Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yunohn 109 days ago
> yeshiva

Doesn’t Orthodox Judaism (like all religions) look quite harshly upon all forms of gambling? How is Polymarket kosher?

To be clear, I didn’t question efficient market hypotheses - my stance has been pretty clear along the thread, questioning the value of the kind of information gambled upon in popular prediction markets.
1 comments
FergusArgyll 109 days ago
Yes, it does. I never gambled on Polymarket, I look at it to figure out the odds of things I care about.

I thought I explained the value quite clearly. ~10 years ago if you wanted to know the odds your flight will get canceled due to war, you had to trust the hyperventilating talking head on your favorite cable news channel (who's job it was to keep you watching...). Now you get basically the actual odds. If that's not value, I don't know what is.

link
yunohn 108 days ago
> Yes, it does.

I find the way you operate - supporting and benefitting from Polymarket - to be equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from, but I guess even in orthodoxy one can bend the rules to their liking.

> Now you get basically the actual odds.

But that's the thing - insiders bet & trade at the very last minute, and thus are not supporting the /just cause/ of "information sharing", rather just plain, old front-running and racketeering. The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds - when the actual action happens just before event takes place.

https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...

link
FergusArgyll 108 days ago
> equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from

I don't know which religion/s you're familiar with but I bet you don't know the reason gambling is prohibited in Judaism. It doesn't carry the moral stench you think it does. I've been studying Talmudic law for a very very long time and am confident there is no issue with using polymarket to get the odds on anything.

> The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds

In my previous comment I shared a link with you (https://calibration.city/) I told you to filter by market midpoint.

I don't know if you didn't see it or you are being obtuse but between repeating something I disproved and lecturing me about my religion, I have my suspicions...

link