Toward a Theory of Kevin Roose ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest — what you say, what you do — is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

This article crystallizes for me the uncomfortable feeling I have about prediction markets, generally, and the specific feeling I got when I read the phrase “[c]ombining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights”. The whole point is to turn someone’s being correct — not right, in any moral or ethical sense, nor principled, but merely correct — into money, which is the purest expression of the fiction that being financially successful is a product of being smart, and vice versa.