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Mark Kelly now heavy favorite to be Harris’ running mate as he blasts JD Vance on Ukraine
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Jfc. Taking the odds from an aggregate of betting websites and using that as a verified source seems crazy to me.
I mean, it's the closest thing you have to a futures market, and if you assume that markets are efficient, you can extract information there -- people do use those.
So Wall St then. I never assume anything good from them.
I lost faith in 2008.
I mean, anyone. I remember when DARPA had a project to create a futures market to do geopolitical analysis (which was controversial and got shot down because a world where you can place money on a world leader being assassinated and also, you know, go out and assassinate them has certain dangerous misincentives).
They're not using it as a "verified source", except in that they're saying "this is the source."
It's actually not a bad approach. Prediction markets (which betting sites are just a form of) are often very good at reflecting what the current well-informed belief on a subject is, because people who make bets on ill-informed beliefs quickly end up not having money any more and thus not betting any more. It's just important to bear in mind that it's not literally saying "this is what's going to happen," it's saying "this is what well-informed people currently believe is going to happen based on current information."
That’s not really true.
People that don’t make decisions on ill informed beliefs don’t bet at all as it’s just a money waste. People that make bad decisions tend to bet more and go into debt because of it.
Betting odds are not a prediction by any means. The betting houses don’t even try to predict anything because they know it is a fools game. Instead its just a sentiment tracker of very small subset of the population.
For example if tomorrow I would bet 100 Billion for Harris to win the election she would suddenly show up as the heavy favorite when nothing about her campaign has changed. Instead the bets for that particular site would be heavily skewed and they would increase odds for other options to reduce risk, while at the same time basically bullying any further bets on Harris.
Less crazy than you think. Those markets actually have a pretty good record as long as you pair it with more traditional data points.
I would suggest that it might be a significantly more accurate source than standard polling.
It's not. People aren't just coming into the bet as neutral computational machines trying to maximize odds. They're betting on people they like. Some are spending money to intentionally warp the odds. The only population control is people with money willing to risk it in a process with <1.0 expected return. That's a subpopulation already known for making bad choices.
Here's a previous "betting odds" headline: Andrew Yang has the same 2020 odds as Elizabeth Warren