This is a story about a flawed Manifold market, about how easy it is to buy significant objective-sounding publicity for your preferred politics, and about why I've downgraded my respect for all but the largest prediction markets.

I've had a Manifold account for a while, but I didn't use it much until I saw and became irked by this market on the conditional probabilities of a Harris victory, split by VP pick.

Jeb Bush? Really? That's not even a fun kind of wishful thinking for anyone. Please clap.

The market quickly got cited by rat-adjacent folks on Twitter like Matt Yglesias, because the question it purports to answer is enormously important. But as you can infer from the above, it has a major issue that makes it nigh-useless: for a candidate whom you know won't be chosen, there is literally no way to come out ahead on mana (Manifold keeps [...]

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First published:
August 6th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/awKbxtfFAfu7xDXdQ/how-i-learned-to-stop-trusting-prediction-markets-and-love

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets and Love the Arbitrage” by orthonormal

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets and Love the Arbitrage” by orthonormal