> The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money.
I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.
If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death, I would use that as a trigger for whatever defense strategies I had in place. Someone has really good reason to bet a lot of money on the prospect that I'm about to die. It's probably someone who knows of an active plot in motion to try to kill me! The sooner I can find out about that, the better. I would much rather give them an incentive to make that known somewhat earlier than wait.
I feel like there must be some big piece of this puzzle that I'm missing that makes it so these cannot operate the way I imagine them, but I haven't heard anyone explaining what it is. Someone fill me in on what I'm missing here?
If the prediction market is for a non-trivial amount, it's likely someone is going to kill you in exchange for the money the prediction market offered them. The prediction market isn't acting as a prophet here, it's acting as a plausibly deniable murder for hire service and you are its victim.
The people "betting against" you dying just paid to have you killed.
This was discussed on polymarket with the Galve Goat burning bet and assume it's why
Essentially it's a big straw goat in Sweden that vandals sometime set on fire.
Right towards the end as the probability approaches zero there's a huge profit incentive, "done deals" usually go under well under 1¢ meaning 100-200x returns.
A US man once traveled to Sweden to set the goat on fire, he was caught, fined $20k(?) and then fled the country before paying the fine.
Risk reward in a situation like this absolutely creates a situation for prediction markets similar to the observer effect in physics, it's no longer predicting the future and instead altering it.
As it gets closer to the deadline, the timeframe shortens, so the gain does increase. A 1% return which you're paid on tomorrow is a 3,778% annualized return.
There’s still limited liquidity. You need to find someone willing to put up a very large amount of money for almost no gain. I also doubt these websites have enough activity to well calibrate near 1 dollar bets, so it’s not clear the market is giving you accurate predictive power with very expensive bets, which means you’re risking a lot (again, for almost no gain).
Exactly, these markets exist in the real world, so as their size and use increases, the more likely the odds will influence real world events. Look at sports betting for a much smaller example. Match fixing is known. Electricity markets are gamed for individual profits at the detriment to everyone and the stability of the system, even with regulators trying to keep things stable. Enough "Market for all the things" already..
The type of people who have the power to change decide these type of events already are able to use that power to make money in a thousand different ways. These markets will change nothing.
See, there are two major flavours of pro-market attitudes. The first one is "if we allow many independent individuals to try their own approaches to a problem and let the people with "better" approach to personally profit from it handsomely and make them compete against each other in an environment with objective-ish judgement of "what is better" instead of "impress the (inevitably corruptible) officials to be judged victorious and awarded the fortunes", and also manually guard and regulate against several universally known ways to sabotage such competition, then we'll be able to channel human ingenuity into solving difficult to solve technical problems while also rewarding those who are able to come up with (and implement) such solutions with low overseeing overhead". Of course, such an attitude isn't strictly speaking "pro-market", it's been around since ancient times; hell, the USSR of all places had this attitude in spades until about the 70s or so.
The second one is "Nah, we don't have to try and think about anything ourselves, just let people fend for themselves, they'll figure it out, and it won't have any unforeseen bad side effects, why would it; markets are magical like that!" Yeah, about that...
Right, a market is a small tool of larger systems. That’s fine, hard to get right but can make systems better. Type two just seems to be the cargo culted everywhere..
I think it's actually not that hard to get right (or at least "right enough"), as evidenced by the fact that markets have successfully run the entire global economy for thousands of years with no central oversight and almost no regulation.
Markets failures do happen, and when they do it can be helpful to have an external force step in to nudge the market back onto the rails. But even without such interventions they work remarkably well on balance.
> markets have successfully run the entire global economy for thousands of years
Markets, as they are understood today, are more like about 300 years old, even less in some places. The bulk of world economy has been sustenance farming for most of the human history, with some communal mutual help (based on favours and mutual indebtedness) thrown in.
> with no central oversight and almost no regulation
Lol what? E.g. Roman Republic (and later empire) tightly regulated its markets, especially food trade, during all of its existence.
The industrial revolution multiplied the size of the global economy by several orders of magnitude, but it didn't create it. International trade has been happening on a smaller scale since large-scale civilized society existed. And I said "almost no regulation", not "no regulation". Probably something on the order of 99% of the regulations we have today wouldn't have even been feasible to enforce a couple hundred years ago, yet markets still functioned just fine on the whole.
Yes, OOP might have chosen a suboptimal example here. But for general newsworthy events, people aren’t going to be in positions to manually make them happen. And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.
The prediction markets aren't yet at sufficient scale to purchase a war, you mean. People start wars for money all the time though. If they become of sufficient scale, people will purchase wars on them.
There's already lots of examples where they are of sufficient scale, like paying the press secretary to shut up after 64 minutes. Or paying someone to falsify ISWs map of the front line in Ukraine.
> But for general newsworthy events, people aren’t going to be in positions to manually make them happen.
Many newsworthy events (and even more events that actually reach prediction markets, many of which are at best marginally newsworthy) are actions ultimately pivot on a human decision, so the first part isn’t true.
> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.
Are you saying “no one would start a war with personal financial gain being part of the motivation”, or “it is impossible for the payoff of a prediction market bet to be of sufficient magnitude to alter the calculus in even the tiniest iota in that case”?
Because the first seems extremely clearly false, and the second seems improbable in the case where the first is false.
I can see someone in the Trump admin absolutely using a betting market when they can influence the outcome. At the least I'd also bet that someone in the T admin was the person who knew about Maduro being captured.
...but many people in positions where they can start a war or cause some other highly visible event of any sort probably will start turning to Polymarket to make money in the course of their work
Not really, for the same reason entrapment isn't usually seen as an accurate way to gather information for law enforcement. See also Goodhart's law and overfitting.
> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.
Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least trying to prove it.
If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.
Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many people exist who have the capability to start wars or influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you know about these people and their motivations?
It isn’t just the people who can start a war. It’s also normal people who can.
Imagine if 10 million people bet on starting a war vs 5 million who say no war. Those net 5 million people are going on social media saying why the war is justified. They’ll vote in war mongers. They’ll support the military. The bet literally influences the result. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's not a bounty, though, right? It operates like other trading markets? So unless they have big money to wager, they don't have big money to gain. If it's hovering at, say, 10% odds, it's not like they can automatically 10x their money because other people have to take the opposite side. There would have to be a lot of liquidity in the market for their large bet not to move the odds, and as the odds move, they make less money.
> So unless they have big money to wager, they don't have big money to gain.
It requires that they put down collateral (the purchase of the the yes bets) that they lose if they don't meet the contract, so they do have to have starting capital.
> because other people have to take the opposite side.
That is to say that there must be people offering the bounty.
The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of the contract, but the total upside available in the order book.
> and as the odds move, they make less money.
They have to put up more collateral for the remainder of the contract if they want that upside - but they make all the money that they already put up collateral for.
> The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of the contract, but the total upside available in the order book.
But one person doesn't get the whole thing. ALL the people holding that side of the contract split the payout, in proportion to the size of their holdings in that side of the market.
I think if I use hypothetical numbers, it will help me explain how I think it works, and maybe this will help someone figure out where my error is.
Let's imagine the market is about whether I will die by the end of the day. So far, there are $500,000 in total bets in the market, and there are 5,000 shares in this market. Let's say it's currently sitting at only 10% odds that I'm going to die. I think that means 4,500 shares, or $450,000, is on the "No" side and 500 shares, or $50,000 is on the "Yes" side. Do I have that right so far?
If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
But suppose someone has a solid plan to kill me by the end of the day. They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the current price. They'll actually get well under 500 shares, and probably not even half that many, and they'll still be splitting the pot among the other people who already have the 500 shares on the "Yes" side. So they're still at not even half the "Yes" side of the market. They can probably double or triple their money, but we're talking about making another $50-100k on top of getting their own $50k back. It's not like they get the whole $500k.
That's what I mean when I say it's "not a bounty." A "bounty" makes it sound like, "If you're the one who kills smeej, you get $500k," but that's not what's happening here.
Lots of people might be willing to try to kill me for $500k. A heck of a lot fewer are going to be willing to try to kill me for 2-3x whatever capital they can come up with right before the hit.
Am I at least understanding this part of it correctly, how the payouts actually work? If I'm not, that would go a long way toward helping me figure out what I'm missing.
> I think that means 4,500 shares, or $450,000, is on the "No" side and 500 shares, or $50,000 is on the "Yes" side. Do I have that right so far?
No - there's always an equal number of contract outstanding on both sides of the bet. A contract is a promise from the person who sold "no" to pay the person who bought "yes" a dollar if the outcome happens. These contracts can trade from anywhere between 1 cent to 99 cents corresponding to a 1% chance to a 99% chance that you would die*. The odds the market reports is just whatever price the last contract traded at (or alternatively whatever price sits between the current open offers to buy/sell contracts. In liquid markets these tend to be the same).
> If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
They each get $1 per share. Their profit is $1 minus how much they paid for the share. It's not (meaningfully) a shared pot which is divided up, it's a fixed amount per share.
> They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the current price.
Ignoring the numbers at this point - you're generally right that they need to find someone willing to sell them the contracts. The existence of a large number of outstanding contracts doesn't guarantee this - they might be held by someone who is holding them to minimize the payout a hitman could get for killing you for instance.
The most direct guarantee is the order book The order book is the collection of open offers "I'm willing to sell X yes-contracts at Y price" that the market has for potential purchasers. The hitman can look at this and snatch up all of these simultaneously (up to some race conditions in the market - we can mostly pretend those don't exist but they do introduce some risk on the hitmans side). This can be thought of as the size of the currently available bounty.
There's a chance the market will continually over-price these yes contracts - and the hitman will never kill you as a result. That would be a huge mistake on all the financially motivated holders of yes contracts though - their positions go from worth something (if they sell to the aspiring hitman) to worth nothing if they don't price them low enough. In general you should expect the market to find the price at which a hitman will carry out the contract - so long as there's enough money in the market in the first place.
* Ignoring transaction fees and the time value of money, it's close enough for this discussion.
But the hitman still does not get the entire value of the contract. The hitman gets the value of the number of shares he can afford to buy, but that's not the whole contract by any means.
I think I understand what you're saying about the pricing. Am I correct in saying, then, that if the odds are 90% in favor of my living through the contract, the "No, smeej won't die today" price should be close to $0.10 (again, ignoring fees and the time value of money)?
If the hitman tries to buy in with 10% of the total funds already in the market, the odds/price are going to shift hard. It's going to devour a huge chunk of the order book. Any market that suddenly has someone come in at 10% of the whole market value is going to get a massive trading wick. So yeah, he'd get some shares at $0.10, but he's probably going to eat the open order book to a much higher cost. He can 10x some very small portion of his money (however many shares are on the book at $0.10), but he can only 5x his money at $0.20, or 3x at $0.33.
Even if we assume he does have $50k to dump into the market, I still don't see how he's going to more than triple his money, which is a heck of a lot less than taking the entire market's value as though it were a bounty.
Yes - we agree on how the pricing and odds work now :)
The hitman shouldn't expect to capture the value of the entire open interest. The market here is serving to negotiate the bounty with speculators betting that too much was offered taking the rest (a privilege they pay for by buying contracts that only pay out if they don't take too much). It's a curious form of negotiation since the people paying for the murder don't participate... but should (in a very theoretical efficient market) come to a "fair" (large enough to get the job done, and no larger) payment for the hitman.
2xing your money in a night is a huge payout, I think you're overestimating how high the multiplier on the capital requirement needs to be. That said, if you aren't, and you need a 5x payout to find a hitman then no rational speculator would purchase contracts for more then $0.20...
It's only a huge payout if you have a huge amount of money. If you have $1k to put in, you get $2k out. Who's risking getting caught and potentially facing the death penalty for $1k in profit?
If someone already has significant money backing, and especially if that person already has some other specific reason to want you dead, I can see how it might be added incentive, but even so, you also now have to tip your hand. To buy in hard, you have to send a signal saying you have reason to be confident I'm about to die. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot right before trying to shoot me in the head.
Plus, it's not like the markets are anonymous. Polymarket isn't trading with Monero. You're not just tipping your hand ahead of time. You're pointing the investigators right at yourself.
I just don't see how the calculations end up falling in favor of killing somebody if you weren't already planning to do so.
OK so its much a shallower thought than I anticipated.
Why go through the "prediction market" at all then? The hitman still killed someone, payments are not anonymous in this market, and its certainly not clean. Further, you share the pot with however many are involved, proportional to the allotted bets on each side and presuming binary prediction. And if the winds change on the market for the bet proportional to the "hitman's" side, you lose out on dollars that would otherwise be paid to you (the hitman).
And it'd be so easy to stiff the hitman just by equalizing the positions by timing it.
All that risk for something that's far simpler to just pay directly?
> Why go through the "prediction market" at all then
It's there. It's not actually easy to find hitman for hire. This is a publicly advertised market for it.
Plausible deniability. We weren't paying for the witness to be murdered, we were expressing our confidence that no one would murder the witness.
Price discovery. The market tells you how much you need to pay a hitman (if you overpay hedge funds swoop in and take the difference, telling you for next time. If the hedge funds underestimate the cost they end up paying a significant penalty to the people who they prevented from hiring a hitman).
Crowd funding. The market means that every can chip in however much they want towards paying the hitman, and they only end up paying if its enough. In fact the middlemen who accepted the bets in the meantime may promise to pay some small amount of damages if enough isn't collected.
It is impossible to stiff the hitman, and there is no risk for the hitman that the "winds change". The hitman takes out the entire "yes" position before committing the murder. If it's not enough, they don't commit the murder.
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.
You're ignoring the critical issue of timing. It's one thing to crowd-source knowledge in a steady, homogenous way. It's quite another for an actor with material knowledge of the situation to exploit this dramatic information asymmetry to turn a profit, revealing the new information at the last possible timepoint it could be used to lay a wager. Insider trading is quite different from a Hayek-style price signalling, and it's the same here. In principle (and on long time-scales) these markets can incentivize important information to come to light sure, but in infinite time we're all dead anyways. The short-time dynamics matter a lot more, from a social welfare perspective.
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here
You're correct in your understanding of prediction markets with respect to traders using insider information. There are a couple things going on here. One is the subtext from most news media now that Technology Bad. New technologies are treated as guilty until proven innocent, because that is a more engaging narrative for readers. So in this case, those covering this stuff immediately latch onto the rich get richer, insider trading viewpoint, and that gets reported without any analysis of why that might actually be desirable.
Second, prediction markets, in trying to become broadly accessible to "normal" people and desiring liquidity, need a marketing strategy that is understandable. They can't put out a Robin Hanson article as marketing material. So they market by appealing to something people do already understand, which is gambling. The public has this idea now of prediction markets as a way to make money, not as a tool for learning information. So the default perspective on insider trading is now one of unfairness: somebody used their privileged position to make money. The correct perspective is, in fact, that prediction markets are providing users with value by eliciting information from those insiders, information that the public would not otherwise have. The latter perspective is mostly foreign to degenerate gamblers, and the marketing campaigns of Kalshi and Polymarket aren't helping.
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.
Except the paragraph you quoted nullify this benefit
> The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro
So we learnt nothing. For the entire duration the stock is online, its pretty much 50/50 then suddenly 1 day before, the ticker spikes to yes.
Yes, but it spikes BEFORE the attack begins, which means we learnt someone thought there was a string reason to believe things were about to change earlier than we otherwise would have.
That's the whole point, isn't it?
And if you're going to tell me the paragraph I quoted nullifies what I've said, would you please explain how? Obviously I don't currently understand it the same way you do, and I have asked for help understanding what I'm missing. Saying, "You're missing it," isn't helpful.
The missing piece is the distinction between a market that observes reality and a market that instigates it.
The criticism is about the systemic risk of converting prediction markets into "Assassination Markets"—mechanisms where the payout is not a reward for foresight, but a bounty for action.
In the case of Maduro, the operation cost around $300 million so a $400,000 payout isn’t providing a financial incentive.
But in the case of assassination, a $400,000 payout is sufficient motivation.
Or if you're the military commander with the option to disobey the illegal order (to go to war without congressional authorization) or take the bribe and execute the order. "Unmarked cash" (which this is) has pretty different purposes from official funds.
I think there's a pretty good chance the person who took that money was opportunistic, this time, but $400k isn't a trivial sum of money, it's not impossible it was the difference between this happening and not.
But it's not a bounty. It's a market, right? So the payout is split among everyone on your side? And the if you try to dump a ton (measured relative to the size of the market) into the market, the price tanks because there aren't enough people coming in on the other side. You get a big wick in the trading candle, so you scoop up the much less favorable terms of the bet at higher cost.
>If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it [...] Someone fill me in on what I'm missing here?
The assassin might place the bet at roughly the same time as they place the bullet in the chamber. Making the prediction into a bounty. Not giving you any meaningful time to ponder the new information. The notification from your phone would be the distraction they'd use when taking aim.
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it.
Indeed. Insider trading is a feature of prediction markets, not a bug. There are two kinds of people who participate in prediction markets:
1. People who have insider information, or at least more sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.
2. Gamblers.
In effect, prediction markets are a way to move wealth from the second group to the first. If you understand that and still want to participate, cool. It's your money, and you're allowed to gamble it away if you find that entertaining.
At any rate, given the relatively small-potatoes level of bets going on at Polymarket and Kalshi, the article author's breathless anxiety about this is a bit overblown.
> 1. People who have insider information, or at least more sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.
This bucket as you've defined it is too broad.
There are a few different kinds of non-gambler participants in prediction markets:
1. People with "insider information" as we think of it - they "know" the answer to the market because they are "involved" somehow.
2. People who aim to do superior analysis of publicly available information to produce an edge. For example, an AI firm with better hurricane prediction modeling may try to monetize that by betting on whether or not a hurricane will impact an area.
2b. People who do the work to create new information. For example, the Trump 2024 election market on polymarket famously had better odds for Trump than polling. It turned out that a mega whale was bidding Trump up because he had paid for his own private polling in battleground states and that gave him confidence Trump was going to win.
In short, it's mostly incorrect to suggest that prediction market participants are either illegitimate insiders or gamblers; there is a third class of actors that are a very important cohort: those who do the work to create better predictions and monetize their work by betting in the markets. This third cohort of professional predictors is the most important in long-term prediction market growth.
Insider trading in stocks are prohibited but not for the reason most people think. It has nothing to do with someone having an unfair advantage in an informational sense, and everything to do with fiduciary responsibility.
The CEO and executive team has fiduciary responsibility to act in the financial best interest of the shareholders. Your broker too.
If you have insider info (Obtained legally) but no fiduciary responsibility you can act on it. That’s why congress members trading US equities based on decisions they’re privy to is not, from a legal perspective, insider trading. They don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to their constituents
1. The misappropriation theory of insider trading covers anyone who trades on material non public information sourced through a trusted relationship regardless of any fiduciary duty to the company. For example, if I tell my personal attorney a non public fact about the company I work at, and they trade on that information, they absolutely can be found guilty of insider trading despite having no relationship to the company at hand.
2. Congress is explicitly covered by insider trading law, which was affirmed in the STOCK Act of 2012. The fact that they’re rarely indicted has more to do with the legal and political challenges associated with doing so, not the legality of the act.
> The misappropriation theory of insider trading covers anyone who trades on material non public information sourced through a trusted relationship regardless of any fiduciary duty to the company. For example, if I tell my personal attorney a non public fact about the company I work at, and they trade on that information, they absolutely can be found guilty of insider trading despite having no relationship to the company at hand.
Huh. The lawyer example works because attorneys have a very specific, enforceable duty of confidentiality. Swap that relationship out and the conclusion may change. As written, the comment slides from "duty-based misuse of information" to "any private knowledge you shouldn’t have," which is not the same thing.
A lawyer (not my lawyer) gave me his off-the-cuff opinion on this scenario:
A pharmacologically-literate clinical trial participant for a novel new drug strongly suspects he did not receive the placebo/comparator drug, based on the subjective effects, plus their own pharmacology knowledge, experience with the placebo, and the research on the candidate drug.
However, this drug was not therapeutic for him, the side effects were onerous, or perhaps he believes the trial will be halted. Whatever their reasoning behind his inference, no details of others’ experiences were leaked to him, blinding was maintained; protocol was followed. He didn’t base this on a lab readout.
Based on his understanding of published research on the candidate drug, and projecting from his lived experience as lab rat, he believes this trial should disappoint shareholders. At the very least, shares may be priced too high.
Can the participant, based on this inference, invest $$$ shorting the pharma firm? This drug is considered the firm’s last best hope.
Their answer was yes, basically. He can trade on this non-public info.
This scenario seems very different because nobody gave the person any material non-public information at all, they simply deduced it from their experience participating in the trial. This feels similar to the question of "can a passenger on the Boeing jet with the door plug that blew out trade on that information" to which the answer appears to be yes.
Misappropriation theory is the following:
> The misappropriation theory of insider trading is a form of insider trading where an individual trades stock in a corporation, with whom they are unaffiliated, on the basis of material non-public information they obtained through a breach of a fiduciary duty owed to the source of the information
The important part, which you're right was unclear in my comment is that the recipient of the information must have a fiduciary relationship with the source of the information, even if they do not have one with the company in question at all. That's the distinction.
Kalshi and Polymarket have a billion dollar of open interest between them (though velocity here matters too and volume is not very useful). The important thing is they are growing fast. Which means it might become big-potatoes very soon.
I thought the reason prediction markets were useful was not that people with inside information participate in them which can provide an indicator to the rest of us, but that by providing a sense of consensus at scale we can more accurately predict things.
e.g. two sports teams participating in a fair match tomorrow, someone runs a book and after 200,000 punters bet, the odds are 90/10 in favour of Team A indicates that 90% of the time Team A is going to win that game.
This assumes perfect and fully available information with punters availing themselves of this info (or at least an equal split of passionate/casual/informed/wreckless or even slightly "inside" punters on each side).
Ironically, I actually have a philosophy degree. If I'm still missing the point, I really don't think it's because I haven't learned how to think.
All I can really do in this case is ask for explanation. If you're enough higher and mightier than I am that you don't care to give me one, that's fine. You don't have to. It's just kind of...unnecessarily condescending to rub my face in it without even trying?
The interesting thing to me about this example is that it had to be someone lower level in or near the administration with less wealth, but who knew about a military operation. Hard to imagine any of the rich people around him risking a bet for such a small sum.
One of the problems is that by creating a prediction market for your death, you may be creating a hit for yourself.
You enable different enemies to crowdsource for your bounty, and as soon as it is deemed worthy by a hitman, they might take up on the job by placing the opposite bet.
It's a very specific example but the mechanics work for most events in a similar fashion.
It is for this reason that event creation is not open to the public, but rather handled by the regulated markets themselves
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here
> If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death
No, you definitely would not want that. You don't want to live in the world like this. That's the point.
It's fucking horrible and dystopian, people betting on extra-legal invasions of countries, murders, things that could hurt or harm people where they have incentives to do something else that you've just distorted.
Gambling has been illegal, immoral, and proscribed by religions for literally thousands of years, in all sorts of different forms and iterations, for a reason. Because it's incredibly toxic to society.
You can make some arguments that pure games of chance, like casino games, and even maybe sports betting (since sports is a spectacle) aren't that bad. Based on what we've seen recently, I tend to disagree, but at least it's an argument.
But now we're talking about betting on all sorts of political issues, things that are illegal, things where people are acting in an official capacity and shouldn't be given incentives to subvert that. And all these other examples are just bad. There's not really any upside to this at all. It's just bad for society and it shouldn't happen. It's horrible.
If you feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle you should take a couple of steps back and think about the consequences of a world where this is common.
I think easy gambling over the internet is terrible, tons of young people are getting stuck in it. People get addicted to it throughout history and ruin their lives, vulnerable people get in trouble with huge losses.
But I don't think we should do anything because religion doesn't like it - that's a foolish thing to use to make your crucial choices or world view. A key reason is pretty much every terrible thing ever was excused as requirement of some religion or forever. Separate from the hurtful things in religious books at times, it's too easy for leaders or authorities to somehow justify actions.
Let's instead use a goal of treating each other respectfully, stop hating and killing each other. Yeah, that's all naive stuff, we aren't there, maybe we'll never be there. Still a good goal, treat each other with kindness. And yeah, I'm an optimistic sort.
You have cause and effect backwards. I'm saying that it's horrible and toxic for society which is why almost every major religion over every major period of history noticed and banned it.
It's not toxic because religion doesn't like it. Religion doesn't like it because it's toxic.
Religion has been the primary means throughout history by which humans have tried to figure out right and wrong. You can feel however you want about it, but that's just how it's worked. It's basically the ultimate example of Chesterton's fence.
To carry my analogy further, there are many, many, many times where the fence doesn't need to be there or where the fence has outlived its useful purpose. But it's still a good metaphor.
I think the problem is that I don't think it would end up primarily being about gambling.
I already live in a world where people make odds about whether I'm going to die. They're called "actuaries," and they work at life insurance companies. There are also oddsmakers of the same kind at car insurance companies, etc.
Right now, I hate that people who can actually analyze enough data to make odds about these things can only earn a living working for companies that are incentivized to find ways not to pay out when the odds do break against them. I'd much rather these people be able to make their livings just calculating odds, placing bets, and being right. I would like to have access to their calculations, and not be in a position of "just take it or leave it" when I'm evaluating a prospective plan from a life insurance company, for example.
Yes, by all means, there will be gamblers in these markets. There will always be some amount of noise, just like there is in the stock market. But why would that end up being the bulk of the industry? Just like with Wall Street, I would expect companies to grow up around these markets that specialize in getting the odds of things right, and making money off of their predictions. If the market ever became truly efficient, I think we would have a MUCH better idea than we do now about the likelihood of all kinds of things.
Heck, even if I think of something as apparently mundane as weather forecasting, if somebody came up with a breakout model that was right substantially more often, I would expect they would be able to raise all sorts of capital around it and start winning in all the weather forecasting markets, which would then make their predictions a reliable signal, and we'd finally have better information about what the weather is going to do.
I think one part I must be missing is why so many people are assuming that the primary user of prediction markets would be gamblers instead of specialists, especially once they operated at scale. I just don't see why that would happen. Anywhere there's an opportunity to make money reliably by coming up with better analysis or prediction tools, capital will flock there and incentivize coming up with better analysis or prediction tools.
I think I really would like to live in a world where that was highly incentivized, and I'm confused why people would not want that.
ETA: I don't think the gamblers would ruin this any more than they ruin Wall Street. I don't think they have enough capital to matter. (They are, after all, prone to losing money.)
> There is no question if I want to do it, it is set at that time and I have to do it, period.
Gosh it must be nice to have at least an ordinary amount of executive function skills. Is it really this easy for neurotypical people to build routines? That's really all it takes?
I don't see how this removes willpower at all. It just determines what time you have to use it.
All you need to do is go to sleep before 12 every single night and wake up at 7am without fail, hit the gym and crank out a few sets of squats, hit the pool and the sauna, read a chapter of that book, and then cook yourself an amazing breakfast, all before 9am.
If you're a real go-getter, though, you'd wake up at 6am and do some vibe coding for an hour on that side hustle.
This but unironically. I don't post on LinkedIn or anything. But sometimes it seems like all the agonizing people sometimes do over whether or not they should follow their plan (fitness, diet, productivity) makes it ten times worse.
It can be possible to decide to do something in advance, and then... just do it. The more times you do it the easier it gets. My wife comments on this sometimes. I guess not everyone has this? Maybe it can be learned? I don't know.
The list of things I must do is large and growing. Much of it outside my control. Yes, I could sell the house but rent is quite high. Yes, I could divorce the wife but that actually makes for more work. Yes, I could abandon the children but I've grown attached; and that's only legal after finding someone else willing to adopt them and a judge willing to approve it. Yes, I could deny any help with the elderly parents on both sides of the family but that seems extreme and carries a social cost. Yes, I could spend a few decades trying to cure the medical issues I've collected but that leaves little time for anything mentioned earlier.
I mean, yes. That's true for everyone. Different people have different life circumstances. It's equally important not to decide to do things that one can't realistically do, for whatever reasons there may be. I'm not sure what your point is.
Don't sell your house if you don't have a realistic place to live lined up. Don't divorce your wife if it's not worth the work.
I'm not saying everyone can or should be grindset hustle bro. Probably no one. I'm just saying that it is sometimes possible to decide what you're going to do in advance. If you already have too many obligations, that could include deciding which ones to fail. That's probably better than trying to do everything and just rolling the dice.
It's surprising how controversial this idea is, but it works for me. I hope you find something that works for you.
Sorry if my point was lost in the rant. IME the younger generations are facing an increasingly large burden of must-do's with less slack for them to make any other choices. Growing housing, healthcare, and societal expectations combined with fewer employment opportunities are leaving little room for them to chart their own course.
Some might say it's offset by all the luxuries so widely available. But I personally find it hard to enjoy minor luxuries when so much of life is swallowed by obligations. And I'm one of the luckiest members of my cohort. Most of my high school friends still live with parents or several roommates, have lower paying careers, and/or have to care for more family with serious medical issues. (Though on the latter I seem to be catching up quickly)
It sounds as if you are filing a complaint, but I'm afraid chargebacks are out of question. You have been scammed and given a non-perfect generation to live in.
I'd argue we shouldn't so quickly throw off the solutions of past generations, like protesting, unions, social safety nets, independent branches of government, and rejecting apathy and religion.
You're hitting on exactly what I meant, though. You're generalizing from "it works for me" in a way that implies it's equally possible for everyone, that everyone's brain has the ability to look at something they decided to do earlier, and then just do it, without sending them through a spiraling decision matrix that factors in all the other things that have reemerged as possibilities since whenever they made the first decision.
It's so cool that your brain has this "decision persistence" feature. And it does seem to be common enough that it's treated as "typical."
It's just not remotely universal. Not all of our brains have this.
People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
It’s actually insulting to people who work hard that some people assume they have it easy somehow, like the “must be nice” comment upstream. Not everyone takes the view that you can’t control what happens to you, it’s pretty easy to see who does.
Your prior comment makes it sound like you assume it’s generally just about willpower and that external factors aren’t generally an issue. Is that accurate?
No, is generally about discipline and building good habits. Willpower or lack thereof is largely irrelevant. I'm not convinced that willpower is even a real thing.
What do you think discipline is if not willpower? This might explain why we're talking past each other.
I can do the exact same thing a hundred days in a row as long as the circumstances happen to be the same. And I can try to make them as similar as I possibly can. My lights come on at the same time. I eat the same food. My clothes are in the same place.
But the second something happens that I can't control, the night the wind howls all night, or a cough wakes me up, or for some damn reason, I wake up hungrier than normal, it doesn't matter how many times I've done it. None of it is automatic. It's all new now. All of it requires decisions. It's like it was never there. And that's why, frankly, I don't ever get to 100 identical days.
Your brain does something different with whatever you mean by "discipline and good habits" than my brain does. And that's really cool. It sounds awesome to have a brain that does that.
It also sounds way easier and like it's not something you actually deserve any credit for, in the same way that my learning how to speak before I was a year old or read before I was 3 is just "a cool thing about my brain" and not something I deserve credit for.
The difference is that because your cool thing about your brain is common, people who don't have it are considered "less than" by people who do, whereas my cool thing about my brain is uncommon, so people looked at me as "more than" other people. Both are baseless. You and I have no more control over having these advantages in our brains than we do over our height or the color of our eyes.
This doesn't answer the question on any level. There is ALWAYS a choice. Where does the choice go when you remove it? What exists in its stead? How is there ever not a choice?
Dicipline and the ability to build good habits is out of the window for a lot of people due to different illnesses. You come across as trying to sell snake oil to people with a heart attack.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse for failure. Discipline and good habits are the most effective way to prevent heart attacks in the first place. While there are a tiny fraction of people with serious mental health conditions or developmental disabilities which prevent them from making progress, that hardly applies to anyone on HN.
Your parents determine a lot of your trajectory. If they don't make the same investement in their kids as the average for the socioeconomic, you start with a heavy penalty. You can work hard, but you'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else.
If you friends gets permit, cars, fully financed studies but you get thrown out to work straight out of high school what is the probability you would give to be able to accomplish the same things as your friends in a similar timeline.
Sure you can work hard and you will get somewhere, but is that somewhere anywhere near what could be possible ? I would argue not.
The left often argues about unfair advantage from famillies having money. In my experience it's not the having money part that is important, its the parent willing to invest it in their children.
I know some people who accomplished a lot with poor parents, but they got full support from both gov aids and parents, it generally explains a lot.
Without talking about the genetic lottery, life is unfair and hard work isn't really all that's needed. It can never hurt but at the same time you can work much harder than most and never get as much. Add politics in the mix and anything goes.
I have to leave the house for work at 7am. I get back sometime between 6 and 8pm. When I get back I'm mentally and physically shot. I mean, yes I could get an easier job that pays less I suppose, lose the house etc.
Even better in my opinion and experience, exercise during lunch break, if possible. Being drained after work can feel like too high barrier to get started exercising.
> People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
In my opinion the first step to taking responsibility is acknowledging reality. That reality can includes brains and bodies being different, sometimes extremely so. If someones brain or body is different but they deny it, stick their head in the sand, ignore it, then they are at a disadvantage when they try to take responsibility for something and may fail due to failing to acknowledging reality.
You can actually just choose to lock in.
And you don't need a perfect streak. Waking up early, working out and eating a nutritious breakfast is a perfect morning for probably 90% of people but our society is so broken that being healthy is associated with being either a grifter or a fascist.
Nah, you can do it with kids! I have two that are about to be 4 and 6, here are my weekdays:
- Alarm at 4:30. 5 mins of breathing exercises, 20 mins of meditation.
- Make coffee, have breakfast, out the door to work by ~5:30.
- Get to work's gym by 5:45, cardio for 60 mins.
- In my office by 7:00-7:15.
- 3:30, 25 mins of breathe work and meditation again. Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is 3:15 so I can fit in ~30 mins of strength training.
- Head on out, pick up my youngest from school, home by ~4:15-4:30-ish. Ballpark depending on traffic, actual gym times, etc.
- Cook dinner (kiddos often like to help), eat with family, hang out with and play with my kiddos until 7:00PM.
- Kiddo bath and bed time, wife and I take turns doing this every night. Whether I'm "done" at 7 or 8, it only takes me ~30 mins to shower and prep my shit (clothes, lunch, etc.) for the next day.
- Leaves me with ~1-2 hours each night to hang out, read a book, and enjoy my wife's company before heading to bed at ~9:30.
It's busy, but I don't feel like I'm overstretched and I don't feel like it leaves me missing out on anything.
There’s a few things required to make that work for you.
You fall asleep instantly every night or function on less than 7 hours of sleep long term. You have a 15 minute commute. You don’t seem to need any slack time to deal with any issues that pop up.
4 year old has a meltdown because the 6 year old ate the last fruit snack. One of the kids decides to wake up at 3am. Friends come over for dinner and throw off the routine. Oops forgot to buy an ingredient for dinner, now you have to load up all the kids and go to the store. Ugh piece of plastic is lodged in the garbage disposal better get the flashlight and chopsticks.
And that’s not even mentioning regular household maintenance. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, grocery trips etc…
I’d need at least 2 extra hours in every day to handle all of those unexpected and expected issues. Probably closer to 3.
So I made my original post knowing full well that my situation is my own and YMMV, but to speak to those concerns wrt my schedule/life...
>You fall asleep instantly every night...
Actually, yes! Two points there. First, when I'm out of my routine, not working out, drinking lots of coffee and eating like garbage, I sleep like ass. When I'm in my routine, eating well, and only having a cup of coffee with breakfast, I'm incredibly energized throughout the day and end up suddenly feeling tremendously tired right around 8:45/9:00.
The second part is that my father's side of the family is notorious for falling asleep anywhere, anytime. There's a litany of photos of us passed out on couches in the middle of packed parties.
> Meltdowns
They happen, but they don't really rock the schedule in my experience. Bedtime somehow always ends up being bedtime. Might shift by ~15 or so occasionally, but never in a way that nukes my bedtime or anything.
>One of the kids wakes up at 3am.
This is entirely YMMV, but we sleep trained. For whatever absolutely fucking weird reason, neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning, they always wake up and wait for us to come get them. Earliest I hear one of them is occasionally 6 on the weekends, usually closer to 7. I feel tremendously lucky here, and recognize how not normal this is.
>Forgot dinner ingredient and load kids up...
Nah. I do my best to buy ingredients on the weekend for the week. Definitely isn't foolproof, but usually we just pivot to a meal I'd planned for another night, or we always have easy to make shit like mac and cheese or grilled cheese and tomato soup lying around to fall back on. Life doesn't need to be perfect and I'm cool with pivoting and not sticking to plans.
>Friends coming over
For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
>Household maintenance
Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen. I'll take the kiddos to the grocery store on Saturday. Dishes happen quickly, we all help there.
I’m not doubting that your schedule works for you, I’m just saying that it’s at the extreme of what is feasible with young kids.
> neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning
My wife is a pediatrician. This is so incredibly not normal to have 2 kids that absolutely never get up early that you won the lottery. And not the regular jackpot. You won the powerball multi-state $500 million lottery.
> For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
I wish I knew what a weekend was. My wife works in the ER, as do many of our friends.
> Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen.
There’s so much more daily maintenance work for our house than an hour a night for one person.
Just making my kids lunch for the next day takes me 15 minutes. It takes me 20-30 minutes to fold one load of laundry.
And the irregular things I mentioned were just a tiny part of it. The other day my 4 year old got a whole stack of puzzles down and the 2 year old immediately dumped out all the pieces. Took me 2 hours to sort that out. Last week the tankless hot water started randomly cutting out and I spent 2 hours dealing with that.
Yesterday we took 2 of our 3 kids for a well check to their pediatrician. For some reason it took 1.5 hours instead of the 30 minutes we had planned. A few months ago one of my many spoke alarms started randomly going off once a night for a few days until I could track down the problem. 3 months ago my 2 year old tripped on the very bottom stair and had a freak fracture. That took hours of time up front and then reverted to crawling for 9 days. And for 6 weeks he had to wear a boot that I had to remove and reapply multiple times a day.
Our 2 month old blew out her diaper a few days ago and I had to take all the padding off, wash it, then figure out how to put it back on. Big storm recently knocked most of our Christmas wreathes off and I had to deal with that.
My kid was recently “snack leader” for his preschool class, which means for a week I had to make healthy snacks for the whole class.
All of that is just the random stuff that has popped up over the last few months that I can think of.
The original post who mentioned this kind of thing isn’t feasible with kids was correct. 2-2.5 hours of exercise/meditation and a full workday isn’t something that most people with kids can pull off.
Sorry to confuse, it's 9:30 every night. Anything less than 7 and I'm wrecked. 7.5 is ideal, but I also feel great with 7. My non-scientific guess is that I spent so much of my teens and 20s getting less than 6 hours that my body is delighted by 7+ lol.
But yeah, I imagine I'll need more as time continues to pass and I get older.
/shrug
Edit: To say nothing of my mild fear of an inadequate amount of sleep in middle age possibly contributing to dementia, but I digress...
My neurodiverse mind often won't let me sleep that early. It just whirls with problem solving that keeps me up all night if I go to bed in a whirl. Yes I know how to meditate. Imagine spending years at it and finding yourself in a mental state that means you can't clear your mind any more. You can't 'let it go', it just comes straight back in a more aggressive way with flash backs and visions. What would you do now?
Not the person you're replying to but I am confused by your comment. What would you do? You'd try and meditate. If that doesn't work, you distract yourself with something else. The mind whirling keeping you up at night is rarely a productive thing, speaking from experience.
I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.
No, your tone is fine, and thanks for that. A whirling mind is not often productive but it can make great leaps forward. It can also be paranoid, dangerous and self-destructive.
I was trying to make the point that self- help easy fixes are not always successful. I spent decades actively learning to sleep. It works most of the time. It is good to learn. I use a mindfulness sleep meditation most nights. I also learnt from sleep hygiene that going to bed early is normally a big mistake for me, precluding much of the 'go to bed earlier, get up and exercise' advice.
I have also hit periods in my life where I simply couldn't mediate for weeks on end despite regular practice over a decade. I was mentally ill. No routine or hacks was going to get me to exercise. I needed therapy (EMDR) and rest, and when I got really self-destructive I needed sleep medication (useful only for a very short time). The 'hack' people just made me feel bad about myself for being unable to get a grip.
That is what I want people to see, exercise is only useful if you are well enough to do it. If you are not well enough to shave, then don't beat yourself up for not getting exercise. Put a pin in it, and do it later.
My latest illness was (psycho-somatically) interfering with my cortisol levels, and it made any exercise crippling. I couldn't recover. I didn't get the boost. I beat myself up about not being able, and it made me worse.
Exercise and therapy rather than exercise or therapy might be better advice.
It still requires willpower, but to use a metaphor, it's much easier to travel down a well-trod path than it is to cut a new path through the jungle. Repetition and consistency establishes the path, so the willpower required to travel down it the next day is reduced over time. Establishing a pre-set time and committing to that time ahead of time removes the "will I or won't I" decision at "go time", when you're most likely to falter.
This method requires a significant amount of executive function.
My body doesn't feel the passage of time consistently. So my mind is never prepared to switch activities when it needs to.
And there are times my brain stops working on a particular task and nothing can get it started again. It's like a leg going out, you just can't stand on it.
This isn't occasionally where habit could be picked back up. This has been a problem every day of my life.
In my experience, this has been the death of every bit advice I've gotten from a neurotypical person. A lot of them keep circling back to discipline or trying harder as a solution to a problem they can't make sense of. Lack of understanding isn't their fault, this is so far outside their frame of reference they can't make sense of it in a single conversation. Fortunately understanding isn't required, only the acceptance that other people have limits they don't have themselves.
Do you ever feel unmotivated to go to the toilet despite needing to? Has this lack of motivation ever stopped you from getting from your chair?
What modern people usually lack is not time, but lack of energy. Usually this is thought as the energy to do stuff (like coding a side hussle in the evening). But often it manifests in a lack of energy:
1. to make a decision (to do something)
2. to slow down, to stop the current activity and to think with the rational mind.
So you need to recognize these things and do certain decisions beforehand to solve the problem. Stuff like:
1. Go to the gym in the morning, when you still have the decision energy.
2. Create a habit, linking a new habit with the old ones, in order to decrease the energy expenditure
3. Increase the stakes, like getting a gym buddy
4. Decide stuff beforehand. Pack the bag, set up the alarm clock (to go to gym, to go to sleep)
5. When you are tired, actually rest. Don't turn the tv on, don't scroll social media, stop touching yourself via phone. If you are tired, eat, go to gym or a walk, go to sleep or simply sit in your chair or lay on the sofa looking at the walls. I guarantee, watching at the wall for 30 minutes straight will give you great motivation to do something else more productive. Don't let the monkey in you convince you to do the unproductive things I mentioned. Stay strong and make a rational decision what to do instead of looking at the wall. Do the right thing, not the thing that may feel nice in the midst of it.
6. Take care of the nutrition/sleep in order to increase the energy reserves
I really don’t like being snarky here but this is an absolutely perfect example of what I was talking about in my last paragraph.
I didn’t mention energy because energy has no relevance.
I’ve literally broken down crying because I really wanted to work but my brain refused to move. I was having such a great day and was really motivated. I spend hours and absolutely exhausted every bit of energy I had trying every advice that I’ve spent my entire life hearing. I could not get a single word out of my brain.
Nothing worked. I spent my entire childhood trying harder and got nowhere. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I get quite pissed off when people tell me to try hard harder.
You arent the only human whos had a issue with not getting things done, its normal, and its hackable. Brains are hackable.
I dont mean to say you implied it, but its easy to dig a larger hole when you believe you are special, or you have tried "all" the advice.
Every problem has a solution, and I beg you to search deeper to what you do even in task-paralysis states. That might be where your mission comes from.
It helped me to have a life goal that was bigger than life, ego, or energy. Maybe you havent found it yet. If you have, I apologize if I sound cocky!
You sound like you are just repeating the same mistake in telling a nuerodiverse person to 'just do this brain hack, it worked for me.' It will never work for them. Never. It will just make them feel worse about themselves.
I am brilliant at certain aspects of my job. I have read the books, had coaching etc. And yet today I still miss important meeting because I don't realise it is time to go...with a watch on my arm, outlook reminders popping up etc. I just hold attention so deep that I am never going to notice. It is what makes me great at my work. So now I am a manager I have developed some solutions. I hire people who compliment me, and I am open about my problem. It is normal for my team to walk in my office and say, 'are you coming to this meeting?'
Some people are special. The preferred term is neurodivergent. ;)
There are times you just can’t fix a broken brain by trying harder or finding an alternative.
It can be really difficult to understand if you’ve never experienced it yourself. For you there’s, always been a way to get something done.
What do you do when you try to throw something with your arm and your entire body doesn’t move? No matter what you try to do. You can’t get your body to move. I got some advice on how you should move your arm. :)
Your advice is the equivalent of telling someone who has dyslexia, "Reading isn't hard. You just look at the letters, and then you say the words out loud. Or if that doesn't work, you have to come up with some other way to make it so when you see the letters, you know what the words say, and then you say them out loud. Just hack it."
Some people really do just have to figure out a way to get through life missing a skill that "typical" brains have. It's not "hack it until you make your brain do the typical thing." It's "choose a field where you can get away with not doing the thing, or hire someone to do the thing, because you're not going to be able to do the thing, and all the advice in the world isn't going to change that."
>t helped me to have a life goal that was bigger than life, ego, or energy. Maybe you havent found it yet. If you have, I apologize if I sound cocky!
You are incredibly cocky, and naive and have very little insight on other peoples situation. You are reducing peoples various illnesses to something that can be solved if they just tried a bit harder not to be sick. If only it was so easy.
They keep all their feelings inside, carrying the worries of the world, constantly sacrificing themselves at every opportunity without a hint of reciprocity, and then die of a heart attack in their 60s or earlier.
Way too many people treat ADHD as an excuse of not following proper task-management rules. They are so special that no rules could possible apply to them. To all hundreds of millions of them...
This is backwards. In practice, it should be the exact opposite. ADHD people should be MORE vigilant regarding the correct behavior, rules, habits. It is neurotypical people who have some leeway to be lazy with what and how they do stuff, but ADHD have way smaller margin of error!
Sometimes there are things (noise in the room, other distractions, mess in tasks, etc.) that neurotypical can safely ignore, but that will make an ADHD person not able to work at all.
The fact that life is harder to organize and manage for ADHD people only means that they should pay EXTRA attention to doing right things the correct way.
Sure, ADHD people have their own peculiarities (as does any other neurotypical person), but in my experience this is a drop in a bucket of issues that are actually solvable with typical means without reinventing the wheel.
>ADHD people should be MORE vigilant regarding the correct behavior, rules, habits.
Yes, but that doesn't make the ADHD fully go away.
>actually solvable with typical means without reinventing the wheel.
Yes, and they are defined by medical science, not your "think deeper".
>The fact that life is harder to organize and manage for ADHD people only means that they should pay EXTRA attention to doing right things the correct way.
Wow great insight, a bit hillarious with the part of asking adhd people pay extra attention. Should the guy with a neurological problem just pay extra attention to moving his leg, and he will soon run as fast as the rest?
> Yes, but that doesn't make the ADHD fully go away.
Not an argument.
> Wow great insight, a bit hillarious with the part of asking adhd people pay extra attention. Should the guy with a neurological problem just pay extra attention to moving his leg, and he will soon run as fast as the rest?
Yes, if you have problems with inattentiveness, then you can't just eyeball the size of the fabric and cut. You actually need to measure. In worst case, you should measure and remeasure several times, as well as use the pen to draw a straight line with a ruler, instead of just keeping the finger and trusting that you can make the line straight during cutting.
If have no trouble concentrating, you can just work in a cafe or an open office. If you have problems, then take extra steps to get rid of distractions (quiet office, noise cancelling headphones, work-inducing music, etc).
If you have more difficulties getting into the zone, make extra effort organizing yourself: blocking working uninterrupted time on the calendar, disabling notifications, using airplane mode etc.
Have trouble concentrating and the mind wandering? Even more important to keep a proper task/idea/knowledge management system to offload the brain.
This is still not enough to get rid of adhd symptoms for many.
Keeping a knowledge management system is uttainable, I bet many with adhd have tried them all (and constantly try new ones instead of doing work)
you can only block so much. Some people suffer so much that days can get lost by doing virtuelly nothing. Its not like its so easy to sit around being unable to work, and still not check the web or whatever. Also even though you block, many people experience that they get contacted regardless, and loose the flow.
What you propose are great ideas for someone having a hard time concentrating, but that is something completely else from those suffering under a diagnosis.
> This is still not enough to get rid of adhd symptoms for many.
Once again, this isn't the point. And I also didn't suggest it.
A normal adhd should be considered as a personal quirk, not an unescapable death sentence, like many seem to do.
> Its not like its so easy to sit around being unable to work, and still not check the web or whatever
Being still without distractions is hard for most people. Adhd people may have it harder, but fundamentally they don't differ from others.
That's the whole point of slowing down, concentrating on relaxing, not running away from the anxiety and to understand what your mind and body tell you.
> Some people suffer so much that days can get lost by doing virtuelly nothing.
"Virtually" - exactly my point. Most people have not been doing the actual nothing. If they were, they would actually see how much energy and motivation this type of rest gives.
I keep being told this stuff by normies who couldn't do my job.
ADHD doesn't manifest the same way for everyone.
> pay EXTRA attention to doing right things the correct way
I do wrong things a different way all the time. I'm a maverick. I'm known to have creative solutions other people can't find. Not little ones either, 'we have been trying this for 20 years' ones. $multi-million strategic ones. I can't do the boring task list work you normies can do, but I have super powers you don't.
The breakthrough started and my recovery began when I stopped listening to people like you and focused on what I am good at.
But last night, I wanted to get to bed at 10pm, but I got some music stuck in my head. I had some music on to chill out, but something gripped me and I picked up my guitar. It felt like a moment of time but I look up and it is 1am. If I had gone to bed I would have lain awake all night. Meditation would have had this music dominating it and dragging me out of it. I'm in bed late on Saturday morning typing this, which will upset my whole weekend, but I wouldn't have slept, which would have been worse. So, I just went with it.
I envy people who can keep a routine, but I now pity people who don't have extraordinary moments of inspiration. I embrace my super powers and accept my life won't be normal. It will be exceptional.
The assumption that there is one set of rules for "correct behavior, rules, habits" that somehow applies equally to all brains is so spectacularly ignorant it's staggering.
I can obtain the same results as almost anybody at the vast majority of things. But if I am required to follow the same process, I simply cannot. I can't tell you how destructive the well-meaning people were who tried to tie me down to the way that works for their brain rather than saying, "OK, fine. Don't do it my way. Do it your way. Just get it done."
It's like saying to someone with dyslexia, "You just have to be MORE vigilant regarding looking at the letters, putting them together, and saying the words! There's no excuse for not following proper reading rules!"
It's just asinine. It's wonderful that you have figured out a set of "proper task-management rules" that work for your brain. I'm even happier for you if it was easier for you. That sounds nice.
But why on EARTH would the billions of living brains on this planet all function like yours? Does anything else in all those billions of bodies function exactly like yours? Of course not. And it would be ridiculous to expect them to.
> But why on EARTH would the billions of living brains on this planet all function like yours? Does anything else in all those billions of bodies function exactly like yours?
Yes, literally everything in our bodies function exactly the wayvit function in other people. Never heard of anyone's heart working like another person's kidney.
If the organ is not working properly, it is considered a problem and stuff is done to fix it. The stuff that is from the same list as for any other person with a similar problem. Never heard of knee problems being fixed with dyalisis.
It's impossible to me that you're dumb enough to be saying these things in good faith, so maybe I'm guilty of the same assumption, that anyone who can form sentences must have a brain at least as much like mine that they can connect two thoughts.
Nobody's talking about a heart functioning like a kidney. We're talking about the range of functions among people's hearts, or people's kidneys, or people's brains.
You're acting like everyone's heart is the exact same shape and has the same blood pressure and the same resting heart rate and the same outflow volumes, which is just stupid. There is a HUGE range of function among hearts. There is a HUGE range of "healthy enough to work" among hearts.
JUST LIKE THERE IS WITH BRAINS.
There's also a huge range of "not healthy enough to function under normal circumstances, but not bad enough to kill the person."
I don't believe anybody with the brainpower to create an email address, register for an HN account, and sign into it is actually somehow as ignorant of basic human biology as this, so stop trolling and go away.
You read, but did not actually listen to my explanation of energy. I gave it for a damn good reason; because most people misunderstand it and my explanations light the bulbs in people's heads.
You also totally missed the point of suggestions entirely. I assume that happened because you were out of brain/willpower energy.
My suggestions were not to try harder. They were the exact opposite, they were about:
1. constraining your energy output
2. being careful where and how you spend your energy
3. do a better targeting with your energy
4. hacks to do the same (or more) with less energy
5. restoring energy
Please reread my previous message after you sleep and with a good mood. Assume that I actually know what I am talking about (because I truly do) and my goodwill. Assume that I did not spend my time writing a long comment in order to anger or troll you, but because I wanted to help; I saw clear indicators of certain problems, to which I am able to provide solutions that work in practice.
I wasn't suggesting using willpower to power through the problems. I was suggesting setting up a system, that would fit you and would enable you to live a better and more efficient life. Willpower is useful in setting up the system, to learn it. Not to operate it.
Let me try again. I shouldn't have mentioned willpower. Let me restate the problem.
I try to do something and I have the physical sensation of hitting a wall that shouldn't be there. Thoughts never stop at that part of the brain.
I'm talking about a fundamentally different mechanism than thinking something is too hard. It's a hardware interruption that I have no control over.
I've spent my entire life working around this and it's difficult. Especially when everyone thinks I'm just being lazy or I just need to do this one thing. I'm still trying to figure out how to explain it better.
Let't imagine that you have a task, that you started doing, but then hit the hardware wall. How physically/emotionally/intellectually tired are you at that point?
What will happen if you just rest? Sleep, eat, exercise/go on a walk, lay down. No phone, no social media, no doom scrolling, no tv, no netflix, no gaming. Just 100% effort of resting and recovering, without any distractions.
Would you not get bored at some point and will decide that it's better to complete the task rather than continue this boredom while fully rested
I truly believe you're sincere but I can't get my point across. :/ Please read carefully.
Stop thinking about how to fix the problem. You might find this interesting if you look at it scientifically.
When it comes to things like ADHD and bipolar, executive function is compromised at the biological level. Put it simply, the baseline is broken.
You're talking about are inputs to this baseline. To use an analogy, explaining how to make macOS apps to someone who's making a Windows application. There are a lot of principles in common, but the implementations are very different.
The default state for this brain is restless, looking for things to focus on. The recovery methods you're talking about are sensory depth deprivation, the worst possible solution. For myself, the best thing I can do is feed the bastard carefully until it calms down. Think of using calm words to get a screaming toddler who just woke up to stop running around and go back to bed. That's not happening.
Sometimes I can't wrestle this thing into control and focus on what I want to. And you want me to relax? That's a bit optimistic. :)
With ADHD, there are a lot of individuals who are able to find a way to work with this and some use it to their advantage, masking the real cause. For those who have it worse, the underlying problem becomes visible, and they get asked why they can't be like other ADHD people who manage. It's like asking why a two year old can't act like a six year old.
> Just 100% effort of resting and recovering, without any distractions.
You say that like the distractions are exclusively outside. I'm not the person you're replying to, but if I close all my blackout curtains, turn off all the lights, and turn off all but the white noise, but I'm not sleepy, my mind will go in a thousand directions at once.
How do I or anyone else explain that to you? The challenge is in the brain. It's not an outside force. There is no boredom.
You are saying it as if that't uncommon (for non-adhd people) or a bad thing.
Yeah, and it is fine that the mind goes somewhere. This is called meditation and it is good for you. You get valuable insights, figure out important issues, get energy and motivation.
No no. Not "somewhere." A thousand places. At once. Not in sequence. Not from one to another. At the exact same time. And then they each fractal off in their own directions.
Take away the external reminders and my reality fragments into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which are just as real to me as the rest, just as pressing, just as important, or just as unimportant, because they all get lost in each other.
We are not describing the same thing. It's confusing that this is somehow not obvious from your side, because it's SCREAMING obvious from this side.
It's confusing because true multitasking in thinking does not exist. Sure, you can walk, eat and think at the same time, but you can't think several thoughts at the same time, only sequentially (with rapid change).
Can you give me research which shows that true multithinking is possible.
"Thinking" is directed and intentional. That may very well not be something people can do. I don't know. That's not what I'm talking about. And it very well might be practically impossible to find enough people whose brains can go multiple directions at the same time that it could be studied.
So no, I'm not going to follow you down a tangent that isn't actually related to what I'm saying.
We were talking about healthy people with adhd, not about bipolar people (who need serious medical help) or people with 60iq. No amount of running technique is going to help a legless person.
100%: There's no way you could ever understand me if I were trying to say something complicated. I'm much too intelligent. I have way more mental firepower than you do. I'm a very complex thinker, and you just can't keep up. Proving it to you would be a waste of time. It's just hopeless anyway.
--
If communication isn't working, sure, it might be a comprehension error. But...it's rarely only a comprehension error.
>Do you ever feel unmotivated to go to the toilet despite needing to? Has this lack of motivation ever stopped you from getting from your chair?
A lot of people with depression and adhd will nod "yes" here. Sorry but you have no idea. Great it works for you.
When I am healthy I can work out 4-5 times a week (l<fting weights, climbing, running up to half marathon distances in training) have a full job and be a dad.
When I am ill all I can is to try my best to be a dad. You have no idea.
Has your lack of motivation ever stopped you from getting from your chair, and go to the toilet; instead you decided to pee and crap in your pants? How has it worked for you? Well enough that you have been repeating the behavior?
No, you don't understand. On about a weekly basis, my need to go to the bathroom does not make itself pressing enough to get me there without leakage. It is not more than 15 steps from my desk chair to the toilet. Sometimes I roll the chair over because if I stand up, I won't make it.
Is it really impossible for you to believe that someone else's brain might be this different from yours? Presumably you have no trouble believing someone's eyes might be completely different from yours (i.e., might exist but not see a damn thing), or their legs might be completely different from yours. Why should brains be any different? What possible reason could there be for that?
Why, when there are full-blown medical specialties dealing with these sorts of differences, do you maintain the sort of willful ignorance that denies other people's brains might be completely different from yours in a way that makes things that work for your brain not work at all for their brains?
I struggle daily to urge myself to eat after years of habitual starvation. The process of storing and making food through-out the week is extremely difficult for me to say the least... I also don't have room in my finances to out-source this completely. To combat this, I have been successfully meal prepping on the weekends; however, I still often struggle with the basic task of eating the food, prepped and served. It is a common experience for me to get part-way into eating a dish, move on to another task, and neglect the food until it's spoiled only to realize so when I pack up for the day. Sometimes I will even notice the food, deep into a task, but the thought to address it is hardly formed.
In this regard neurotypical advice _did_ actually help me I suppose. However, when applied to a habit not immediately linked to your existence, it is quite alienating to receive.
I would imagine you'd get this advice from other non-neurotypical people too. My son is neurodivergant, and strict routine like what is being described is about the only thing that keeps him able to handle most daily life tasks regularly. But plenty of other advice he constantly gets frustrates him similarly to the frustration you seem to be describing. We call it "you've just never had it cooked right" advice. So I feel your exasperation.
I call it the “loadbearing just”. :) “if you’ve just did this”
Most neurodivergent people I’ve met accept my limitations and don’t expect what works for them to work for me. It might take a little explanation but they didn’t seem to get upset about it.
The few that have expected me to be like them, expected other people to be like them as well. So it wasn’t specific to me.
Just a shout out here for medication. ADHD meds are rated effective in the 70-90% range, which is just incredibly good compared to medication effectiveness for just about anything else.
I have ADHD, and hate the feeling of being a victim. "I have this, so I can't do that. It's just the way it is." No! Not for this. Not when there are so many treatment options.
I accept that things may be harder for me than a typical person, that I may have to put in more work than other people to get the same results, that this is something that's very real that I have to deal with and manage at all times. That there will be times when I will fail and my stupid monkey brain will win the moment. But I won't let it define me, I won't let it dictate who I am and what I can and cannot do.
EDIT: Also, I mean to agree with you here: there's a point where no amount of discipline will work, and the advice to "just try harder" sounds like an alien telling you to just grow wings and fly. If you find yourself at that point, medicine can and will help. It also helps you be able to get in a routine of actually doing exercise, which in turn helps even more, and it becomes a sweet positive feedback loop.
What makes this “neurotypical?” I don’t necessarily consider myself as such, but I’ve made it a point to have some routine in my life. In fact, I think being highly regimented and sticking to a routine can be very neuroatypical. I would never go so far as to say I’m autistic, but there are markers on that spectrum, like becoming upset when a routine is disrupted. I certainly am perturbed when I’ve set some routine for myself and something interrupts it.
I'm not claiming this works for everyone but what sometimes work for me to form a routine is to do the thing but without committing effort to it. I.e. go to the gym but you only promise yourself to go there, not actually spend effort there. Any actual exercise you then do is a bonus, not a "payment on your promise".
I think it can be generalized as:
Find the thing to do that doesn't require much effort but puts you in the context of doing the effortful thing. Do that thing. See if you "want" to do the effortful thing. Otherwise go home.
Cleaning? Put the vacuum in your hands and see if something happens.
At least I think that's how it works for me.
The points when it's hardest to make it work is when there's lots of distractions. Like when you try to get into a routine of doing work at a computer.
The parent comment's point is that you can reduce the amount of executive function required to do the correct thing. Doing something at the same time every day will indeed make it more automatic, requiring less willpower to do it again tomorrow. This effect applies whether you're neurotypical or not and is grounded in behavioral research.
There are better examples in my opinion than just doing something at 18:00 every day. There's a technique called habit stacking where you identify all the habits you already have at a given time (like when you first wake up), and then you add one more at the end. It's easier to introduce a new habit this way, and it becomes ingrained more quickly, resulting in less need to use executive function.
There are still more techniques. An example from my personal life: in my whole adult life, I've never gone to the gym... unless I sign up for a gym that's right across the street from my workplace. Then it happens like clockwork. If all I need to do is walk across the street, I end up in the gym, and inevitably, I work out. If I need to drive 20 minutes though, well my willpower just ain't that great, so it basically never happens.
The best book I've read on this topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. He goes deep down the rabbit hole of these techniques you can employ and touches on the research it's all based on. The brain's not a computer so I mean it's not all just going to come together automatically, but in my experience this stuff does work.
Willpower is what you use when you’re allowed choice and know you should make the good choice but actually feel like choosing the bad choice. The trick to good discipline is to never allow it to be a choice. There are no excuses. There is no negotiation. It just is the same way the sun rises or the tax man comes. Good discipline is a skill you develop and it is far easier than trying to live via something as temperamental as willpower.
You say "when you're allowed choice" like there are some times when you aren't allowed choice, and I think this is where you lose me. Everything is a choice. Always. It's not a matter of "allowed/not allowed." It's just a reality of existence for me. I'm not sure if I can explain this, but I can try.
You seem to have a kind of "decision persistence" that I don't have, where having decided it once makes it still true in the actual moment of taking the action. It doesn't matter how many times I choose things in advance, in the hypothetical, for the future--and the future is always in the hypothetical. I still have to choose every moment, day in and day out, what I'm doing. Even now, it's not quite a foregone conclusion that I'm going to finish typing this and click the "reply" button. Probably will, but I won't know that for SURE until I've done it. I might decide it isn't worth it after all.
My brain simply does not consider past decisions binding on present activity. I might still decide to do the same thing I thought I would do at this time when I thought about this earlier, but I have to decide it again, because it hasn't happened yet. Every moment is a "deciding again," which means every moment needs willpower. Putting on one shoe doesn't guarantee the other shoe comes next. After a shit, pulling up my underpants doesn't guarantee the pants come next. Maybe I step out of the pants and am halfway through lunch before I realize I never pulled my pants up after the toilet and have been walking around my house without pants for 45 minutes.
"It just is" is not an experience I have. They're not excuses. The next thing just goes, right out of my head. I don't talk myself out of doing what I previously decided to do next or into something else. But there is no mechanism that makes something happen just because I decided it should earlier.
There always has to be another choice, in each moment, about what to do, and whether to keep doing it. Every one of these choices requires willpower, and there's only so much in the jar. But it's not like the jar fills up once, overnight, and I just draw from the jar until it's empty and then it's gone for the day. The jar arbitrarily loses and gains willpower ad hoc throughout the day. So I can always reach into the jar, and sometimes there's some willpower in there and I can do the thing that Planning Smeej thought would be a good idea yesterday, but sometimes there's not, and nobody knows what's going to happen until maybe there is again later.
I don't know if I've made that make any sense. I just know that you're describing a reality fundamentally different than the one I experience.
I have utterly horrible executive function. Diagnosed and everything. Sitting here on HN right now avoiding boring spreadsheet work to finish my day out.
It’s not easy for anyone to develop these style of habits and routines. It’s just hard mode and takes much more effort for folks with executive dysfunction.
The first rule is choose one thing and stick to it. With realistic goals. Mine was: I am going to walk at least 6,000 steps a day. No matter what. Zero excuses.
Since schedules are insanely difficult for me I set none. If I remembered I still needed to walk and I could do it in the moment I simply prioritized it. It’s surprisingly easy to fit in 10 minutes of walk in throughout your day, even when working a desk job. It could simply mean pacing while on conference calls.
Another rule was “if I fail to achieve it one day, I must achieve it the next” to avoid the “all or nothing” mental trap.
This was to the level of getting into bed, checking step counter, and if I was under target literally getting out of bed, putting clothes back on, and walking until I hit it. I had all sorts of technical widgets to enforce this and help remind me.
It totally sucked for the first couple months. Then it started to just become a thing. Then I ramped it up to 12k/day until I hit a weight goal.
It’s the best thing I ever did for my mental health since it started a snowball in other areas of my life. I was able to swap out a few days of steps for an hour workout (beginning with a personal trainer to force me to show up 2 days a week minimum). I was and still am constantly 10 minutes late to my session but no matter what I show up to them.
The weeks I miss them due to schedule conflicts or travel I feel much worse mentally. And it’s easy to give into the anxiety and panic over not having enough time in the day to fit it in after procrastinating on other items. You also start to realize that those other items are probably not as important as you thought.
I find routine and habits over schedule and calendaring are hyper-important for my dysfunction and have leaned into that. It’s more of a “this thing before that thing” sort of deal vs “at 3pm I do the thing” since the latter would go off the rails immediately.
It’s possible. Just the hardest thing I’ve maybe ever accomplished in life so far.
Gonna be different for everyone and you probably need that one moment of clarity to get the initial motivation. The motivation will go away, but the habits and discipline will probably stick around.
Been using this same method to build habits and routine into other areas of my life now as well.
> I find routine and habits over schedule and calendaring
I find the same. To keep myself honest, I built a simple habit tracking sheet (grid paper; 1 page/month; x axis list items; y axis list days). Keep it simple to reduce friction, no more than a handful of items, and try to stack habits and routines. Focus on anchor points of the day like sleep/work/exercise/nutrition/meal prep/tidy house. I’ll also track non-action items like coffee/alcohol/anxiety/video games/book reading, etc. Include the process as part of end of day wind down and reflection.
> Insurance companies completely dictate what she can and can't do, and frequently she is unable to do more in-depth, best-practice analysis because insurance won't pay for it.
The distinction between "can't do" and "can't get paid for" seems to get lost a lot with medical providers. I'm not saying this is necessarily what's happening with your wife, but I've had it happen to me where someone says, "I can't do this test. Your insurance won't pay for it," and then I ask what it costs and it's a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars and I say, "That's OK. I'll just pay for the test myself," and something short-circuits and they still can't understand that they can do it.
The most egregious example was a prescription I needed that my insurance wouldn't approve. It was $49 without insurance. But the pharmacy wouldn't sell it to me even though my doctor had prescribed it because they couldn't figure out how to take my money directly when I did have insurance.
I get that when insurance doesn't cover something, most patients won't opt to pay for it anyway, but it feels like we need more reminders on both the patient and the provider side that this doesn't mean it can't be done.
> The distinction between "can't do" and "can't get paid for" seems to get lost a lot with medical providers. I'm not saying this is necessarily what's happening with your wife, but I've had it happen to me where someone says, "I can't do this test. Your insurance won't pay for it," and then I ask what it costs and it's a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars and I say, "That's OK. I'll just pay for the test myself," and something short-circuits and they still can't understand that they can do it.
Tell me you've never lived in poverty without telling me.
An unexpected expense of several hundred to a couple thousand dollars, for most of my lived life both as a child and a young adult, would've ruined me. If it was crucial, it would've been done, and I would've been hounded by medical billing and/or gone a few weeks without something else I need.
This would be comical but for the years I did live in poverty. In what world does my being able to afford it now mean I've somehow always been well off?
Neither does collective responsibility, for the same reason, particularly in any sort of representative government. Or did you expect people to pause being idiots as soon as they stepped into the ballot box to choose the people they wanted to have collective responsibility?
To all the people saying this doesn't go far enough to change things: Of course it doesn't. This is a symbolic beginning, not the whole project.
Things like the composition of school lunches were determined for years by the recommendations that formed the shape of the food pyramid. What gets subsidized with SNAP and WIC was determined for years by the recommendations that formed the shape of the food pyramid.
The depiction of the recommendations does get fixed in people's minds. And then when actual guidelines come out for things that actually matter, like food programs, people expect them to correspond to what they know of the guidelines.
It's not that different from any corporate rebranding announcement. They show you the new direction they want to take the company with new imagery. You don't laugh and roll your eyes and say, "Suuuuure. Show us some new pictures. That'll fix it." You evaluate the direction the imagery says they're trying to go to decide if you think it's an improvement.
So, is eating "real food" like meat, vegetables, and fruit an improvement over a diet based on (especially processed) grains for people's health? Of course it is.
I'm not a fan of this government (or anyone else's, really), but I also think the people who are most likely to take this administration's word for it on something like dietary change are statistically among the people who would most benefit from this kind of dietary change, so I sincerely hope this works, and I'm glad to see they're trying to steer it this way. Even if the damn pyramid is upside down and looks like a funnel.
Also came looking for this comment. I get the symbolism of leaving grains at the bottom, but it's dumb.
Just turn the darn thing over. I won't even complain much about having the bottom bulk be "meat, vegetables, and fruit" with just a tiny layer of grains at the top. But this is a funnel, not a pyramid.
What got to me was when my own doctor was telling me I was "healthy at any size" when I was telling her about things like plantar fasciitis in my feet that clearly got worse as I gained weight. Like, it would be one thing if I told her I felt like a million bucks and my labs were excellent and I was a little bit big. But I was in there explicitly telling her that I was NOT healthy at my size.
I eventually got a better doctor and a dietitian and lost 50 lbs by changing my macros to focus on getting enough protein, fat, and fiber, which finally curbed my hunger, and wouldn't you know it, my feet feel better.
I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.
If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death, I would use that as a trigger for whatever defense strategies I had in place. Someone has really good reason to bet a lot of money on the prospect that I'm about to die. It's probably someone who knows of an active plot in motion to try to kill me! The sooner I can find out about that, the better. I would much rather give them an incentive to make that known somewhat earlier than wait.
I feel like there must be some big piece of this puzzle that I'm missing that makes it so these cannot operate the way I imagine them, but I haven't heard anyone explaining what it is. Someone fill me in on what I'm missing here?
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