[busyant]

> You'll need to look for your own individual scheme, ethics be damned.... That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.

I was thinking about what you said w/r/t the proximal issue (gambling in prediction markets) and my 1st though was "why is this a big deal? If you're not an insider, just don't participate in these markets ... and then the insiders don't have a counterparty to fleece."

But I thought a little more about and I think you're right. Insider's fleecing others in prediction markets just erodes trust everywhere. And we need a considerable amount of trust in people we don't know for society to function properly.

I don't know the owner at my local hardware store, but I trust that he won't sell me shoddy tools. The same goes for every societal interaction. We need to trust people we don't know. If that gets eroded, we go back a several centuries.