I really don't like this, to be honest. There's already way too much money in politics, and while this isn't really "in" politics in the same way as PACs or "speaking gigs", it still adds another...
I really don't like this, to be honest. There's already way too much money in politics, and while this isn't really "in" politics in the same way as PACs or "speaking gigs", it still adds another layer of financial stakes that don't consider the best interest of the average citizen.
I don't have any knowledge of the legal arguments for one side or the other, but from a purely ideological perspective, it feels like another straw on the back of democracy.
One of those things where there is very little upside and the potential downsides are endless. Best case scenario is that people have something else to bet on. That's the absolute best thing that...
One of those things where there is very little upside and the potential downsides are endless.
Best case scenario is that people have something else to bet on. That's the absolute best thing that can come of this. Not worth the risk.
Prediction markets are viewed as an alternative or complement to traditional polling. It's not just gambling and random bets but working off the assumption that, on average, betters are working...
Prediction markets are viewed as an alternative or complement to traditional polling. It's not just gambling and random bets but working off the assumption that, on average, betters are working off all available info.
I know many people view them as an alternative, but I have yet to see much evidence that they do better than properly conducted polls. Frankly, I think the assumption is wrong — most people think...
I know many people view them as an alternative, but I have yet to see much evidence that they do better than properly conducted polls. Frankly, I think the assumption is wrong — most people think they are working off of all available info, but the info available to a given person is highly dependent on their media ecosystem, and even then people are inclined to ignore information that they disagree with. Outside of settings like, I don't know, professional poker, I think most betters are simply gambling. It's no different than sports betting.
Consider that one of the best election modelers, Nate Silver, is a former professional gambler. While it's likely that many or most gamblers are making haphazard guesses, the aggregate averages...
Consider that one of the best election modelers, Nate Silver, is a former professional gambler. While it's likely that many or most gamblers are making haphazard guesses, the aggregate averages can still be another indicator.
The fact that Silver is a former gambler doesn’t really mean anything about the behavior or predictive capabilities of the average gambler. The aggregate average could be an unbiased estimator of...
The fact that Silver is a former gambler doesn’t really mean anything about the behavior or predictive capabilities of the average gambler. The aggregate average could be an unbiased estimator of the true population sentiment, but only if the types of haphazard guesses people are making are uncorrelated. Given that the type of person drawn to online politics betting is probably not a representative example of the broader population, I think most such people tend to make the same kinds of mistakes.
viewed by whom? I have no doubts that the prediction markets of 2010 compared to 2020 are wholly different. The majority of these people are not integrative-thinking super-forecasters but more and...
viewed as an alternative or complement to traditional polling
viewed by whom? I have no doubts that the prediction markets of 2010 compared to 2020 are wholly different. The majority of these people are not integrative-thinking super-forecasters but more and more tending toward sports-enthusiast horse-betting crypto-bros who always have a Polymarket browser tab open. Not that these two groups of people are mutually exclusive...
Polymarket does not allow Americans to make U.S. election bets on the exchange
Ah wait... so they are all foreign people or at least the "large traders"? If people see these "polls" and it influences their vote, how is it not foreign election interference?
Can confirm, with respect to the composition of Polymarket's participants. It skews heavily young, "rationalist", crypto-friendly, male, etc. This is not an unbiased sample from which to "wisdom...
Can confirm, with respect to the composition of Polymarket's participants. It skews heavily young, "rationalist", crypto-friendly, male, etc. This is not an unbiased sample from which to "wisdom of crowds" can be extracted, or a group of "integrative-thinking super-forecasters" as /u/xk3 mentioned. If you want to play, the Good Judgment Open is here.
Why would people change their vote if their candidate was more likely to lose? This seems a bit absurd to me, but idk I'm not well exposed to american culture.
Why would people change their vote if their candidate was more likely to lose? This seems a bit absurd to me, but idk I'm not well exposed to american culture.
A lot of Americans don't have strong opinions (30% of the population fails to vote!) and choose people who they think will win so they can feel like they are on the winning team. Makes them feel good
if their candidate
A lot of Americans don't have strong opinions (30% of the population fails to vote!) and choose people who they think will win so they can feel like they are on the winning team. Makes them feel good
The hypothesis would be about wisdom of the crowds. Although each individual’s belief has a lot of noise, when averaged together the noise tends to cancel out and the signal is amplified. The...
The hypothesis would be about wisdom of the crowds. Although each individual’s belief has a lot of noise, when averaged together the noise tends to cancel out and the signal is amplified.
The classic story is Gaston’s cow experiment. He asked hundreds of laymen how much an ox weighs based only on looking at it; when he averaged their answers, it was only 1 pound off, even though each individual had no idea about an ox’s density or whatever.
Fair point. I can see how that might be an upside. Another downside I hadn't considered though, is that it makes people much less likely to be open to changing their vote regardless of new...
Fair point. I can see how that might be an upside.
Another downside I hadn't considered though, is that it makes people much less likely to be open to changing their vote regardless of new information.
If John has money riding on the person he thought would be the winning horse a week ago, what would the candidate have to do for John to vote against him now? How big of a scandal before John votes against his own wallet?
I foresee this causing folks to picking likely winners early and then closing their minds to any and all information once their bet is placed.
They're related, but they're absolutely not 1:1 derived. If I'm a polling wonk gambler that's convinced the polls will be off by 2016 or 2022 margin, I will bet differently from reported polling...
They're related, but they're absolutely not 1:1 derived. If I'm a polling wonk gambler that's convinced the polls will be off by 2016 or 2022 margin, I will bet differently from reported polling averages. A Pennsylvania gambler might ask their friends and a family that don't answer polls who they'll be voting for then place bets based on private data.
From the article: I admit I don't know the math behind betting market statistics, but that doesn't sound like a terribly accurate prediction mechanism to me?
From the article:
The majority of Polymarket’s 210,000 users have lost modest amounts of money on the platform, according to the analytics site LayerHub, and as of Friday only 12 percent of users have made a profit.
I admit I don't know the math behind betting market statistics, but that doesn't sound like a terribly accurate prediction mechanism to me?
That doesn’t really have anything to do with it. That most users lose money just means that it’s a small proportion of users who win more than others - winning and losing is fundamentally zero...
That doesn’t really have anything to do with it. That most users lose money just means that it’s a small proportion of users who win more than others - winning and losing is fundamentally zero sum, after all, in this kind of market.
The predictive ability is the actual lines - if you want to see how accurate it is, you’d look at their calibration across the events being predicted on.
It's probably not a shock that a bunch of gamblers mostly lose money -- the rates at which they bet on particular outcomes are what's interesting statistically, not whether they actually manage to...
It's probably not a shock that a bunch of gamblers mostly lose money -- the rates at which they bet on particular outcomes are what's interesting statistically, not whether they actually manage to come out on top.
If you run a poll, you're asking some sample of the population how they'll vote. You can then look at those results and extrapolate to predict how the whole population will vote. In this...
If you run a poll, you're asking some sample of the population how they'll vote. You can then look at those results and extrapolate to predict how the whole population will vote. In this circumstance, a subset of the population is betting money on how they think the election will go. Assuming that they're operating off all available information, you can extrapolate from their bets to make predictions about how the whole population will vote. This doesn't necessarily entail them not losing money -- pretty much anywhere you bet is designed so that most people lose money. What matters is what they think is likely enough to bet on. How useful this is varies, ofc, but it's a source of information about what people think will happen.
Right, but if only 12% of them tend to be right that suggests what they think is not a particularly useful metric, no? Or am I just misunderstanding what that means?
Right, but if only 12% of them tend to be right that suggests what they think is not a particularly useful metric, no? Or am I just misunderstanding what that means?
Not for a betting market, because it’s about the amount of money, not the number of people. If you want to look at its accuracy you’d want to do a calibration study.
Not for a betting market, because it’s about the amount of money, not the number of people.
If you want to look at its accuracy you’d want to do a calibration study.
Right. If ten people bet $1 on horse A, and one person bets $50 on horse B, horse B is still going to be the 5:1 favorite, even though ten times as many people bet on horse A. In other words,...
Right. If ten people bet $1 on horse A, and one person bets $50 on horse B, horse B is still going to be the 5:1 favorite, even though ten times as many people bet on horse A.
In other words, betting odds are weighted by the amount bet, while presidential elections are weighted by a half-assed electoral system from the 18th century designed to protect slavery.
You can be right without making a profit, to start with (especially since most of these users probably make multiple bets -- remember, these guys are gambling). But more importantly, we don't...
You can be right without making a profit, to start with (especially since most of these users probably make multiple bets -- remember, these guys are gambling). But more importantly, we don't actually care if they're right necessarily, we're interested in what their opinions tell us. If way more people bet on a certain outcome, that gives you information on what they think the results of the election will be, which you can use to supplement other information to make predictions.
Me neither. Immediately makes me think of the possibility that the people behind assassination attempts on Trump were just because they bet their life-savings on Kamala. It's not what happened,...
Me neither. Immediately makes me think of the possibility that the people behind assassination attempts on Trump were just because they bet their life-savings on Kamala. It's not what happened, but the fact that it doesn't sound so absurd to me if that were the case is scary in and of itself. The stakes are already high enough. Someone should make a movie with that as plot though
On the flip side, the conspiracy could be someone who knew Trump was the strong favorite and wanted to bankrupt a bunch of people who thought they had easy money betting on a Trump W.
On the flip side, the conspiracy could be someone who knew Trump was the strong favorite and wanted to bankrupt a bunch of people who thought they had easy money betting on a Trump W.
It's worse than the article suggests. There's clear evidence of manipulation in Polymarket. Even Nate Silver acknowledges that there's been a significant increase in Republican-skewed polls. It's...
It's worse than the article suggests. There's clear evidence of manipulation in Polymarket. Even Nate Silver acknowledges that there's been a significant increase in Republican-skewed polls. It's arguable that these biases reinforce the conclusion of many Republican voters that any Democratic Party wins are fraudulent.
Note that as far as I know there is at this moment no known link between those two things, them being done by the same agent is not an only clear explanation and the conclusion of the Nate Silver...
There's clear evidence of manipulation in Polymarket. Even Nate Silver acknowledges that there's been a significant increase in Republican-skewed polls.
Note that as far as I know there is at this moment no known link between those two things, them being done by the same agent is not an only clear explanation and the conclusion of the Nate Silver article is that "smart" poll aggregators like NYT, VoteHub, 538 or himself are not affected by the poll flooding.
It's not that the biased Polymarket and Republican-affiliated polling are truly meant to throw the public averages. They're meant to reinforce doubts about any poll which denies Trump is winning....
It's not that the biased Polymarket and Republican-affiliated polling are truly meant to throw the public averages. They're meant to reinforce doubts about any poll which denies Trump is winning. When 83% of self-identified Republican voters are already primed to believe that election fraud is a problem, it seems reasonable to infer that the biased information is intended to amplify this belief.
Edit: Curiously, the last available figures from Open Judgement had a 63% weighting on a Democratic Party win for the Presidency.
Thanks for the links. That article is actually by someone who works for Nate Silver. It seems worth quoting: … I see betting on the presidential election as pure entertainment rather than being...
Thanks for the links. That article is actually by someone who works for Nate Silver. It seems worth quoting:
First, are polls from Republican-aligned firms more favorable to Trump this cycle? Yes, but not by that much. Here’s a simple average of all national presidential polls conducted in October, and separate averages of polls from Republican-aligned and non-Republican-aligned polling firms according to Rosenberg’s list.
Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally in this simple average. But when you look at only Republican-aligned firms, she’s up by only 2.0 points. Removing those polls from the average brings Harris up to a 3.4 point national lead. These aren’t huge differences, but they’re not nothing. Combined with a similar pattern in state-level averages, polls from Republican-leaning firms could push polling averages — and by extension forecasts — rightward.
…
For the flooding-the-zone theory to hold water (pun somewhat intended), polling averages and forecasts would have to just toss these polls in the average without any adjustment. But that isn’t happening. Here at Silver Bulletin, for example, we weight polls based on pollster quality and adjust them based on pollsters’ house effects. And every other high-quality polling average does something similar.
What’s the result? The polling averages say pretty much the same thing, regardless of which polls they choose to include or exclude. Nationally and in the battleground states, the biggest difference in Harris-Trump margin between the Silver Bulletin average and averages from 538, Split Ticket, The New York Times, and VoteHub is 0.5 points. In Pennsylvania — the likeliest tipping point state — our average is Harris +0.6. Split Ticket has the race as Harris +1, 538 has it as Harris +0.7, VoteHub has it as Harris +0.7, and The New York Times has Harris up by less than 1 point.
The important thing here is that these averages have somewhat different philosophies on which polls they use. For example, Split Ticket excludes Rasmussen Reports and Trafalgar; we include them, but automatically designate them as Republican partisan polls. 538 uses polls from Big Data Poll, Quantus and SoCal Data and ActiVote but we don’t. And VoteHub only uses high-quality nonpartisan polls. But because we’re all weighting and adjusting the polls in reasonable ways, we all end up in about the same place.
I see betting on the presidential election as pure waste entertainment rather than being informative, since the election forecasters do a better job with better data and a better methodology. They don’t cover most contests, though. Betting on other, less partisan contests might, possibly, be a useful signal, but only to the extent that it attracts skilled, informed gamblers, and there’s little sign of it so far.
In the puzzle that is the 2024 election, many people are turning to prediction markets offered by Kalshi and rivals such as Polymarket or PredictIt. They lure some to put down money and others as an alternative readout on the state of the presidential race to those offered by conventional pollsters, pundits and the media.
Around $2 billion in cryptocurrency has been wagered on predicting the next president on Polymarket as of Friday. The New York-based company says it receives tens of millions of visits per month.
Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, said in an interview this week that the site’s user base has been “doubling day over day” since the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia early this month ruled against a Commodity Futures Trading Commission order banning bets on politics. The agency is appealing the decision.
I haven't seen the gambling organizations make a correct prediction about any U.S. presidential elections yet. Maybe they got lucky and hit one once or twice.
I haven't seen the gambling organizations make a correct prediction about any U.S. presidential elections yet. Maybe they got lucky and hit one once or twice.
I really don't like this, to be honest. There's already way too much money in politics, and while this isn't really "in" politics in the same way as PACs or "speaking gigs", it still adds another layer of financial stakes that don't consider the best interest of the average citizen.
I don't have any knowledge of the legal arguments for one side or the other, but from a purely ideological perspective, it feels like another straw on the back of democracy.
One of those things where there is very little upside and the potential downsides are endless.
Best case scenario is that people have something else to bet on. That's the absolute best thing that can come of this. Not worth the risk.
Prediction markets are viewed as an alternative or complement to traditional polling. It's not just gambling and random bets but working off the assumption that, on average, betters are working off all available info.
I know many people view them as an alternative, but I have yet to see much evidence that they do better than properly conducted polls. Frankly, I think the assumption is wrong — most people think they are working off of all available info, but the info available to a given person is highly dependent on their media ecosystem, and even then people are inclined to ignore information that they disagree with. Outside of settings like, I don't know, professional poker, I think most betters are simply gambling. It's no different than sports betting.
Consider that one of the best election modelers, Nate Silver, is a former professional gambler. While it's likely that many or most gamblers are making haphazard guesses, the aggregate averages can still be another indicator.
The fact that Silver is a former gambler doesn’t really mean anything about the behavior or predictive capabilities of the average gambler. The aggregate average could be an unbiased estimator of the true population sentiment, but only if the types of haphazard guesses people are making are uncorrelated. Given that the type of person drawn to online politics betting is probably not a representative example of the broader population, I think most such people tend to make the same kinds of mistakes.
viewed by whom? I have no doubts that the prediction markets of 2010 compared to 2020 are wholly different. The majority of these people are not integrative-thinking super-forecasters but more and more tending toward sports-enthusiast horse-betting crypto-bros who always have a Polymarket browser tab open. Not that these two groups of people are mutually exclusive...
edit: Also, this is another point to consider: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/large-bets-election-prediction-market-are-overseas-source-says-2024-10-18/ I know at least 3 Hong Kong people who have no real ties with the US but have spent a significant amount of money (>$2K USD) on these markets. Their news sources are mostly wallstreetbets and lihkg
Ah wait... so they are all foreign people or at least the "large traders"? If people see these "polls" and it influences their vote, how is it not foreign election interference?
Can confirm, with respect to the composition of Polymarket's participants. It skews heavily young, "rationalist", crypto-friendly, male, etc. This is not an unbiased sample from which to "wisdom of crowds" can be extracted, or a group of "integrative-thinking super-forecasters" as /u/xk3 mentioned. If you want to play, the Good Judgment Open is here.
Why would people change their vote if their candidate was more likely to lose? This seems a bit absurd to me, but idk I'm not well exposed to american culture.
It’s not that they would change their vote, but rather they might be inclined not to vote at all if they think the outcome is a sure thing.
A lot of Americans don't have strong opinions (30% of the population fails to vote!) and choose people who they think will win so they can feel like they are on the winning team. Makes them feel good
The hypothesis would be about wisdom of the crowds. Although each individual’s belief has a lot of noise, when averaged together the noise tends to cancel out and the signal is amplified.
The classic story is Gaston’s cow experiment. He asked hundreds of laymen how much an ox weighs based only on looking at it; when he averaged their answers, it was only 1 pound off, even though each individual had no idea about an ox’s density or whatever.
just fyi it was Galton (I assume overzealous autocorrect ;) )
Fair point. I can see how that might be an upside.
Another downside I hadn't considered though, is that it makes people much less likely to be open to changing their vote regardless of new information.
If John has money riding on the person he thought would be the winning horse a week ago, what would the candidate have to do for John to vote against him now? How big of a scandal before John votes against his own wallet?
I foresee this causing folks to picking likely winners early and then closing their minds to any and all information once their bet is placed.
Then they could make another, larger bet on the other candidate. Same as stock traders trying to hedge their bets.
Betting markets are derived from polling and polling aggregates.
They're related, but they're absolutely not 1:1 derived. If I'm a polling wonk gambler that's convinced the polls will be off by 2016 or 2022 margin, I will bet differently from reported polling averages. A Pennsylvania gambler might ask their friends and a family that don't answer polls who they'll be voting for then place bets based on private data.
From the article:
I admit I don't know the math behind betting market statistics, but that doesn't sound like a terribly accurate prediction mechanism to me?
That doesn’t really have anything to do with it. That most users lose money just means that it’s a small proportion of users who win more than others - winning and losing is fundamentally zero sum, after all, in this kind of market.
The predictive ability is the actual lines - if you want to see how accurate it is, you’d look at their calibration across the events being predicted on.
It's probably not a shock that a bunch of gamblers mostly lose money -- the rates at which they bet on particular outcomes are what's interesting statistically, not whether they actually manage to come out on top.
I think I'm not understanding what prediction means, then.
If you run a poll, you're asking some sample of the population how they'll vote. You can then look at those results and extrapolate to predict how the whole population will vote. In this circumstance, a subset of the population is betting money on how they think the election will go. Assuming that they're operating off all available information, you can extrapolate from their bets to make predictions about how the whole population will vote. This doesn't necessarily entail them not losing money -- pretty much anywhere you bet is designed so that most people lose money. What matters is what they think is likely enough to bet on. How useful this is varies, ofc, but it's a source of information about what people think will happen.
Right, but if only 12% of them tend to be right that suggests what they think is not a particularly useful metric, no? Or am I just misunderstanding what that means?
Not for a betting market, because it’s about the amount of money, not the number of people.
If you want to look at its accuracy you’d want to do a calibration study.
Right. If ten people bet $1 on horse A, and one person bets $50 on horse B, horse B is still going to be the 5:1 favorite, even though ten times as many people bet on horse A.
In other words, betting odds are weighted by the amount bet, while presidential elections are weighted by a half-assed electoral system from the 18th century designed to protect slavery.
You can be right without making a profit, to start with (especially since most of these users probably make multiple bets -- remember, these guys are gambling). But more importantly, we don't actually care if they're right necessarily, we're interested in what their opinions tell us. If way more people bet on a certain outcome, that gives you information on what they think the results of the election will be, which you can use to supplement other information to make predictions.
Me neither. Immediately makes me think of the possibility that the people behind assassination attempts on Trump were just because they bet their life-savings on Kamala. It's not what happened, but the fact that it doesn't sound so absurd to me if that were the case is scary in and of itself. The stakes are already high enough. Someone should make a movie with that as plot though
On the flip side, the conspiracy could be someone who knew Trump was the strong favorite and wanted to bankrupt a bunch of people who thought they had easy money betting on a Trump W.
It's worse than the article suggests. There's clear evidence of manipulation in Polymarket. Even Nate Silver acknowledges that there's been a significant increase in Republican-skewed polls. It's arguable that these biases reinforce the conclusion of many Republican voters that any Democratic Party wins are fraudulent.
Note that as far as I know there is at this moment no known link between those two things, them being done by the same agent is not an only clear explanation and the conclusion of the Nate Silver article is that "smart" poll aggregators like NYT, VoteHub, 538 or himself are not affected by the poll flooding.
It's not that the biased Polymarket and Republican-affiliated polling are truly meant to throw the public averages. They're meant to reinforce doubts about any poll which denies Trump is winning. When 83% of self-identified Republican voters are already primed to believe that election fraud is a problem, it seems reasonable to infer that the biased information is intended to amplify this belief.
Edit: Curiously, the last available figures from Open Judgement had a 63% weighting on a Democratic Party win for the Presidency.
Thanks for the links. That article is actually by someone who works for Nate Silver. It seems worth quoting:
…
I see betting on the presidential election as pure
wasteentertainment rather than being informative, since the election forecasters do a better job with better data and a better methodology. They don’t cover most contests, though. Betting on other, less partisan contests might, possibly, be a useful signal, but only to the extent that it attracts skilled, informed gamblers, and there’s little sign of it so far.From the article:
Archive link
I haven't seen the gambling organizations make a correct prediction about any U.S. presidential elections yet. Maybe they got lucky and hit one once or twice.