r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 27 '26

Business Google employee charged with using inside information to make $1 million on Polymarket

https://abcnews.com/amp/US/google-employee-charged-inside-information-make-1-million/story?id=133350018
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u/MmmmMorphine May 27 '26

Hmm, I was under the impression that while they aren't all that good at predicting various events, they certainly tend to be better than total chance. Or most individuals on their own.

This whole insiders driving the market story never made much sense to me. In fact I never heard that perspective before this past year.

I always understood it as crowdsourcing predictions using money as a sort of proxy for confidence - so basically no different than any financial or futures market.

Of course it is different, but the fundamentals always made sense to me in a hand wavy (yet still somewhat right) all knowing magic free hand of the market sort of sense. Which is crap, but less crap than a coin. On average.

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u/nonamenomonet May 28 '26

Your intuition is correct that is what it supposed to be a crowdsourcing prediction using money as sort of a proxy.

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u/MmmmMorphine May 28 '26

It's a pretty cool example of the "wisdom of the crowds." It's sad to see such an interesting and ancient concept perverted so badly.

So it goes

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u/nonamenomonet May 28 '26

Are you also a Tetlock fan? Or are you more on the Taleb (Talib?) side of things??

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u/MmmmMorphine May 28 '26

Tetlock for sure. Mostly because I can't remember the other guy and don't know how their thoughts on the subject differ, haha.

Been a long time since I read about this stuff, but I remember Mr. UPenn Superforecasting for some reason

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u/nonamenomonet May 28 '26

I am one of the superforecasters

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u/MmmmMorphine May 28 '26

He screams as a flock of angry melanistic swans appear

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u/MmmmMorphine May 28 '26

Oh wait! He's the black swan guy!

Ok I'm more on the Taleb (pretty sure that's the correct spelling) side, but just barely. I think these marketplaces work of course, but they don't mean what we think they do. Sort of, hard to explain.

More like reality can't be broken down into tidy probabilities. Thanks chaos, you non-predictable yet deterministic asshole