[cannonpr]

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.

[Aurornis]

That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.

[astura]

>There is a whole class of urban legends like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_by_catastrophe

[happytoexplain]

>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior

Why "can look", "but", "just"?

[Ajedi32]

I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just makes it more visible.

[tclancy]

If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.

[cannonpr]

Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.

[tomtomtom777]

I think that's horribly fatalistic perspective.

Yes, humans can be bad. But humans can change. Let's not start accepting bad stuff as not so bad, simply because it is "just human behavior".

[happytoexplain]

Yes - and further, even if something is "just human behavior", that doesn't mean it's never beneficial to humans to legally regulate the enablement or exploitation of that behavior.

[victorbjorklund]

Sounds like a urban legend.

[proggy]

I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.

[PaulHoule]

"Suicide is Painless"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0xy-LoDi94

[sc68cal]

So, because it's a human behavior, that means it's okay that there's a huge company out there amplifying that behavior and profiting off it?

[thinkingtoilet]

Your comparison is not even close to what is happening here.