What Is the Truth? ⇥ lrb.co.uk

Geoff Mann, London Review of Books:

The dubious achievement of prediction markets is to have found a new way to exacerbate and exploit the simultaneously frantic and passive experience of the world that is a defining aspect of our age. Like any kind of gambling, they are enervating. We put our money down and then (unless we are using a hairdryer on an airport thermometer) fidget anxiously till it’s over. The world happens to us. This passivity is characteristic of the politics of those who think we are stuck with the world we have. The best we can do is make money while events wash over us: ‘Don’t blame me. I didn’t start the war, I just bet on it.’ Such people may think they are ‘courageous’ or ‘gutsy’ because they take ‘risks’ (this is the way people in the financial sector have always talked), but the whole charade is a profitable supplication to, even a cowering before, the power of ‘the markets’. To put the case more gently, the appeal of ‘risk-taking’ just now, especially but not only to young men, may be an indicator of how little control many people feel they have over their own slice of the world, and of the feeling that they can’t shape their lives in a meaningful way. Marking time through a series of ‘settlements’ and ‘closes’, hoping for a windfall, may look like the best way to buffer oneself against an uncertain future.

The “hairdryer on an airport thermometer” phrase is a reference to a story I had not heard before about a temperature sensor at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It is dumb as hell in the best and worst ways you can imagine.

The only way users of Kalshi and Polymarket are predicting anything is if they have either knowledge of — or control over — an outcome. We recently had a by-election in Alberta. Kalshi members bet with 99% odds that one candidate would win — right up until the votes began to be tabulated. Betting on nigh everything is treacherous, and claiming it is not gambling but “prediction” markets is laughable.