jawiggins

> longshots lose 6.3 cents per dollar when each contract is weighted equally but gain 4.1 cents when related contracts are first grouped by parent event; the two-sided pattern is robust in Crypto and Politics but surprisingly absent in Sports.

This seems like a relatively small inefficiency in the markets, no? If the margin of error notable in a prediction markets is <10 cents per dollar, that implies that they are pricing events pretty accurately. Especially post publication of this paper, when sophisticated traders could trade away this inefficiency.

Huh, I hadn't considered that. Have you seen research from other sources that demonstrate they are not accurate?

> An event predicted to happen p% of the time happens about p% of the time. Can’t beat that.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/10/pr...

As much as I am a fan of being able to see the current probability of a future event by checking prediction markets - the argument that there is a meaningful difference between predicting the outcome of a sports game and betting on the outcome of a sports game strains credulity.

Even if they are losing money, if they went from $10b to $2t in evaluation, that's still $1.99t in value that has accrued to insiders rather than the general public.

But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.

This author seems to be focused on if Anthropic will continue to grow and return value in the future. But it's disappointing that no one has questioned why they waited so long to go public. If they had gone public at a $100b evaluation, everyday people and pension funds could have invested in and seen the returns that AI has already delivered. Instead, Anthropic leadership runs around saying how AI need to benefit society as a whole rather than a select few, meanwhile they have kept the benefit of >$1t for themselves and refused to share it with others.

Previously, I thought investing in AI companies would be a good hedge against AI taking my job, but I hadn't considered the possibility that they fund the build out by issuing shares. Is there no reprieve?

Often when seeing stories like this, there's some implication that the training is due to a planned operation or coming scenario. Yet my employer will regularly make me do trainings for all kinds of things that I know we don't plan to do, from system compromise to fire drills. Yet I've never seen a news story reporting that, for instance, a US bank is drilling for a systems breach that compromises customer accounts, even though I'm sure they do it. It's funny that there are some things we may fret about in the news yet in our personal lives we know them to not be a big deal.

It's significantly less useful in first world countries that have developed and reliable financial systems. However all of the problems crypto has can often still be more reliable than the financial systems available to many humans.

There are so many benchmarks now, it’s hard to know which ones to look for. Google has listed a bunch that they’re winning at, but idk if those are cherry-picked or not.

Good question, I don't know. Guess I'll have to wait and see if I'm even allowed to invest haha.

Haha, yeah I think I will. It's hard to see that growth and not think it's an incredibly opportunity.

The revenue growth rate is quite shocking. Their two worst quarters were Q425 and Q326 where they grew 47% and 45%. Other than those two, they've been growing >100% QoQ for two years. This company is about to list with some of the greatest revenue growth in the history of shareholder capitalism. I wasn't planning on investing before, but I think learning this has changed my mind.

I recall once reading some Patrick Mckenzie article where he discussed how administrative issues like this used to be easily fixed by journalists. They could reach out to an institution seeking comment on a story, the institution's PR department could then ask for 48 hours to comment, in which time they could run something up the flag pole and get it fix. But with the speed on online reporting, they're now incentivized to report on the scandal ASAP, leading institutions to similarly fail to fix the errors. In that case I believe it was about bank foreclosures, but in this case I suspect there might be a way to convince the DA they're prosecuting an old woman and not an e-scammer.

Recently I've seen these game mods where people combine the game engines of two unrelated games (eg, minecraft and grand theft auto) and end up with a play-able and fun product.

I wonder how many areas of computing are about to be transformed by the class of things that used to be impossible because the engineering needed to make it happen has just gone from enterprise level to "claude please do this" level.

It's such a shame they were never able to invest the SS fund in something productive. The WSJ had an article a few weeks ago that put the lost earnings close to $1 trillion.

Baby Boomers are on average the richest generation, with ~$1.8 million [1]. Most of them could happily fund their own lifestlye without taking money from the poor. It's not like elderly people aren't able to apply for normal government programs if they need support. Elderly people can get on SNAP so they don't starve, but why can't a 20 y/o who can't make ends meet get free checks every month?

[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...

Every young person in America is paying 6% (3% directly, 3% by their employer) of every pay check into a wealth redistribution program. Who receives the money from that program? Baby Boomers, who have an average wealth of $1.8 million, only ~$400k of which is in that house they don't feel pressure to down-size out of. The remaining ~$1.4 million is spread across a number of liquid-able assets that they could use to fund their lifestyle if they choose to [1].

It's funny that most politicians promise taxes on the wealthy to support social programs without mentioning that the overwhelming majoring of said programs involve forcing young people who don't own homes and aren't having families to give UBI to millionaires.

[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-wealth-distribution-in...

There's a reason why every American worker is paying 6% of their income to give checks to the richest cohort in society, and every politician is afraid to touch the program.

While notionally my interests align very well with lesswrong, I am seldom able to make it through the length of a post without losing interest.

Because of all the people I've met in my life, I've never actually met someone who was willing to voluntarily lower their standard of living. I've never met someone who had AC in a hot place and gave it up, wanted lower internet speeds, less phone battery, or wanted to go from living in a nice house back to one with a leaky roof.

In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.

For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.

Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?

How do you become <100 richest people in the world without being right about anything?

It turns out that small minor improvements compound long term, and there are relatively few examples of massive step-changes that were centrally planned. Here's a good book on the topic that you may enjoy: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency

It already has made them poorer and miserable. The Draghi report was all about how they were poorer due to these things. Of course they decided not to follow the recommendations.