[Havoc]

I'd venture that actually smart people don't go near this at all because they know telling yourself "I'm better than others and won't get addicted"...all to chase a couple bucks is the height of folly.

Polymarket has me intrigued though. Especially stuff like their geopolitics section...as a measure of how good one's read of the world is. Still gambling in disguise though

[chongli]

Since my friends gamble on sports and I enjoy sports a lot I’ve placed a few bets here and there. I don’t find it addictive at all. My sense of loss aversion must be just too high for it or something. Every time I lost a bet I wanted to uninstall the app it annoyed me so much. Once I lost the initial bankroll and bonus bets I uninstalled the app.

I think the folks who get addicted must have much lower loss aversion and higher thrill-seeking. People like me can’t become even regular recreational gamblers (betting small amounts without ruining their lives) because it’s too frustrating.

[bpt3]

Smart people who are "gambling" for anything other than fun only would participate when they have an edge.

There are many ways to obtain such an edge, and the casinos are highly motivated to prevent that from happening.

[mr_mitm]

Not on polymarket or kalshi. They welcome what would be insider trading on the stock market.

[bpt3]

Because they aren't (yet) casinos. Their current business model is much more like a stock exchange, but without the regulation as you point out.

[woooooo]

Smart people can like sports, and there's a century long history of "sharps" who are better than most at sports gambling.

[chongli]

People who find an edge and actually make a lot of money aren’t really gamblers though, they’re hackers. The bets they’re placing are guaranteed to pay out as long as their edge is maintained. They often retire after the edge is discovered and fixed.

[ACCount37]

Polymarket's purpose was specifically to let the best of the best take the pot by predicting events with real world impact. So, ideally, it's "gambling" in the same way day trading is gambling.

Contrast that to normal "sports betting" - which aims to block skilled betters, and squeeze suckers for their cash.

[watwut]

A lot of day trading is pure gambling tho. And prediction markets dont even pretend to not be gambling, except for legal reasons.

[piva00]

It's betting but even better for the house: they don't need to put anything on the pot to lose it, just taking a cut from the zero-sum game others are betting on.

That's why Kalshi/Polymarket don't care about winners, they don't lose money to them, others do.

It's all gambling, as most of day trading also is.

[airstrike]

Polymarket is an "insider trading" festival. Plenty of suckers getting squeezed there too.

[dangus]

I imagine there’s lots of money to be made on fools in polymarket, like “Will the US confirm that aliens exist in 2025?”

That topic had over a 10% “yes” chance in January. Betting no on that is better taking out a CD.

[amenhotep]

I can't remember the exact figures, but apparently if you'd taken the "insane thing does not happen" option on every Trump related contract over the past years, you'd have made a very tidy profit.

Not because he doesn't do insane things, obviously, the market is just not at all good at pricing it.

[mmcwilliams]

After the platform takes its cut the actual percentage is not as appealing.

[ismailmaj]

Maybe an extremely inefficient way to do money laundering?

[newsclues]

No but it’s a perverse incentive for people in power

[singron]

You can still make that bet at 10% "yes" for the next year. Previous years had similar patterns, so it's not a reaction to Trump.

To be fair, we don't need to find little green men in a UFO. It's sufficient to e.g. find fossils of extinct microorganisms on Mars, which is a slim possibility that's a goal of the Mars Sample Return mission.

These markets also have low volume at reasonable prices. If you bought $10K of "no" right now for next year, you would only get an 8% return, not 10%. You could execute better trades to get better prices, but the odds also become more sane over the year. The S&P 500 is also up 18% YTD (13% YoY for the last 5) and you can buy as much of that as you want.

[dangus]

I don't believe that fossils of microorganisms were counted in the resolver, but the ambiguities of Polymarket are definitely something to be wary of if the resolutions aren't well defined.

To your last point, I'd argue that the S&P 500 has way more risk. Bets for insane stuff like this where a sufficient number of morons are believers in the obviously-not-going-to-happen outcome are the ones that act like CDs.

[begueradj]

> I'd venture that actually smart people don't go near this at all because they know telling yourself "I'm better than others and won't get addicted"

Being addicted is not an intelligence criterion because every human is addicted to something -good or bad.

That's actually a basic principle of how we function cognitively.

- https://psychiatryofscottsdale.com/psychiatrists-honest-take...

- https://psychiatryofscottsdale.com/were-all-addicted-to-some...

[istjohn]

Every human is not addicted to something good or bad. You're abusing the definition of addiction.

[barnabee]

I know people who profitably run algorithms on Betfair, etc.

Smart people will treat it like any other “trading” or “arbitrage” opportunity, given half a chance.

[timcobb]

I used to think this but then developed the impression that quite the opposite is true, that a great many clever people live their lives betting on this or that (equities, derivities, sports, polymarket, often they call it "risk management" or other such things) and, unfortunately, that abstaining from betting (as I still do) is, unfortunately for me, an unrealistic maladaptive cope. I think the adaptive thing to do is to learn how to bet, especially if you're not a person who becomes pathological.

[paulgb]

> an unrealistic maladaptive cope

I like betting myself, but I don't think abstaining from betting is maladaptive at all. Most of the bets we encounter in the real world are negative EV.

[timcobb]

What do you like about betting?

> Most of the bets we encounter in the real world are negative EV.

Yeah that's why I don't like betting. It feels not smart, for me especially. But people who make the right bets can make very large otherwise unrealizable gains.

[paulgb]

I like betting because I find it fun to quantify probabilities of future events, and having a ~small amount of money at stake keeps me motivated to follow through on whether I was right.

I do think there are positive EV bets to be had on prediction markets though, they are mosty not efficient.

[skippyboxedhero]

The analogue that people have of betting is, for some reason, drugs. Addiction is an inherent property of taking drugs. Gambling is not like this in any way. It is not inherently addictive, 99% of people who gamble have no issue with it.

It isn't to chase a couple of bucks either. Billy Walter has made hundreds of millions. A recent court case leaked that Tony Bloom's syndicate was making £200m in profit per year. This activity helps make these markets more efficient.

There is nothing wrong with gambling. Fast food kills tens of thousands a year in the US, hundreds of billions spent on healthcare and life expectancy is still terrible because of obesity. Should we ban fast food? Why? Many other people don't have a problme. The idea of personal responsibility will always be completely abhorrent to some part of the population.

[skybrian]

While it’s true that many (most?) people won’t have a problem, a minority have their lives ruined as well as family members, and the risk of that is reason enough to regulate it.

This isn’t all that different from alcohol.

[skippyboxedhero]

Okay, but gambling is heavily regulated...so that isn't the discussion here. You believe that alcohol should be banned then?

[watwut]

The gambling the article ia about is not regulated. Saying "heavily regulated" is just very far from truth.

[skippyboxedhero]

First, most states ban many forms of gambling...so I would call that heavy regulation. Second, whilst the regulatory approach in legal states differs - for example, NJ...for various reasons...is one of the most strict - the overall level is high.

Most states have self-exclude/no-market lists, most states require links to gambling addiction helplines in adverts and within product, responsible gaming features are required in every state de facto (and providers are going beyond this in reality) so this is deposit/wager/loss/time limits, reality checks have effectively become mandatory, some states have hard limits on total wagers or require ACK over limit, deposit alerts are also moving to mandatory, there are limits on some kind of machines and how they operate (this is a massive difference to casino gambling, IGT designed physical machines that only appealed to addicts, that experience can now be 100% controlled online), etc.

I don't think people are aware that state regulatory bodies exist and are doing a huge amount. If you compare with European countries, I would say that providers are probably more aware of their responsible gaming function (afaik, many providers have responsible gaming goals that impact board-level compensation, so in the past year you had providers blanket limiting customers based on certain categories...which, I will add, is not an ideal approach, no regulator asked them to do this). In addition, there are some aspects of regulation that, afaik, don't happen anywhere else: for example, most state regulators are checking code that providers are deploying to ensure it is compliant.

This change in regulatory approach is largely a function of things moving online. To be blunt, when Adelson died then the old approach of functionally limited regulation was over because no-one was being paid to advocate for it. Online gaming also enables far more controls over the experience i.e. you can enforce hard limits (as opposed to a pit boss telling someone to stop). I can only assume that most people are completely unaware that this is happening though.

The difference with Polymarket and co, which are regulated as financial firms, should be quite obvious too. People are gambling on their site, they are doing none of the above.

[apothegm]

Ban fast food? No. Regulate it and find a way to re-internalize some of the externalities? Perhaps. The invisible hand is neither benevolent nor infallible.

[skippyboxedhero]

I didn't mention the invisible hand because the precise point is that this is a non-economic discussion. People who want to ban gambling will always, as can be seen elsewhere, make economic points about how it is an economically inefficient activity. Many fun things are economically inefficient, and economic inefficiency is nothing to do with overall bad or good.

"Regulate" fast food...how? So the government is responsible for deciding how someone of normal weight is allowed to eat? Btw, I live somewhere where this has happened...I pay 30-40% more for some types of food, some products have been removed totally, they don't sell them anymore...why? I am healthy, I run, what did I do? The narrative for this was that obesity is a societal problem, that anyone can be obese...which is false. I am just paying more because someone else is obese, that is it (and, obviously, this hasn't changed obesity...the government has just unlocked a new source of revenue to spend on nonsense).

It is easy to regulate gambling, which the US does btw, because the experience is controlled. So you can remove products, unlike with fast food, that are explicitly designed for addicts (for example, many countries have regulations that rank casino/machine/slots gambling into categories). And in many countries, again like the US, you have government-maintained self-exclude lists, no-market lists, etc. Again, this only impacts addicts. The problem is that people who want regulation want to go further, they have these bizarre notions of economic efficiency with embedded social norms they don't appear to acknowledge, and (ultimately) this will impact people who just enjoy gambling. The premise of the original point was that gambling is inherently addictive...this is not the case, it isn't infallibility...some people find this activity fun, they should be allowed to have fun even if some other people shouldn't do it.

[piva00]

> The idea of personal responsibility will always be completely abhorrent to some part of the population.

The idea of personal responsibility is also way overrated by some part of the population like you, gambling is addictive and a net negative to society. Problem gamblers ruin not only their life but of their families as well, it's an addiction with a very high rate of suicide.

Allowing it to be done through your phone is like supplying opioids at the candy store. Not everyone gets addicted but you certainly increase access to the ones in most danger of becoming one, and for what purpose?

Personal responsibility doesn't ever solve systemic issues, you are defending the increase of a systemic issue and blaming the victims which it's the actual abhorrent thing...

[skippyboxedhero]

Okay, so you believe there is nothing that anyone can do...so logically, you would also believe that any form of gambling addiction treatment is pointless? The issue with your point of view is that it defies any sense of understanding about what addiction actually is, there are no possible solutions apart from the government just banning everything in sight.

The purpose is that gambling is fun. That is it. Eating fast food is fun. Drinking alcohol is fun. There are people who are addicting to shopping, so we can ban that too? It is a net negative to you (again, the classic contradiction: YOU believe gambling is wrong so you characterise it is a society wide problem...individual agency doesn't exist though? everyone agrees with something because YOU think it) because you don't enjoy it. It is like saying food consumption is a net negative because it is a sunk cost...in reality, people enjoy eating food, they will spend money on food that is more expensive than basic sustenance for enjoyment, and people enjoy gambling because it is entertaining. No crazy theories required, it is fun, people should be allowed to have fun.

Also, they supply very addictive things at the candy store...candy. Not everyone gets addicted, but you think we should also ban them? Eating candy is clearly a systemic issue, right? Nothing to do with personal feelings, it is a systemic issue with insufficient government intervention in the supply of candy. Candy exists, and for what purpose? Lol, it is like talking to a robot.

Because there is no systemic issue. You are saying that people are just mindless drones who have no control over their actions. Again, ban gambling therapy...must be completely pointless? There is nothing that anyone can do?

No victims are being blamed, I just don't have the arrogance to call people who do something I don't like or behave in a way that I wouldn't a "victim". They aren't victims. Gambling addiction will exist no matter how much we ban, there are gambling addicts in your paradise of Saudi Arabia, and they get no help because they live within a system that denies individual agency replacing it with religious agency. Some things are addictive, those things can also be enjoyable to other people without harm, it is okay for people to enjoy things that aren't enjoyed by other people, it is okay to have fun.