Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, February 12, 2026
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21 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
A year into Trump’s term, voters say Biden was better (Axios)
3 New Polls Show ‘How Bad Things Have Gotten For Trump’ (Newsweek)
The Independent:
Golden Age lol
@DK:
Fool’s gold
I dont this has been mentioned here. Fox News guy Andy McCarthy covers the blatant corruption in Trump family crypto business.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/bluey-is-the-most-conservative-show-on-tv-59ed3402?st=Hqga2X&reflink=article_copyURL_share
“The former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York wrote that “Four days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the UAE began pouring what is now publicly known to be at least $2.5 billion into the Trump crypto enterprise.” He noted that the UAE, soon after, was given “access to cutting-edge American chip technology” which had previously been denied them because of their ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The UAE was also “feted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump administration’s Stargate project to build global artificial intelligence and super-computing capacity, and given an ownership slice of TikTok.””
Steve
Let’s get one thing straight: Prediction markets are gambling, plain and simple.
People who partake in them and claim it’s not like casino gambling, though, have a kind of technical point. They’re not betting against the house. they’re betting against the people who take the oposite position, just like sports betting (which, BTW, can be done at most Vegas casinos).
These may be good bets, as in there’s no house edge and the payoff approaches real odds.
But it’s 100% gambling. Unless you have inside knowledge that makes it a sure thing.
@Kathy: The counter argument would be that prediction markets are like the stock market. You’re simply putting your money where your mouth is, betting you can predict the future better than others. The flaw in that argument is, of course, that stock markets are casinos.
@Kathy: And then there is this:
Israeli Soldiers Accused of Using Polymarket to Bet on Strikes
@gVOR10: ” The counter argument would be that prediction markets are like the stock market.”
Except that when you buy a stock, you are actually acquiring a real good. You may be betting on its value increasing, but whether or not it does you still own the underlying asset. With these “prediction markets” you are doing nothing but betting, and if you bet wrong you lose it all.
Don’t know why my response posted twice — I swear I only hit the button once!
@wr: Except the “real good” in the stock market often has no intrinsic value beyond being a corporate trading card — no dividends are paid out, and there’s no meaningful vote.
And we can measure the value of that no-meaningful-vote. A bunch of years ago, Google did a stock split, where each share of GOOG was split into two shares — one with a vote, GOOG (Google), and one without, GOOGL (Google for Losers)*. The price of the two kinds of shares moves in lockstep, with the difference between them being noisy and GOOGL sometimes being above GOOG, sometimes below. On average, the share with the vote is a little less than 1% more expensive. So, 99% trading card.
And the trading cards are typically virtual, so more of an NFT than a baseball card.
——
*: They did this so they could issue more stock to employees without diluting the ownership. Future stock grants were GOOGL. You can’t have peasantry having a vote, after all, even if the vote is meaningless.
@Kathy: Prediction markets are definitely gambling. The markets get a cut, but it’s off the top. They aren’t your counterparty, as you say.
AND, prediction markets serve a purpose. The provide a numerically indexed prediction of the likelihood of certain events. They are reasonably good at this, though not at all oracular. The are probably better at it on average than any single person is.
Now, this is not a high and noble purpose, I grant you. But it does have some value, most of which goes to the operators, but some of which goes to the public.
I think they stand well in comparison to certain other financial tools, such as HFT. Or blockchain based cryptocurrencies, or NFTs. Which have no social value that I can see. Options trading has more value than that stuff.
Anyway, prediction markets are something I really am not likely to participate in, but I am not particularly concerned about existing. I think they are probably less corrosive to us than sports gambling, and offer more social value.
Some examples of the public also our very intelligent government preferring AI hallucinations over actual information:
“Parker Molloy“
@wr:
Gus beat me too it, but also there’s Tesla. I’m in the car business. I’m in the scam business. I’m in the combination car scam business.
@Jay L. Gischer:
So, I’m not against gambling at all. It’s gonna happen anyway might as well tax the ever loving shit out of it. We do need to make it harder to do sports betting though.
That being said, I don’t find any social value in prediction markets. One, it’s just betting on coin flips. What’s the predictive value of ten thousand idiots guessing whether something is going to happen or not? Two, what’s the predictive (and social) value when there is rampant insider trading in these markets. To the point where I’ve been wondering if I could spot enough suspicious bets to make money on the insiders.
@Beth: I can’t find the video of Chris Hayes discussing this at the moment on anything that doesn’t want to bring up an app*, but there was a prediction market bet on whether he would bring up Greenland during an interview on Colbert.
https://kalshi.com/markets/kxcolbertmention/colbert-mention/kxcolbertmention-26jan08
Hayes learned about this after the show was taped, but before it was aired. He claims he did not place a bet. IIRC, he mentioned this on his show, which aired live between the taping of his appearance on Colbert and the Colbert show airing.
Silly aside: I don’t trust comments on predictive market betting sites, obviously, but if you read the comments there, people are claiming to have placed bets hours after the show aired… and lost.
——
*: I’m not particularly good at Googling things.
@gVOR10:
As evidenced by the many, many firms that try but can never beat the market indexes.
@Scott:
That wouldn’t be gambling. It should be a war crime.
@Jay L. Gischer:
They started out with serious forecasts, with the betting being a way for people to make serious predictions. Whether that would be useful or not is open to debate. But now it’s just a bunch of bets, many of which are inherently unpredictable. It’s just an online casino, if not an insider trading paradise and therefore a scam.
@Beth:
I’ve been meaning to post about lotteries and gambling, seeing as at the office we’re playing a rather terrible lotto game twice a week (Kathy’s Fist Law of Gambling: Bet only what you can afford to lose*). But work’s just not letting up. And sometimes given the tone of the open forum, it seems frivolous to engage in lengthy explanations of traditional lotteries.
*I consider it superior to the First Commandment of Gambling, as set down by The Wizard of Odds himself, which states “Thou shalt expect to lose.” He’s not wrong, but mine includes it.
Anyway, I capped participation at around $3.50 per week per person.
@Beth: I don’t think this is an all-or-nothing deal. Probabilities are probabilities – a way to deal with uncertainty.
A prediction market is a way to aggregate a bunch of motivated individuals’ opinion about future events. Strangely enough, insider knowledge working its way into the market makes the prediction better. For instance if you have insider information that the Seahawks are going to win the Super Bowl you buy “Seahawks win” which makes the price go up, which makes the prediction better.
Yes, there can be manipulation. There are hosts of imperfections. But this isn’t all or nothing. It’s probably better at predicting than any one human. Recall that that is a low bar.
So, there is marginal value in it. I try to have more than only two categories of things: Wonderful and Useless. Sometimes stuff doesn’t fit well into those categories. Prediction markets, for instance.
Binaries are old and busted. They are a relic of the 20th Century.
The Daily did a whole segment on predictive markets last Friday. It raised a number of good points, including “insider trading” by people involved in the outcomes who had no fiduciary duty to anyone.
Over at LGM Scott Lemieux quotes polling from Strength In Numbers/Verasight. Thay have a low bar for defining “high knowledge” voters, knowing who holds majorities in the House and Senate. They voted against Trump by a net 1.75. Current approval has dropped 12 points from that to net -14%. Meanwhile, “low/medium knowledge” voters, who don’t even know who controls congress, voted for Trump by net 11.4% and now disapprove by 13%, a -25 point swing.
I note this to support my frequent claim that the electorate are a box of rocks. It’s also an occasion to note that while college educated and not are socio-economic classifications, they’re mostly educational classifications and denote some level of competence at reading and reasoning. Lemieux notes,
Karl Rove is an incredible asshole, but he’s smart. He said modern prez elections are all turnout elections. How do we excite our guys and discourage theirs? With respect to elections, I’m not much interested in policy except indirectly. How do we excite our voters and discourage theirs?
I don’t know about the rest of humanity, but to me LLMs have grown tedious and boring.
On other things, I’m having a math headache. I was thinking about fair bets (ie bets that pay according to the real odds), and for the life of me I can’t figure out why a fair bet on a single die is six to one. I know it is, but I can’t work it out for practical cases. I keep coming up with ridiculous results.
That’s why I failed at math so often.
@Kathy:
Five to one?
Six numbers on the die, one wins, five lose.
@charontwo:
Yeah, but it fails to make logical sense.
Thing is a fair bet should have an expected value of zero in the long term, which is a lot higher than the common negative expectation built into all casino games. A six to one payoff has an expected value above zero.
More later, if I can manage over the weekend.
@charontwo:
Think of it as a fraction. Odds of winning are 1/6, odds of losing are 5/6.