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Comment by hogFeast | Hacker News Reader

Right, but the point is that prediction markets remove the subjectivity, and I am saying they don't. They are just wrong in different ways.

Rewarding individuals? So we swap one set of "experts" for another? The point of this is that no-one is an expert. The problems are created not because we don't have prediction markets, but because we treat "experts" with reverence.

The comment about randomness you made to another reply...with any event, there is some part of the outcome that is unpredictable. You could have perfect information, and still would be unable to predict it every time. Some events have no information that can be used to predict them, so predicting is just the event's previous frequency or last value.

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Just for clarity, are you of the opinion that prediction markets have precisely zero value, positive or negative?

It would depend on the underlying event. The reason we have financial markets isn't to predict things, it is to fund things that need funding, and the price mechanism guides that for better or worse.

Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be. As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.

> It would depend on the underlying event.

Agreed.

Would it be fair to say that there is some value, but the quantity is unknown?

> Creating an artificial prediction market is more like gambling where people are transferring risk for its own sake.

I suppose this is part of what is involved, but "transferring risk for its own sake" doesn't seem like a comprehensive description of what they are.

> Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure what the purpose would be.

I think it's useful to always consider that there may be more to see than what catches one's eye.

> As said, these markets are also unlikely to add any new information either because the kind of events being talked about some largely random.

If I rephrase this to:

>> Because [the kind of events being talked about are largely random] it logically follows that [these markets are unlikely to add any new information].

...it seems to me that this is an imperfect way of thinking about it. Perhaps I have mischaracterized your intended meaning?

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