{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls","description":"The Monkey\u2019s Paw Curls Isn\u2019t \u201cmay you get exactly what you asked for\u201d one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world\u2019s youngest self-made billionaire (now it\u2019s some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it\u2019s getting called a national security threat. The catch is, of course, that it\u2019s mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the \u201c140 - 164 times\u201d category. (ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don\u2019t mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially \u201cinsensitive\u201d markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don\u2019t know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets) Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn\u2019t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it? https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"