It beats polls for elections ONLY until someone notices it is being used as the basis of news stories and figures out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opinions.
The very low stakes you point out make this even easier to put a thumb on the scales.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The point of the article is that as soon as the "news" started reporting on prediction markets or corporatized gambling as if it was a measure of sentiment, it ceased to become a good measurement. That point has long passed.
News already broadcast tons of nonsense. Political commentary is just brain rot. Economic commentary might be just as well generated by one of those Markov chain string generators - it would make as much sense.
>>out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opinions.
It will then become more expensive.
Out of all the manipulation news and journalists do every day I am not sure why "people bet money at 1 to 4 odds that Trump takes Greenland before 2027" is particularly problematic. It's true people bet money on it at those odds. How is that more problematic that news running pro or anti Trump segments or broadcasting some random crystal ball readings to justify stock price fluctuations of the day?
You can see how much money is bet on the market as well. It's not like you can spend 5 figures and suddenly shape the narrative.
Right, we agree on just about everything. Political and economic commentary is generally brain rot, and Polymarket, etc. is not an accurate predictive tool
And yes, if it starts to be seen as one of the levers to manipulate in manipulating public opinion, it will become more expensive. That does not improve it's predictive value, since we never really know how expensive it is on either side relative to the bankrolls and motivations of those who might want to manipulate it.
But for anyone who wants to use it as a crystal ball, go right on ahead — good luck with that!
If you think Polyrmarket is not an accurat predictive tool you can easily exploit and make a fortune. If you think some politician is paying to manipulate the market just take their money by taking the other side.
It's not perfect but it's the best thing we get. Certainly beats analysts, government officials and about anyone else.
>>If you think some politician is paying to manipulate the market just take their money by taking the other side.
Yes, that is True -- IFF (and that is a big If and Only If) we can suss out in real time what is happening.
The other risk is the Polymarket (or other betting market) managers' calls on what gets meet or don't meet the criteria. Like that punter who made big bets on the Venezuela Maduro kidnapping operation, betting tens-of-thousands$$ on the "Invasion" proposition and initially looking like he made almost a half-million dollars, only to have Polymarket decide it was not an "invasion".
So there is both risk of "did I actually detect a ploy?" and counterparty payout risk. But if we can get past those two, we can definitely make bank!
EDIT: Another risk, and probably the key risk, is even after noticing and identifying a large market-moving bet, whether that is from a player who is trying to skew the market (and doesn't care if they win/lose as they are playing a different game) or a player with inside information who knows something we do not.
There is a certain kind of person who thinks that all the news they disagree with is being faked by people who will spend multiple millions on Polymarket just to get a news story on CNN.
This person does not realise that most people do not pay attention to the news, that people in power are not glued to the news waiting for journalists to tell them what to say, or that the news is generally not very important...except to people like them who play out these fantasies about wealthy people mind-controlling them through CNN.
The very low stakes you point out make this even easier to put a thumb on the scales.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The point of the article is that as soon as the "news" started reporting on prediction markets or corporatized gambling as if it was a measure of sentiment, it ceased to become a good measurement. That point has long passed.