This may be an obvious thing that everyone else has caught onto, but... if I were to place a bet against someone dying this year (say it was someone powerful), wouldn't I essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove me wrong and make that death happen?
And isn't that exactly what's happening when people are betting on a new pope in 2025? Doesn't that heavily incentivize some violent individual to take that bet and commit murder?
Imagine any business decision that would strongly benefit from e.g. J.D. Vance not becoming the acting president and Trump remaining in his place for the rest of the year/term. Does making such a decision "essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove you wrong", those someone's being your business competitors/rivals?
Or you could even dial the timeline back to right before the last elections, where this question could literally be about the Republicans literally losing their candidate due to sudden expiration.
My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
For example, I'm in Canada. There's a trade war going on. Every business in Canada is now having to hedge their bets for whether and how long and how bad the trade war is going to be. And we all know the trade war is being driven by one person. So yes, "what are the odds of a change in who is running the country?" is part of that risk assessment.
That's not the same thing as saying, "here's $100k if something were to happen to the man in the funny hat".
Technically, you could construe both as hedging your bets. But in the first scenario I'm just making a decision for my business. In the other, I'm offering a reward to make it happen.
Now, that being said, I could see the water getting murky for a publicly traded company that positions itself in such a way that it would truly benefit from such an event, because then a violent member of the public could buy their stock and benefit financially from commitment that violence. But that's not what we're talking about with polymarket.
Polymarket is all about tying a specific financial outcome to a specific real world event that people could choose to influence. It incentivizes outcomes. Some outcomes would be hard to influence this way. For example, I don't think any bet of any size would influence who would win an election. But if the bet was "It would be terrible if someone did X, I'm betting $$$ that no one will", then the only question is whether the $$$ is worth it to someone with the ability to commit X.
I'm not questioning whether it would be worth it. I'm questioning how that would work, and am very much open to being wrong here. I just don't see how it would work.
For example... let's say I bet a trillion dollars that the Canadian Communist Party (a party on the extreme fringes that few Canadians even realize exists) would NOT win the election. How would that incentive lead to them winning? What could anyone do to make that reality happen in order to claim the money?
That's not to say there aren't other ways to use money to influence an election. Of course there is. But you need to spend it in the run-up to the election, not offer it as a prize afterwards.
Am I being naive? (A: Probably. Wouldn't be the first time.)
I've mulled over your comment for a couple days and I still don't really understand what you're saying... feel free not to reply in light of the delay (or to stop the conversation from spiralling), but:
> Throw a baby in water and it can swim, no naiveté anywhere.
Are you suggesting I'm doing something akin to intentionally throwing a baby in water to see if it drowns?
> 1) Putting out a bet that a vulnerable person will take is immoral. But that’s not what we are discussing.
Agreed... I'm just asking if Polymarket can effectively be used as an assassination market, and if so, isn't that a bad thing?
> 2) How would putting out such a bet, a call option, lead to hedging?
I fully admit I'm not an investment expert, so maybe I'm not using the term correctly. But in my mind, "hedging" is putting in place some type of mechanism to benefit or at least limit your losses in the case of your preferred outcome not working out. So in this scenario, a business person could simultaneously make decisions on the assumption of an ongoing trade war, as well as make other decisions that would only be beneficial in the case of the end of the trade war due to someone's demise.
(For clarity, I'm NOT advocating anyone's demise. I'm a peacenik and am not cheering for harm to fall on anyone. I'm simply discussing hypotheticals in an attempt to understand IF Polymarket could be used as an assassination market, and purely because if it could, I feel that should probably be regulated.)
> 3) This can turn into a long ass discussion that I’m not sure you wanna go on.
You're probably right, but I'm not sure where you feel this conversation is headed.
> Driven by one person? The one that said they needed nukes and allies to defend themselves from their neighbour?
Canada doesn't have nukes and has long advocated for nuclear non-proliferation. We're still not looking to have any nukes of our own.
Trump is openly calling for the annexation of our country, and has started a trade war that no Canadian political leader of any stripe wants.
Seriously just put yourself in the shoes of a Canadian. We've supported the USA in everything they've done other than the Vietnam War, and history proved us correct in taking a pass on that one.
The USA called for Free Trade. We said OK.
The USA called for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We said OK and agreed to never have nukes of our own, taking the USA at its word that it would never violate our sovereignty. Now the so-called Leader of the Free World won't shut up about taking over our country.
The USA called for NAFTA, we said OK. Then Trump tore that up and forced a new trade deal on us. We said OK again. Then he said whoever negotiated that was an idiot who did harm to the USA, to which we still say, "Ok, that's weird, it was your deal, Donald. But let's talk."
And now we're in a trade war that no one wants on our side of the border, and that a vast majority of Americans don't want either.
So yes, driven by one person: Trump.
As for the "new world order" comments, Freeland isn't talking about some conspiracy. She's literally referencing that Trump has set aflame to the existing world order (that was largely engineered by the USA) thereby creating a "new" world order. It's a poor choice of words, but I hardly take this as sufficient evidence that Canada is the belligerent nation in this trade war.
I mean, seriously, what are you even trying to say?
The largest volume of short puts ever purchased on DJT / TMTG (Truth Social / Trump Media Stock) was made shortly before the assassination attempt at the Butler PA rally. The investment firm Austin Private Wealth, however attributed it to a clerical error of a 3rd party that accidentally multiplied their transaction by 10,000. Oops.
>My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
As a third party, I don't particularly care who's in the wrong if I'm living in the middle of a civil war.
Most human beings organically find murder too abhorrent to contemplate or I should say plan and follow through with. Modern entertainment media may be twisting your perception here.
Wow, I had no idea. For all I know that's true in Canada too, I'm not an expert on Canadian insurance law, but I was under the impression that suicide was never covered anywhere. Thanks for correcting me!
It's not something insurers, healthcare professionals, or most anyone else is keen to advertise. It's even difficult to Google as most of the immediate results will be for mental health crisis resources. But AFAIU as suicide came to be understood as a consequence of mental illness, and given that the beneficiaries are no less innocent than if someone died by accident or cancer, courts began to favor and then insurance regulators began to mandate coverage.
I usually think about this in terms of entrepreneurs versus managers, or creators versus optimizers and maintainers.
One is not more important than the other.
Entrepreneurs are cowboys in this analogy. But it's more than just being willing to figure things out on the fly. An entrepreneur sees something that doesn't exist yet and breaks all the rules in order to bring that thing into reality.
Think of any successful startup. Or think of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They're bullshit artists with a penchant for finding talent who can make reality match their lies so that they're not lies anymore. Without them, the word would be a very stagnant place.
But, for every successful Jobs, there is a Tim Cook. For every Bill Gates, there's a Paul Allen.
The problem with the visionary entrepreneurs is they make for terrible managers (drones). They're great gamblers, great at taking big risks, but they just keep doubling down until eventually things blow up in their face, unless they're constrained by an excellent manager.
Look at SBF or Liz Holmes. I truly think they're cut from the same cloth as Jobs and Gates in terms of being willing to bullshit their way to the top. But they never appreciated why they needed "drones" (talented managers) to keep things in check and tell them "no" when their visions were truly batshit.
I'm not sure anyone is truly great at both. Being great at one tends to blind you to the other.
While I'm not saying it's not an emergent property of complexity, is this a falsifiable claim? Is there any proof of this? Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
By all means, if the science has advanced on this, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
The extraordinary burden of proof is on the people making extraordinary claims, in this case that your thoughts come from an invisible, all powerful entity who we have never had any evidence actually exists, and wrote a book, instead of humans having written that book, as we have every other book that has ever existed. The burden of proof does not lay on those who say their thoughts come from biochemical and electrical signals in the brain, as all available evidence supports that assertion.
Yes, we can observe animals at various stages of consciousness and correlate their brain structures (or lack thereof) with consciousness tests (such as the mirror test).
Assuming consciousness isn't primarily a function of brain structures, we'd expect to find animals, plants, or bacteria that defy our predictions of consciousness.
> Is there any proof of this?
Yes. Beyond being able to observe varying levels of consciousness in animals, we've seen the impacts of traumatic head injuries to people. Their entire personalities change, they sometimes become unconscious (think vegetative state). We are fairly confident when operating on brains which parts control what. And we have interesting diseases like split brain syndrome where 2 separate consciousness develop in individuals when there is damage to the bridge between the brain lobes.
> Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
This is a bit of a leap. With many physical sciences, we don't need to replicate things to make predictions, observations, and conclusions. We don't, for example, need to replicate a supernova to understand how stars are formed.
> But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
Have you looked and are you a biologist?
Look, I'm not a biologist, just someone interested in the subject. But from my own personal research on what it known, it's far less a mystery than what you might assume. For example, modern biology doesn't really recognize consciousness as being just a binary on or off sort of thing. There are multiple parts to it that all function in tandem.
The unfortunate thing is that consciousness is not simple. Because of that, it's not something that you could reasonably expect an explanation of in a comment. But if you are interested in a primer then this looks to be a good article [1]
Do you live in the US? The first half of the Biden administration was hamstrung by Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans. The Democrats had nominal control of the presidency and legislature but faced implacable resistance from the Republicans and these two nominally Democratic senators. Until the recent Supreme Court decision the US hasn't had a king.
But there's misrepresenting, and then there's "What the hell does this have to do with the movie I just watched?"
Good advertising (and I speak as an advertiser) sets up your expectations appropriately so that once you've experienced the product (in this case a movie) you leave satisfied.
Bad advertising promises you something completely different so that you leave the experience disappointed, which results in bad word of mouth.
Honestly, what none of the advertising for Civil War accomplishes (and I really liked the movie) is telling you that this is a movie about war journalism more than anything else. Yeah, there's a "this could happen here" message. But the core experience of the film is what it's like (presumably) to be a war correspondent. Didn't expect that at all going into the theatre.
Also... I loved Happy People. But yes, it's depressing. Beautifully so, but not a comedy.
As a Canadian, it terrifies me that it's supposed to be comforting that these powers are only supposed to be used on foreign targets. The US controls so much of the Internet already, and the idea that it's becoming a full-fledged surveillance state beyond my own country's control is horrifying.
We're always talking about China and TikTok. What about America and the rest of the Internet?
The election of Trump in 2024 and the end of the Russia/Ukraine war might be some of the events that could make the EU come out of its denial about their relationship with the US.
I don't know if this works in a big organization, but as someone working on a solo project, I actually love it, and don't take it as a joke at all.
I reject the deadline part (I'm a solo dev, I do what I want when I want), but I love the idea of focusing on working on discrete functionality that I can then communicate to my small community of followers to show progress.
I think this is precisely the type of advice that's needed for large organizations. They can easily get mired in all the complexity and managing launches by headlines can (1) simply paint the vision of the future for the teams that are building, (2) simply communicate to leadership what is launching and when so they can a) not block and, better yet b) help unblock and even accelerate.
Hey everyone! We're kicking around a concept for a new social media and dating app. It's something we've been looking for and doesn't seem to exist, so we're thinking of making it ourselves. Looking for feedback on the concept.
Would love it if you checked it out and gave us your thoughts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
This may be an obvious thing that everyone else has caught onto, but... if I were to place a bet against someone dying this year (say it was someone powerful), wouldn't I essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove me wrong and make that death happen?
And isn't that exactly what's happening when people are betting on a new pope in 2025? Doesn't that heavily incentivize some violent individual to take that bet and commit murder?