.
The "Karlstack gives more details" link is a duplicate link to Eisenberg's statement, it seems like the correct link should be https://karlstack.substack.com/p/exclusive-the-man-who-may-have-milked
Sorry, fixed.
16% chance of the Iranian regime collapsing by EOY 2022, 20% by 2023, and 34% by 2024? That seems like either a market that shouldn't be trusted or a bunch of predictions that it's especially unlikely to happen in 2023 specifically, no?
Apparently there's multiple manifold markets about me now, and they also spell my name different ways. Is there some rule that if I'm mentioned more than once the spelling must be different each time?
Of course! The Eisenberg exclusion principle -- no two Eisenberg markets can use the exact same spelling simultaneously within a single prediction system.
Edit -- or the Eisenberg uncertainty principle. The more certain you are about the probabilities, the more uncertain you must be about the spelling.
On the polling question, I'd point out that polls overestimated Republicans in 2018:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/2018_generic_congressional_vote-6185.html
As for how to square that with the events in 2016 and 2020, a few possibilities:
* Polling error is random
* Polls have a systemic pro-Dem bias these days *and* an element of random error.
* Polls have a systemic pro-Dem bias when trump is on the ballot
An related question is, why didn't pollsters fix the issues from 2016 to 2020?
I seem to remember people complaining, after 2016, that the issue was not weighting by education, such that the polling models had a higher portion of the electorate be college grads than what the norm was. And they would post examples of polls still making this mistake in the run-up to 2020. Perhaps they fixed it now, or perhaps they will stubbornly refuse to ever fix it (or perhaps they compensated but then simultaneously the problem got worse).
I would factor in whether there are any incentives regarding poll results. For example, I would imagine Trump opponents would want to read a poll saying Trump didn't stand a chance of winning.
What doesn't seem to be factored in is the potential effect pol; results publishing might have on the vote. For example, if someone trusts these numbers and live in a swing state, they might not prioritize voting if Trump has no chance of winning whereas if he did, whether or not tp vote might seem to take on more importance. Living In New Jersey, I feel its "safe" to vote for a third party as the state will almost certainly "go blue" in the federal elections.
On incentives - I think wishful thinking is one for people on both sides, but I would imagine that for most pollsters, getting it right is the number one thing. Especially because I think it's lucrative to be an internal pollster, and I don't think the campaigns themselves want polls based on wishful thinking.
Campaigns want a good number accurate polls, but they also want some noisy polls, so that they can leak one of them that promotes the message they need at that moment. This is why fivethirtyeight generally doesn’t include campaign-sponsored polls in a lot of their calculations, because the ones that are public are often selected for noise.
I've always assumed that the ones that are released are a small portion of the internal polls that exist overall, and are a natural byproduct of doing a lot of polls, so what the campaigns want is accuracy and the noise piece will take care of itself.
I suspect something like that is basically right. But I would not be surprised if they conduct a poll as a sample of 1500 people over 3 days, but then report a "poll" consisting of just the 500 people sampled on one of those days - they get the advantage of large sample size for their own internal accuracy, and of small sample size for the possibility of noisier individual results for reporting.
Rasmussen seems to have made a business model out of being slightly more favourable to Republicans than any other poll.
I'm looking at that link, and is there a poll besides Rasmussen that overestimated Republicans in 2018?
For those of you more into prediction markets: Why are they suing to challenge laws instead of seeking to comply? The notice I read specifically mentioned safe harbors they could take advantage of. That wasn't just them being polite. That was the regulatory agency explaining what they needed to do to be allowed to continue to operate.
Prediction Markets are not gambling or investments. They're clearly games of skill with rewards at the end which are definitionally not gambling. Alternatively, if they must continue to operate as investments, CFR 17.2.227 provides another safe harbor but one with somewhat more complex tax implications.
Also, if the rationalist community somehow takes down the Administrative Procedures Act it will instantly become the hero of libertarians everywhere. Which would basically be necessary to argue that this finding was invalid. Chevron deference and all that.
What safe harbors are you thinking of? My impression was that their notice was just https://business.cch.com/srd/22-08(1).pdf , which whatever you think of Administrative Procedures does seem kind of sparse and ill-explained.
I read something more substantial elsewhere on this blog iirc that cited specific laws. Might have been comments. Regardless, this is the relevant section: "without registration as a designated contract market, swap execution facility, or foreign board of trade, and without registration of its operators." Plus the list of terms below. This is all actually pretty boilerplate and while it sounds dry they are being nice. If they wanted to hurt this they could go much farther.
In short, they've said: We offered you certain terms. You failed to comply so we are withdrawing those terms. If you want to continue to operate under our authority then you must register as a contract market, swap execution facility, board of trade, etc. That's not an exhaustive list. They're saying you could register and operate as one of those. Implicit in that is you could also operate in some other legal structure but they decline to spell that out.
Here's three ways I can think of off the top of my head:
1.) Register as a CFR 17.2.227 platform and instantiate crowdfunded entities per bet.
2.) Operate as an UIGEA exempt entity and emphasize that it is a game but a game of skill.
3.) Register as a Section 5 DCM and basically run the thing as an actual contract market/board of trade.
I'm sure I could think of more. I'm not sure why such options weren't explored. Maybe they were but I can't immediately think of why they'd be a bad option. #2, for example, is incredibly established law because of all the times places like Draft Kings or Fan Duel were sued. #1 is more experimental but was specifically made to get around things like accredited investor requirements that would limit participants otherwise. And so on.
As far as I can tell the backers wanted to carve out their own regulatory niche and change law rather than seeking to find an already compliant structure. Which is a very Silicon Valley attitude to have. And there are payoffs to getting your specific carve out. But the downside is that stuff like this happens and the law might just not change. Someone closer to the prediction market crowd might be able to tell me why in a less speculative way. It's entirely possible they have fancy lawyers who did an analysis. And that'd be interesting to me.
PS: If you think it's sparse keep in mind that is a result of Administrative Procedures Act + Chevron Deference meaning they get an assumption of being correct. They don't have to prove they're right. You have to prove they're wrong. And they get to be their own judge. Which is why rather than laying out a case they just said, "You are no longer allowed to do X. Good day." Suing that they're not allowed to do that is either going to fail or overturn the basis of the entire administrative state. And my money's on failing.
Somehow this reminded me of Effective Illegalism as presented by Slime Mold Time Mold https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/08/04/effective-illegalism/
I can see why. It was an interesting read, thank you. For what it's worth, my point is that "break the rules and try to force a new status quo" is a perfectly good strategy. But this could have been done within the rules as well. They CHOSE to try to break things and now are getting upset the government is trying to regulate them. This is, at best, naive.
And it's hypocritical if they aren't libertarian/anarchists. Scott endorsed Elizabeth Warren back when her big push was to make all these regulations even more powerful, more vague, and more in bureaucratic hands. It's weird to see him simultaneously complain about the specific legislation she wants to expand as her keystone policy and to have warm feelings toward her. To pick one example. And it's particularly frustrating because there's very much a Silicon Valley idea of, "Yes, we need a regulatory state. Wait, no, not like that. No, not for us! The rules are for OTHER people!" Which is again what this article reminds me of. I'm very much on the side of less regulation. But both for prediction markets and everyone else.
One argument I got into a few years back was pointing out that the people who want to tear down these barriers are mostly Republicans and if this is really the biggest most important thing then Prediction Markets should go all in on Koch style financial deregulation. And I got replied too with basically, "Republicans icky." Well, fine. I'm not a Republican either. But it says something about the priorities of the movement.
PS: They mention educating orphans. I've never seen anything EA does for orphans and I've looked. Is there something I missed or are they giving themselves credit for stuff they didn't do?
Just because a game involves skill doesn't mean it's not gambling. Poker is gambling but has strategy and skill. Sports betting is gambling, but it's literally the same skills as a prediction market - you're being asked to predict the outcome of an event based on your knowledge of the teams playing.
Draft Kings and Fan Duel and the like are legal and hold themselves out as games of skill. In fact I mentioned that specifically, that the precedents that declared that relevant created a legal safe space that's not being used. As to poker, because the deals of poker are fundamentally random it counts as a game of chance.
Isn’t it deeply in Putin’s interest to have the West/NATO think the likelihood of a nuclear retaliation to any intervention is extremely high? Therefore, I imagine (if he ever thought other decision makers were looking at the prediction markets) he has various hackers/spammers manipulate those markets? Compared to the resources of e.g., Cozy Bear / Fancy Bear it doesn’t take much to manipulate most of these markets.
However I do love prediction markets and trust them most of the time. Not on Russia nuclear retaliation questions though.
>he has various hackers/spammers manipulate those markets
Or worse, he does real world things to move the markets which in consequence raise the actual odds. (I don't see this as a real risk now, but in the future, if prediction markets really catch on, there is a chance they do more harm than good for this type of reason.)
But he would do those things even without a prediction market? A big part of politics is using your power to take actions that create the perceptions you want in the minds of your rivals. For example, even without prediction markets he might put nuclear submarines (does Russia even have those?) into position closer to Ukraine, or have nuclear bombers (do they have those?) fly over the country as a provocation, increasing the perceived odds of nuclear attack in the minds of other pols (unless they see through the actions as saber rattling.)
If he cares what the prediction markets say, which is your OP, he (or some other theoretical head of state) might decide that it's easier to manipulate the (future, liquid) markets by, say, firing a nuke into the sea than by trading activity.
This, then, puts NATO on a higher level of alert, raising the risks of accidental escalation.
Sure, but he could already do that. Isn't the point that the prediction market gives him an additional, covert lever? (Assuming a future where policy makers paid attention to prediction markets, but underestimated their potential to be manipulated.)
Exactly!
Agree it gives him a covert lever. I'm saying:
Scenario 1 -- World with No Prediction Markets (PMs)
Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
.
Scenario 2 -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risk of Russia using nukes rising per PMs, mutters "Excellent" forming a pyramid with his hands and rubbing tips of fingers together.
.
Scenario 3 -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risks of Russia using nukes didn't rise in PMs. Yells "Buy twenty million shares of 'Yes, Russia will use nukes before March 31st 2023' at the market!"
3. Putin sees risk of Russia using nukes rising per PMs, mutters "Excellent" forming a pyramid with his hands while rubbing tips of fingers together.
.
Scenario 4 -- -- World with Closely Observed PMs
1. Putin talks up the threat he may use nukes.
2. Putin sees risks of Russia using nukes didn't rise in PMs. Yells "Buy twenty million shares of 'Yes, Russia will use nukes before March 31st 2023' at the market!"
3. Odds of Russia using nukes doesn't rise in PMs. Putin says, "Time to day-trade, boys! Let's nuke the Latptev Sea and then buy back half our position in an hour. May as well make a profit. Put all the proceeds on "Yes, Ye will buy Parlor."
.
So I'm saying doing something in the real world to move the markets is a potential *in addition* to manipulating the markets through trading, which, yes, is *also* a lever that wouldn't exist without prediction markets.
AHH, I see what you're saying...so the market creates an incentive to act unpredictably or conceal your true intentions, if you are a well-known figure with high-volume prediction markets that hinge on your behaviors. Of course, this may interact with object-level incentives in complicated ways, and the market may very rarely be big enough to make a significant impact on the real world...but it could happen. It has a "burning down your house for the insurance money" feel to it.
Yes they have ICBM subs, analogous to the Ohio class, not sure how many are currently operaitonal, but I believe some. Also they have bombers.
Pet peeve: submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are not intercontinental, so not ICBMs.
Hum... seems like the Trident D5 range is in the intercontinental range.
It's not (just) about range; SLBMs are launched from underwater, not a landmass.
Sometimes, making things legible is worse. There is a whole school of "strategic ambiguity".
If you think there is a substantial chance that enemy is going to launch a first strike despite MAD, moreover you think the probability is rising, the MAD logic strongly suggests that you should launch ASAP in hope of getting a successful pre-emptive strike through.
On the other hand, if you think there is a negligible enough -- effectively zero chance of the enemy launching a first strike (say, they credibly committed to No First Use), you should take the opportunity to launch a conventional / no-nuclear attack.
So what would be the optimal prediction market market probability you'd want to see?
If he wants to make people think the risk of Russia using nukes is high wouldn't the absolute simplest and easiest way just be to say that it is? And yet according to Scott, "the Russians deny it, and saying this is all just Western propaganda intended to scare people." (Although there's no citation there.)
Why he might not want to raise the perceived risk is another question. One possibility is that the Chinese wouldn't like it.
I wouldn't even know in which *direction* to update when Russia denies something.
I remember them denying the planned attack on Ukraine in February 2022, and denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Crimea a few years ago. Which seems like it would make sense to update in the *opposite* direction, but of course this may a selection bias.
What Putin wants is the West to think that odds of him using nuclear weopons are high while Russians thinking that it's low. What he doesn't want is to have an actual comitment to use nuclear weapons.
As soon as he makes a direct and non-plausibly deniable threat - he failed in every regard other than the first one, so he doesn't actually do it.
Sometimes, the way you get your opponent to believe you’ll do something is to say you’ll do it. Sometimes, the way to get your opponent to believe you’ll do something is to repeatedly deny it in contexts where a denial isn’t relevant. Sometimes, you do something else entirely.
Zelensky and Biden seem committed to making people think a nuclear attack is likely, which would make it weird for Putin to want that too.
what about Womantic monday
wascally wabbit!
I sent Kalshi a petty email too, not sorry for it. If they really sabotaged PredictIt they should feel bad!
My comment for the CFTC was just "Bring back PredictIt"
On the midterm election, I would point out that our most reliable source of election data, Ann Selzer's Iowa polls, point to a larger Democratic victory than either prediction markets or election forecasters, so count me strongly in the camp of "prediction markets are getting this one wrong".
Ann Selzer's final polls in 2016 and 2020 were both massive outliers, both predicted a large Trump victory, both had articles written about how you shouldn't believe outlier polls, and both were right on the money. Looking all the way back to 2008, she has a better election prediction track record than Nate Silver does: https://secondhandcartography.com/2022/10/15/ann-selzer/.
So when her most recent poll shows the incumbent Republican with only a 3 point lead, I think should make you significantly update towards the Democrats keeping control of the Senate.
If she predicted a large Trump victory in 2020, she is not the most accurate. I hope she is right this time around about the Democratic victory being larger than other polls predict, but she is just one poll.
She only polls Iowa, and actually underestimated trumps win there, but much much less so than everyone else.
I think this argument is, in substance, supporting Matthew's point.
Why do you say that? In 2020, she polled Trump in Iowa at +7 when no other poll had shown him above +2. He ended up winning Iowa by 8.2. Ignoring everyone else and just using her poll would have you do much better than 538 in Iowa. I don’t know what will happen this year but I’m definitely interested in what she’s saying.
Because the central claim isn't whether or not her polls accurately reflect Iowa, but whether or not they accurately reflect the entire country.
Scott writes:
> One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?”
The link to Dynomight at the end of the post is titled "Prediction market does not imply causation". Seems like Scott's interpretation here does rely on causation, and now I'm wondering if prediction markets are useful at all in informing decision making where the decisionmaker intends to affect the market outcome.
The Dynomight post suggests a number of ways for decision makers to use prediction markets.
As another concrete application, in March of 2020 we could of done the following
1. Have the CDC propose 20 policies (e.g. mandatory masks on public transit).
2. Have the CDC construct and subsidize prediction markets for the conditional utility* of adopting and not adopting the policy
3. Have the CDC promise to randomly pick one policy. And then choose to follow it if a random number is less than f(policy_name, utility_implied_by_prediciton_market)
4. Now the CDC can otherwise follow all the recommendations or not. Only pay out the randomly selected market.
The big concern here is that the CDC might choose a policy like "Kill all babies" during the random stage. You can mitigate this in two ways
1. Don't choose absurd policies for consideration.
2. You can choose a good "f". For instance, the naive choice if f(x) = 0.5. However, you might choose f(n, x) = 1/(1+e^(x/1000)) so that if the market says a policy will cause 1000 more deaths, its odds of being enacted are 27% rather than 50%. If it would cause 2000 more deaths, this drops to 12%; 3000 deaths to 5%. The CDC could also change it based on the policy - so if they really wanted to check the "kill all babies" policy, they could multiply the "f" for that policy by 0.001 or something.
* define it as something like (all-cause deaths) - (real GDP) / (10 million)
The quoted language from the PredictIt complaint is boilerplate. The reason it asks the court to say that the CFTC's actions were "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, [and/or] otherwise not in accordance with law" and “without observance of procedure required by law" is that those are literally the phrases in the Administrative Procedure Act that describe when a court should vacate an agency's actions (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706). There are other grounds for doing so -- if the agency isn't authorized by Congress to do what it's doing, if the agency is acting unconstitutionally, etc. But these are two of the most important ones: that the agency's decision was irrational or that it didn't follow the procedures it was was required to. So I wouldn't read too much into that part of the complaint; that section of any complaint challenging any agency action will read similarly.
"Republicans distrust pollsters," it says.
I'm a liberal Democrat who has sworn off answering telephone polls of any kind. I used to do them and enjoy the process, but the pollsters have abused my hospitality. They ask long and interminable series of picayune questions a hair's-slice distance in topic from the surrounding questions, on topics on which I don't have a strong opinion and hardly know how to answer, especially when the same question is turned to show a different crystal facet. And they aren't allowed to skip or abbreviate a single thing, even if it's the same list given the Nth time. Or the questions are meaningless or too multivalent to answer, like "Do you approve of California's direction?" What does that even mean, anyway?
One time a pollster was asking me an endless series of picayune hair-slicing questions and my brain was getting tired out by the mere process, and I finally burst out, "How much longer is this going to go on?" The pollster assured me were we almost done. Turned out we were indeed almost done - with that section. There was at least one more whole section as long as the first to follow.
At that point I said, "No more," and hung up. And swore never to answer another telephone pollster, even if they beg me, which they have.
Funny how the pollsters are the same across the world. I'm Czech, sometimes the pollsters call me and yeah, I would be ok with answering meaningful questions which do not drag on and on...
But when they ask questions like the one you mention or when they ask questions mechanically like when they asked me about whether I knew a certain local politician (I think he was the local hejtman which is the title used here for the governor of what roughly corresponds to a county in the US) and I said I didn't know him, they then proceeded to ask me whether I though he was doing a good job...I interrupted and said "How can I answer that if I don't even know the guy?" and they insisted in reading the list of possible answers before I had to explicitly say that my answer is "I don't know"...ugh.
Me too. "Do you subscribe to the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram -- "
Me: "I don't subscribe to any newspapers."
"-- the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal --"
Me: "I don't subscribe to any newspapers."
"or the Washington Post?"
Me: "I don't subscribe to any newspapers."
"Do you regularly watch ABC news --"
Me: "I never watch television 'news.'"
"CBS News, NBC News--"
Me: "I have to go now."
My wife stopped answering the phone when she was getting multiple poll calls daily. So what sort of person are they surveying? Not a typical person!
This is awesome, Scott!
One link is broken — "The Manifold Markets Team" should link to: https://comments.cftc.gov/PublicComments/ViewComment.aspx?id=70745
At risk of sounding like an idiot, can anyone explain to me how prediction markets are functionally different from sports betting in any meaningful sense? I’ve been wayyyy out of the loop on this, but from what I gather the %chance moves based on where people place their money just like the point spread in a sporting event would. Is this correct or am I missing something? At least on the surface where I stand as a newbie, It’s always explained in a language that makes it seem like a more complex system than what it actually is.
Yes, they're fundamentally the same. They're expected to be an accurate measure of a betting community's net prediction for that event, because if the stated probability is above or below what an individual better believes the true probability is, then betting on it is +EV, and if this happens enough the market probability will shift accordingly.
So if the odds of a X happening at the time of putting your money down are st 50%, then you put your prediction at 60%, are the payouts a reflection of how confident you were when “X” occurs? I.e a person who said there was a 99% chance would theoretically win the most money if X occurs right?
No. Generally, the payout is $1 if X occurs and $0 otherwise. You don't tell the market what you think the odds are. You just buy or sell. If the price of an event is 50¢ (the market thinks there is a 50% of the event occurring), and you think there's a 99% chance, you would buy. It only costs you $0.50 per share, and there's a 99% chance you'll get $1, giving you a profit of $0.50 per share (and a 1% chance you lose your money). The price changes based on what people are willing to buy and sell for.
Ok, so as more people place bets with confidence that the event will occur, that 50cent price will creep upward, and reduce the profit in the $1 per share payout? But then what about if you believe the event *wont* occur? If the odds of an event are placed at 65%, can I place a bet that it won’t happen a 35cents per share and get 65 cents profit?
Correct, you can also buy "No" shares.
> how prediction markets are functionally different from sports betting in any meaningful sense?
I have not actually used either, but I think the sport betting works like "the system provides you the probabilities; you decide which of the two options you vote for", while the prediction market works like "you decide the probability of the two options".
From certain perspective, it is the same information used in a slightly different way. If you believe that X happens with probability 30% (and non-X with probability 70%), on a prediction market you specify "X with probability 30%"; on the betting market you check whether the provided probability is smaller than 30%, in which case you bet "X", or greater than 30%, in which case you bet "not X".
But from the perspective of "extracting information from users", the prediction market is clearly more efficient. First, you do not need to provide the probability the users will bet against; the users provide all probabilities by themselves. (Thus, better for voting on things where you have no idea what the actual probability is.) Second, you extract more bits of information from each user.
(I think there are also some betting systems where you only choose the side, and then the money is distributed proportionally to how many people chose either side. Like, if 100 people choose "X" and 200 people choose "non X", then if X happens, the former will win $1.99 for each dollar spent, and if X does not happen, the latter will win $0.49 for each dollar spent. Here, no matter how good you are at predicting X, your outcome still depends on what other people do. So this is completely unlike the prediction market.)
Yeah I guess “the system provides probabilities” is the only real difference. The betting system where you “only choose the side” is a money line, and the odds (and thus payouts) will shift based on what the market is. This is opposed to a point spread, where the odds stay the same but the spread gets bigger or smaller to reflect the information the market brings.
Most sports books today set the initial odds using advanced computer models, are there any prediction markets that set the initial odds of current events based on what an AI says?
Right; that second kind of betting is called parimutuel betting, and it's how North American horse racing works. I think in other countries there are fixed odds, which can change quickly as more bets come in, but in those cases you'll get the payout you were offered a the time of the bet, which is how most sports betting models work.
So prediction markets don't work for something like a full scale nuclear war. Theres no reason to bet on that because even if you win, you can't collect anyway.
You need to structure the bet differently. The person saying "no nuclear war" starts by sending some money *now* to the person saying "yes we are doomed"... and a few years later, if there was no nuclear war, the latter sends *more* money back to the former.
That way, even if there is a nuclear war and we all die, the person who correctly predicted it had some time to enjoy the money.
Funny thing, a person strongly believing that we will all die soon, does not even need a prediction market to place the bet. They can simply borrow as much money as possible from a bank, and spend it without worrying about paying it back. (Of course they lose lots of money if the prediction was wrong.)
Are there any predictions being marketed for "full-scale nuclear war"? There's certainly reason to bet on limited nuclear wars, but if everybody is being strictly rational about that, the positive wagers should be interpreted as ("nuclear weapons will be used against X in timeframe Y", and "there will not be a global nuclear apocalypse shortly thereafter"). Thus the probability of nuclear war will be somewhat underpredicted
> One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: 'Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?'
I'm having doubts about the IR theory baked into this.
Imagine that NATO decision-makers were using forecasts to calculate expected utility like that, and Russian spies found out. Couldn't Russia then announce that its nuclear missiles will launch automatically, if its satellites detect any shipments whatsoever crossing from NATO countries into Ukraine?
Prediction markets would react dramatically. With those new forecasts, wouldn't NATO decision-makers then cut off supplies to Ukraine?
Russia could then extend the same automatic launch procedure threat to another neighbor, then another, and so on.
Nuclear blackmail seems like an issue where maximizing expected utility is not achieved through calculating expected utility but through 1) acting on a qualitative understanding of how threats and credibility work, and 2) making a sharp distinction between defending the status quo and going on offense.
There's no requirement that they mindlessly follow the market's prediction, and market participants are allowed to notice that Russia announces a lot of things of gaseous nature.
What is the overlap in prediction markets for people who made bank on the Trump win of 2016? I feel like Prediction markets, especially the small volume ones that are around now, might be a little more right wing biased.
How accurate were the prediction markets in 2018/2020 vs. the result?
One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?”
--------------
Will that ever be possible? inasmuch as whether you get a nuclear war or not, it's a binary outcome and we're not (from a practical standpoint) in a multiverse with a distribution of results.
I kind of feel the same way when poll results are translated into "Trump has 17% chances of winning". "Oh that's almost a guaranteed loss" says the amateur. The role-player I am knows it's actually not that low - it'll happen. But how is it really helping when Trump actually win? Did he really have only 17% chance and got lucky? Or were the odds far higher?
We don't run elections thousands of time anymore than we run nuclear wars thousands of time. We either get one or we don't.
Here, the whole thing rests on 3 elements and 3 elements only. Will Putin use a nuke to try and save his regime? Given that he escalated to mobilisation rather than accepting defeat/declaring victory and go home, it seems quite possible.
If he does, will his generals follow his orders? Given that, apparently, at least a significant % of his inner circle is more hawkish than he is, that's not impossible at all.
If they do and detonate a nuke in Ukraine, we've been quite clear that NATO would intervene and, at minima, wipe out all Russian forces in Ukraine (though some uncertainty remains around that).
Would Putin (and/or his circle) accept defeat then rather than escalate to nuclear Armageddon? IDK.
> Suppose Russia is losing very badly in Ukraine. Putin, fearing a coup or revolution at home if he gives up, decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon, ie a “small” nuke more suited to winning battles than destroying cities. He nukes a Ukrainian battlefield position.
Haha, no, typical Western nonsense. You guys have no idea how Putin thinks. Why would he nuke Ukrainian soldiers in a war he is going to lose anyway? That does not make sense at all.
*If* he is going to drop a nuke on Ukraine, he will drop it on *civilians* instead. Conditional on the nuke being fired, 80% probability it will be fired on a city with population 50000 or more. That would bring him much greater popularity at home than destroying some ultimately irrelevant battlefield.
Putin actually claims that Ukrainians and Russians are a single people, and this not-war is to get rid of a Western-propped nazi regime, so an obviously civilian-targeted nuke wouldn't win him much approval at home. If things ever get truly desperate I'd sooner expect an outrigh all-out attack against NATO instead.
Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale, and the Russian people, insofar as their opinion even matters to the Russian elites, approve by a majority. Ukrainians evidently refuse to become Russian again, so they had it coming.
In any case, the Russian political system no longer depends on the approval of the masses, and the rational choice for the average Russian is to agree with whatever the leaders decide to do. Under the current political system, only the approval of the elites matters, and their preferences are vastly different from those of regular people.
>Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale
Not something you'll remotely hear from Russian propaganda, and Russians generally don't have easy access to anything else.
>Russian political system no longer depends on the approval of the masses
Every system does, in the end. When millions go out into the streets, it's no longer feasible to suppress them. I'd agree that it's unlikely that Putinism is going to end that way, some sort of elite coup would probably happen first, but I'd expect Putin to preempt that by a suicidal move either way.
> Every system does, in the end.
You do not need approval to prevent million people from simultaniously going to the street. Apathy and discoordination is enough.
Apathy and discoordination require you not to nuke cities.
Yet you hear Russian talking heads suggest all sort of things you'd be forgiven to think came from someone like Goebbels.
They talked about hanging uncooperative Ukrainians as a warning to others, they openly discussed the need to "re-educate" the entire Ukrainian nation (and kill those who won't comply / send them to Siberia), some actually advocated nuclear bombing of Kiyv. They are celebrating the indiscriminate V2-like bombing of Ukrainian cities with Irainian drones that's currently going on (albeit they are presenting that as targetting military infrastructure).
Those in Russia who strongly oppose this are ... well, mostly not in Russia any more. Those who just keep their heads down and hope it all blows over without them being drafted (the majority of Russians who are still in Russia I'd guess) will only care about this insofar as it endangers them personally. They are completely apathetic and won't probably care all that much even if Russia loses.
Then there are the Russian nazis, the ultranationalists, I don't know how many of those there are but I'd guess something like 20-25% of the population (to varying degrees)? Those are the ones calling for "re-education of Ukrainians", hanging etc. and they would be cheering if Putin sent a nuke on civilians. They literally are just like the German Nazis, they see Ukrainians as lesser people who can at best hope to be re-educated to become Russians "again" or who they believe need to be exterminated. This is also Putin's political base. Some are even more extremist than Putin is himself, but he needs to appease these voices first, because if someone is an immediate threat to him it is these people in case they stop seeing him as their leader.
If Putin nuked a Ukrainian city, these people would cheer and the "silent majority" would not not try to overthrow him for that. However, the Russian army might. Or rather they might decide to overthrow him if he every gives such an order without complying with it.
The Russian (conventional) army is probably already quite angry at Putin. They are being micromanaged, scapegoated (although they probably actually are very incompetent and corrupt) and they are suffering the brunt of the war. They know that if Putin nukes something in Ukraine, the likely western response is a massive (conventional) bombardment of all Russian positions in Ukraine by NATO and probably also NATO boots on the ground and that this would wipe out the Russian army in Ukraine in a month or so. Some might also be afraid of a possible further nuclear escalation and people usually value their own lives and the lives of their families over ideology.
So I'd say that if there is something preventing Putin from nuking Ukraine, it is only the fear that the Russian army simply would not comply (out of fear of a western retribution). And also the Russian relationship with China would probably get a lot colder after that too and Putin probably doesn't want to lose his only powerful semi-ally.
>Russia is already comitting atrocities on a massive scale
What is the evidence of this? Aren't they just like, conducting a war? These days we say conducting a war *is* an atrocity, but fundementally what are the supposed atrocities that are different from what went on in other wars of conquest between industrial nations?
I can never get straight if there is actually anything to this atrocity charge byeond "civilians and powerplants and stuff are getting targeted/hit sometimes", or "some soldiers did some nasty shit when they thought they could get away with it", which umm yeah that is what war is.
To me atrocities are are very different thing.
Sadly agree.
Imo the Bucha massacre counts as an atrocity. It did involve the killing of >50 civilians (including children), rape (also of children), torture and the mutilation of bodies. That's not quite My Lai perhaps but pretty bad still.
One instance doesn't sound like "on a massive scale".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
That all sounds like a bunch of politicized nonsense other than the Bucha thing. Once again under that schema nearly every major war involves massive atrocities on both sides. In which case what work is the word actually doing other than signifying that they are the enemy and we would rather they just surrender.
I would rather save the word for actual atrocities so that we can better identify them and preserve some of the function of the word.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/19/ukraine-russian-forces-tortured-izium-detainees
The rhetoric about "single people" is just an excuse for annexation. If Ukrainians are in fact merely Russians in denial, then there is no war between two nations; it's just Russia sorting out its internal affairs. And it is not a cultural genocide if you ban a language that didn't truly exist anyway, or destroy museums and textbooks which only contained fake history.
Before anyone accuses me of strawmanning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHruPv8sLTY
However, let's not forget that Ukrainians are collectively guilty of being Nazis. And it is a self-evident truth for all Russians, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with killing Nazis. Kill the ones who resist, then reeducate the rest.
Russian definition of a Nazi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRFcK1BDlus
Therefore, if a nuke drops on an Ukrainian city, it will be reported as "thousands of Nazis destroyed", and no one in Russian media will challenge this fact.
I don't exactly disagree with any of this, provided that nuking would actually lead to an unconditional Ukrainian surrender, which will be accepted by the West. Everybody loves a winner, a victory makes people forgive and forget many things, but I doubt that even Putin is crazy enough to seriously expect such a turn of event.
Feature request:
Please group all content regarding prediction markets (preferably at the bottom of posts) and clearly label them for an easy skip.
In what sense is having all his prediction market content grouped up in a regular series with “Mantic Monday” in the title not already what you asked for?
Thanks for pointing that out - to my embarrassment must admit that I had not realised that this is what "Mantic Monday" is about, and at first glance I thought some of the short links at the end were not related to markets.
> I am not a lawyer, but it sounds kind of like they’re saying “the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things”. I am split between the part of me which hates government regulators doing bad things, and the part of me which feels like this is how you get a cover-your-ass-ocracy that never does anything at all without fifteen layers of paperwork and ten trillion dollars per action.
Weird. I don't agree that the argument here is "the decision was bad, and you're only supposed to do good things". There are plenty of laws that specify that only good things are allowed, and bad things will be illegal because they are bad. But I don't think this is in that category.
But I agree with the conclusion; this is exactly how you get a bureaucracy that isn't capable of doing anything except generating protective layers of non-action. I think the argument being made is "there's a process for changing the rules, and you didn't follow it, so your decision never actually took effect". And the validity our system bestows on that complaint ensures that the maximum speed at which things can happen is essentially a stop.
This is reasonably close to the mark, although I'm not an APA specialist myself.
The APA isn't my primary area of expertise or practice (and so if anyone who practices with it more regularly wants to weight in please do)., but it's a little glib to summarize the allegations made under the APA as "the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things” -- while that's invariably the *driver* of these types of Complaints (and they are a source of significant bureaucratic friction), the specific complaint here is very much about procedure and touches on a pretty core part of the APA: specifically, that agencies generally can't just decide to do stuff without publicizing their rationale and, typically, having a period of public notice and public comment prior to issuance.
Agencies changing course on a whim are said to be acting in a manner that is "arbitrary and capricious" -- the basic idea is that agencies have a great deal of legislative power but they can't exercise it without jumping through enough hoops to indicate that there's a genuine rationale behind their decision and, moreover, one that amounts to at least a little more than "the president wants more / less regulation."
In practice, this can can easily amount to just requiring a lot of generation of paperwork and public comments that can be ignored, and the agencies can get away with a great deal so long as they do enough ass-covering, but in theory it's designed to limit *exactly* what PredictIt is alleging here -- random reversals in agency policy seemingly done at the whim of executive branch officials to whom a great deal of legislative power has been delegated.
Particularly in instances in which an agency pulls a complete 180 without any compelling factual developments indicating why the previous policy was inappropriate, courts are going to be generally be more skeptical of agency behavior and treat this as an instance in which throwing sand in the gears is salutary, and a court may end up reversing the agency's decision. In practice this can end up just being "come back with better documentation," but delay of implementation (e.g. until the next administration replaces all the top personnel with people who might have different ideas) can often be a win for the challenger in a practical sense.
In theory, the shortcut for agencies trying to get things past APA review instead of being stuck in APA-Complaint hell for four-to-eight years is to basically have an ironclad set of well-documented rationale for its decision, abide by notice and comment procedures, and then show these to the court who tells the plaintiffs to pound sand. Sadly I can't speak to how well that actually works in practice, but it seems that we do, in fact, get new regulations from time to time. The Executive seems to be basically the only branch of government that actually *does* anything these days.
This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, etc. etc.
Great analysis, as ways!
I would like to add another prediction market source about the Senate elections, on Futuur only 41% believes the Republicans will flip the US Senate elections
In short link link number four [0], one solution offered for some scenarios is to resolve a small number of prediction markets selected randomly. The downside is that a market which will get resolved 5% of the time will probably not offer a good ROI even if you can predict the outcome much better than your competitors.
One way to solve this would be to allow people to place their money on multiple markets at once and insure them against the case where more markets resolve than they have money for. If the probability of the market resolving is fixed in advance (like "we will fund 5% of the startup ideas randomly just to resolve the markets"), it would be trivial to calculate odds.
So an investor with 1$ could either invest 20$ in one market which resolves with p=5% (and lose everything 95% of the time) or they could place 1$ in 20$ different such markets (and pay some insurance to cover the case where more than one market resolves and they would be on the hook for more than 1$).
Good luck convincing anyone that this is not gambling, though.
Edit: also, could conditional markets for event B (nuke) given some event A (no fly zone) be modeled by just having markets predicting A, B, A AND B?
[0] https://dynomight.net/prediction-market-causation/
The Dynomight link in number four is by far the most interesting and important point here. The short summary is that conditional prediction markets just give correlation and if you want to use them to make decisions, you want causality. Seems obvious in retrospect. They also discuss how to work around this maybe.
The NASA market (that they'll land someone on the moon before the end of 2024) is utterly bonkers - there's not a snowballs hope in hell of NASA getting someone to the moon a year BEFORE they plan to.
Could metaculus not solicit donations (or some other way to acquire money) and then divide up the donations and award them to the best forecasters on a regular basis? Or is this loophole still blocked by law somehow?
The Kings Owner's "some reason" appears to be:
> I am also the founder and former CEO of the business intelligence software company TIBCO Software, which was one of the first companies to facilitate instant communication in financial markets. In 2016, I founded an early stage investment firm called Bow Capital. I have a long time interest in the domain of business prediction. In 2006, I wrote a book called The Power to Predict about the importance of anticipating the future for business success. In 2011, I followed up that book with The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future–Just Enough. This belief that predicting the future is absolutely crucial to commercial success has convinced me to support Kalshi’s submission to the CFTC to list contracts on the outcome of Congressional elections.
I still don't understand how you measure prediction accuracy of percentage predictions for unique events. An event will either happen or not happen. You can say whether the event will or will not happen and then determine whether you were right or wrong. But if you say there is a 75% chance the event will happen and it does, do you say you were 50% right? Is this considered a valid measurement of success?
You basically can't measure it for single events. What you can do is measure the accuracy of different *forecasters* over many events. The most common way to do that is to say E=0 if the event doesn't happen and E=1 if it does. Then, if you gave it a probability of P, we say that your "error" is (E-P)². If you and I forecast many things and you have a lower average value of (E-P)², then you can claim to be better than me. You can also decompose this "Brier score" into things like calibration/refinement or calibration/resolution/uncertainty.
Thanks for the explanation. But wouldn't this mean that all someone has to do to get a lower average value is to make more predictions closer to 50%?
Well, always making predictions of 50% will give you an average score of 0.5²=0.25, which isn't the worst possible score! But if you're able to go closer to 100% on events that do happen, you can do get much better scores. With clairvoyant predictions of always 100% or 0% you can have an average score of 0.
I suspect the rise in "NO" in September 12 is somehow connected to Russian regional elections (they lasted from September 9 to September 11). But it is really strange, I'd update in the opposite direction: the results of these elections really favoured United Russia (the party that has the majority in Duma, which supports Putin, and is the most popular). It is not fully clear to me what caused these results: changes in minds (according to polls, the support of UR has grown with the beginning of the war), arrests of oppositional municipal deputies (and denial of their registration) or falsifications (distant electronic elections might be easy to falsificate). Maybe people, who bought "NO" expected post-electoral protests?
(Please keep in mind that English isn't my first language, I'm sorry for the mistakes I make.)
I have observed some ... interesting behavior with 538, lately, in which the list of polls used as supporting evidence appears to be getting modified retroactively, and a tendency for the adjustments made to the polls to be -away- from the mean of the polls (which if you're being rigorous, you don't change your methodology midway through, so great - but also, maybe this is a sign that your methodology wasn't great to begin with).
My personal guess at the moment is that Republicans are going to do far better than the polls may currently suggest, and the polls will show an apparently-mysterious sudden Republican shift over the next couple of weeks. (Basically, I think pollsters are telling people what they want to hear, but this can only continue until we get near the election, when they will correct - possibly even overcorrect - so they appear accurate after the fact.)
Can you clarify what you're referring to with 538? They generally don't change their methodology in the middle of an election season. Do you have a specific example in mind?
I have taken screenshots of their polling data one day, then checked it again the next, and historical (non-current - as in, four or five days previous) polls have been added / removed from their lists.
Started paying attention when their graph showed anomalous behavior with respect to the list of polls - going up/down when the polls were basically holding static.
Insofar as the list of polls they cite as evidence for their graphs are evidence for their graphs, retroactively adjusting evidence isn't a good look.
Out of curiosity, I did a super simple regression to see how far off betting markets think 538's forecast is.
It looks like in the key Senate races, they expect Republican candidates to outperform the 538 forecast by about 1.8 percentage points on average.
"Tactical nukes wouldn’t really be useful in Ukraine; the battle lines are too spread out and there’s no single place where a nuclear explosion could take out a substantial portion of Ukraine’s forces. "
This is misleading. It's been about thirty years since tactical nuclear weapons were expected to destroy enemy forces on or near the battle lines. Tactical nuclear weapons are expected to be used against logistics hubs, command centers, airbases, and other such targets behind the battle lines. I would expect that Ukraine has been trying to spread those out, but many of them are tied to things like roads, railroads, and runways that are built in peacetime to exploit economies of scale and concentration.
We've seen Russia's offensives grind to a halt because the Ukrainians kept blowing up their headquarters and supply depots; Russia hasn't been able to do the same because they're critically low on precision-guided missiles to do it with. But if they can achieve the same results with missiles that don't need to be precise to be devastatingly effective, they can plausibly stop Ukraine's counteroffensives and then some.
If you want to argue that this sort of thing is "strategic" rather than "tactical", you can, but you'll be using different definitions than most of the people you are talking to and that leads to unnecessary confusion.
That's an interesting point. Of course, this also means that using tactical nukes is not actually an instant win (like destroying 90% of the enemy battle forces would be).
The Russian narrative that the Ukraine is basically a part of Russia taken over by some Nazis seems not particularly effective in othering the Ukrainian population. Nuking a faraway country of evil foreigners would be an easy propaganda sell, nuking what you consider to be your own territory which you are trying to liberate from the yoke of some evil renegades would likely hurt morale.
Meh, the United States bombed the crap out of a whole lot of France before liberating it, and in the process killed more innocent civilians on D-Day alone than we did in every drone strike in the entire War On Terror. Nobody, nit even the French, ever gave us much grief about it. If you're bombing a place that's full of Nazis, people generally give you a pass on just about anything else.
As for nuclear weapons as an instant win: nuclear weapons plus an army capable of effective offensive action, is likely to be a near-instant win against an enemy without nukes, because an army without supplies or command or air cover is not going to be resisting for very long. Nobody's really had much cause to consider the case of "nuclear weapons but buffoonishly inept army" before, and I hope we don't have to learn that one by experience.
Fwiw, reading this on October 21, some of the prediction markets no longer match the text, which presumably will become more and more true. Is it too annoying to put a screenshot of the market at the time as well or write the probability in each case (you did in several). Or maybe it doesn't matter because this isn't meant to be read days or weeks later?
In every case I've noticed, back to 1980, US Presidential opinion polls overestimate the Democrat's strength significantly. 2020: 8.4% (https://www.ajc.com/opinion/opinion-a-way-to-improve-political-polling/HUIH2PG5OFDR3BLIPENT4Z6UFA/). Looking at Gallup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections), I see more variety -- the overestimate can be down to 0% or even a slight underestimate. But what I always see is that the D is a shoo-in -- even in 1984! And Gore was supposed to beat Bush easily. We all knew Clinton would defeat Trump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election#Two-way_race). My guess after seeing Gallup's results is that although there is a slight bias toward D doing better than he really will, this is exaggerated by which polls I actually saw reported by news media.
Since this goes so far back, I can't credit that it's because R's distrust pollsters. (In 1980, what had they to fear?) Or poll fatigue, which I think really kicked in in 2012. Or undersampling cell phone users. It's just guessing, but I suspect discrepancies in poll results is from the already known phenomenon that R voters are more likely to actually get to the voting booth on Election Day. So D's would show up stronger in polling. Then of course we can expect news sites to be more likely to highlight polls if it makes their side look strong. If you were really doing your best to report accurately, and get proportions of D's and R's and I's right in your polling, you still couldn't very well adjust for D's being less committed to voting except by weighting D's answers less, which looks pretty unfair. So I'll tentatively attribute the difference to, well, not malice.