i agree with everything you've said in these threads so i don't see what your problem with MY position is.
my point is that it's a measure of public opinion of who's gonna win, which on election night is downstream of results, so - aside from drama purposes - it seems more useful to link to results and projections to track the races. or at the very least, my point is that it's retarded to characterize the betting market odds as measures of probability like some poasters are.
Date: November 3rd, 2026 9:53 PM Author: a New York Times analysis of Reddit posts
Because there are 9000 relevant facts going on - vote tallies in a some Indiana county can be relevant to the California governor's race. Prediction markets synthesize that faster and more quickly.
As an example, the thing I am currently tracking is Dem total House seats. We're not going to know the relevant vote totals in California for a week. But there's enough data for motivated traders to take a position on whether it's going to be Dems 250 or Dems 255.
but do you think most of the money is being moved around by people who are GOOD at synthesizing and guessing? i don't think there's any reason to believe that to be reliably true on these sites. gamblers are notoriously bad at gambling and people get kicked off the sites if they win too much. and even if it's been in true in the past, i have no idea if it has, these sites are getting more and more random normies to gamble away their paychecks every day
re: your example of betting on number of House seats, that's not the type of thing i've been criticizing today. my criticism is specific to Election Day and is about linking to individual races on prediction markets instead of results and projections.
cr. i really don't think we disagree on much here. i just don't think you realize that some poasters like EPAH have very very poor quantitative reasoning skills and don't understand the difference between a measure of public opinion and a measure of probability. you see the prediction markets for what they are and find them interesting for that reason. he links to a graph and thinks he's linking to a reliable measure of the probability of the outcome of the race.
you realize my criticism of prediction markets before election day is completely separate from my criticism of prediction markets on election night, right? you understand this?
either one day you'll understand or you'll just be forever easily manipulated by these sites as capital holders increasingly take advantage of people like you
again, if you just acknowledged that they're a noisy measure of public opinion and you enjoy tracking them because they're exciting, that'd be fine, i'm not telling you what to like or not like
but you've claimed that they're accurate measures of probability of the outcomes of races which is indefensible
I think her error is she thinks people look at 61% odds and 93% the same as if they both somehow guarantee a win when neither do. and therefore they’re not predictive of anything.
no, that's not my criticism, and i never said anything about them not being "predictive"; i honestly don't even know what that claim could possibly mean. EPAH made that up. my point is that they're not measures of probability of an outcome, as some people are acting like they are. they're just measures of what people think is gonna happen.
ok but that last part is useful to know. there’s too much media and too many variables for any one person to consume and they change rapidly. if you want to know how news events are impacting races it’s a lot faster to look at a single number based on tens of thousands of people with skin in the game than to try to read 10,000 different twitter reactions to a particular news event and then come up with a guess as to how that’s impacting the consensus opinion
well my criticism is that on election day, it's not as useful as linking results and projections, since it's downstream of those things. it's just a dramatic, volatile reaction to those. it's defensible to find it INTERESTING but i don't think it's as useful as those other sources.
before election day, my criticism is that it's tainted by the thing i keep talking about where people can pour money into a candidate to astroturf them.
the first point only applies on election day and the second only before.