Ed Kaim

25% of one major prediction market platform’s volume was wash trading. At peaks, over 60%. (Columbia study.) If the liquidity signal is fake, every decision you make on that data is noise. I wrote a Bill of Rights for event contract investors. 🧵

@alexkehr @tian_zhi_chen If it makes you feel any better, Polymarket is shedding a lot of that web3 mantle now that their business is legal to operate in the US.

@tian_zhi_chen no clue what hyperliquid is. but bummer is polymarket is the only web3 example since it's a poison on society

it’s pretty wild that VCs poured billions into web3 and the category didn’t produce one breakout company

@DustinGouker Joke all you want, but I’ve talked to people who have made investment decisions based on ridiculous correlations. Some degen out there will have proof that airline stocks always go up when at least 3 of the top 5 NFL picks are offensive players. Good luck talking them down.

Unless you are doing some important hedging via prediction markets

I thought I was the only one actually using the train.

@robinhanson Exactly. The other notion is the idea that companies keep prices low by passing along savings or whatever. If companies could arbitrarily be charging more, then they already would be.

I've never understood this idea that we'd gain from explicitly selling our data to firms we deal with. That sale is already implicitly in current deals we make with them, & I don't see how making it explicit gives us better deals.

I’m team Red as well, but I acknowledge that there is a key moral risk when it comes to children. It’s been argued endlessly that many adults want to protect you children who don’t know understand the implications (infants/toddlers). However, I think an even larger concern is the constant brainwashing of our youth (and gullible adults) that they exist to blindly sacrifice themselves for the sake of strangers. It’s the core storyline in many (most?) movies targeting them and anyone who expresses a desire for self-preservation (or who cares more about the people close to them) tend to be positioned as evil. Maybe this is an education system relic from the German roots where schools were largely intended to produce loyal and obedient soldiers and workers. But whatever it is, I suspect that under typical circumstances a significant majority (80%+) of minors would press blue, creating a moral obligation for the rest of us to also risk blue or potentially lose them.

Despite several days of blue/red button discourse, I haven't seen a single decent argument for why anyone should believe blue would actually win in reality. It's all just personal attacks against red-choosers.

@TurnerNovak @pitdesi I wondered the same but Grok said it’s a famous photo with a negative in the library of congress that may have been enhanced here, but is otherwise legit.

@pitdesi I’m assuming this is a real pic but I hate that I can’t tell if it’s AI or not

One of the most insane things I’ve ever come across: Up until World War II, the majority of renters in NYC all moved at the same time on May 1st at 9am. This is because (almost) every housing lease in NYC expired on the same day. This goes back to an old Dutch tradition where every contract had an end date of May 1st. This was carried over when Dutch settlers immigrated to the US. And in 1820, the state of New York actually passed a law mandating that any housing contract without a specified term ended on May 1st. Many housing leases were just oral / handshake agreements and not actually written down, so they all had this same end date. At the height of Moving Day in the early 1900’s, it was estimated that over a million people in NYC all changed their residences at the same time. For context, NYC’s population was 1.5m in 1890 and 7.4m in 1940. Every year on May 1st, tens of thousands of farmers, etc came into NYC with wagons to make money moving people and their things around all day. There’s a few quotes about this on the Wikipedia page. A good one from 1832: “On the 1st of May the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day. Every one I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable, if you inhabit a rented house. More than one of my New York friends have built or bought houses solely to avoid this annual inconvenience” Moving Day finally ended during WW2 because they couldn’t get enough able-bodied men in town to help move people. They were all away at war. These labor shortages + a general housing shortage + rent control finally put an end to NYC’s Moving Day.

Submitted my CFTC comment on the prediction market ANPRM. tl;dr: IDGAF about gambling and would hate to see it become a distraction from the very practical value of event contracts. Filed: comments.cftc.gov/PublicComments…

My first trip to Israel involved an extended interrogation at Ben Gurion. I never found out if was due to my extremely German name, the Iranian visa in my passport, or my heightened radiation level after spending the day in Chernobyl on a long Kiev layover. I'll pass on this one.

@WALLACHLEGAL You're right, but the CFTC really needs to do whatever they can to win. Setting aside the topic of gambling (ban it or don't, I don't care), we're about to see the entire event contract infrastructure get kneecapped by partisan theater. We need it for legit economic purposes.

The CFTC filed its federal lawsuit vs. Wisconsin in the ED WI even though the 3 removed PM lawsuits are in the WD WI (home of the state capital). It's almost as if the CFTC is forum-shopping to ensure two bites at the apple--similar to SDNY. Judge-shopping to nth degree.

@MarshallCohen @CFTC You nailed it. This is a partisan theater fighting to frame incredibly valuable event contract infrastructure as gambling. Yes, the sports and entertainment markets are largely gambling. Cut them if you want. But let the rest of us use these instruments for economic hedging, etc.

NEWS: I've learned the Trump administration is escalating its battle against states that want to regulate prediction markets — with a new @CFTC lawsuit against Wisconsin. Here's how this fits into the showdown over the future of prediction sites.... (1/5)

The best part of being in Zone 1 boarding is that I know the overhead bins will only be half full by the time I get on. Except for first class. That section will be completely full.

@art_pleb Condor (Germany) does this and more will surely follow. It’s like $30/spot plus another $20 if you want your bag to get a meal.

I never understood why airlines don’t upsell reserved overhead bin space the way the upsell everything else

@pitdesi Well if most people press the red button, only the solvent companies will stave off bankruptcy…

Trump set a precedent, this was obviously coming next How many bad businesses will taxpayers have to rescue?

In Oz Pearlman's defense, they only hired him to read minds in the ballroom. The lobby would have cost extra.

This is a great thought exercise. I would propose two classes of people to exclude: 1. Those who don’t have the ability to understand the implications of the buttons. 2. Those who push blue because they want to die. I think week 1 is an unpredictable outcome because nobody is expecting the choice and therefore didn’t have time to research/socialize. I’d estimate blue edges out because the average person doesn’t understand simple game theory and/or believes there is a social risk to pushing red, so everyone survives. Week 2, 100% of the people who want to live choose red because they fully understand the game theory now. It’s well above 50%, so all the blue pushers are culled. Since the only people left are red pushers, the choice is considered common sense and nobody virtue signals otherwise. In week 3, everyone pushes red because there is no reason for someone to change from the previous week (assuming the exclusions above). Thoughts?

I would like us to run this once a week until everyone always votes red.

@moneybren_nz @waitbutwhy You're overcomplicating it. "Press the red button to live. Press the blue button for a chance to die."

Pretty sure everyone choosing blue misunderstands the question. Imagine you're in a room with 4 strangers. You're asked to push a red or blue button. 1. If you push red, you can leave the room immediately and go back to your life. 2. If you push blue, you can leave the room if at least 3 of you pushed blue. If less than 3 of you pushed blue, all of you get your heads cut off. You're all choosing red now, right?

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@natanielruizg @waitbutwhy There's no child to save here. People who press the blue button are just running into the building with full knowledge that they're only putting themselves at risk.

@waitbutwhy we know there exist people that would risk their lives to go into a burning house to save a child, because we have seen it. i know which button those people press :)