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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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 [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
---
First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/awKbxtfFAfu7xDXdQ/how-i-learned-to-stop-trusting-prediction-markets-and-love
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---

Images from the article:

---

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.