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I'd like to echo the thoughts of someone with whom I've been competing in prediction markets for almost 20 years now (since Intrade). When I first met him, he was headstrong and stubborn, stuck in his right-wing media universe and as sure of his punditry as he was zealous about it. He gradually became more interested in the views of those outside his information silo. He realized that he could make a good living by opening his mind, listening to different points of view, and incorporating new facts into his worldview. He was a climate change skeptic. He was skeptical of moderate policies that improve lives (like the ACA).
By the time President Trump took office, he was a changed man. I saw him say things I never thought I'd see him say. He would ask intelligent questions about policy, politics, elections, and even climate change. He still leans right but even admitted that he voted for Biden, probably the first time he voted for a Democrat.
I bring this up not because I think a D-leaning CFTC might like to hear that, but because I think it's proof that people on both sides of the aisle could use a healthy dose of reality about things like climate. For that to happen, people need a healthy dose of the reality of the politics (cooperation, compromise, bipartisanship) that could do something about climate change. Left-leaning friends have told me they have become more likely to listen to conservative ideas to reach common goals because political prediction markets paid them to drop their shields and listen. They had to shed their biases. They had to shake off the terrible punditry that dominates our airwaves at no cost to those who spew it. They had to scrape off their instinct to belittle and mock information based on who said it and instead judge it based on its merits.
To put it simply: I have never seen any school teach people the way prediction markets teach them. I've learned more in the 20 years I've been investing in prediction markets than I ever learned in school (I have a BA in Philosophy).
Below are the words of my old acquaintance. For the sake of this country, I hope you will listen closely to him and stop this unfortunate action you seem intent on taking, even as we are awash in ubiquitous sports betting (thanks to lobbyists wooing lawmakers with expensive cigars and liquor*) that does no good and much harm:
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At this point, a very large portion of the world is totally silo-ed in their news, and can't see the forest for the trees. Especially in the United States where it's basically a two team sport, people get terrible information that biases them in godawful ways. They essentially wear a blindfold of partisanship. And we traditionally associate this with Republicans, but as an example -- we just saw quite a lot of Democrats being totally blinded to the fact that Biden had to drop out. They rejected that Biden had issues, rejected that the debate was a huge problem, rejected polling, rejected that he was likely to get blown out by Trump. Prediction markets are in many ways a partial cure to information silos on both sides of the aisle. People can be shown reality.
Overall, I would say that the point of a prediction market isn't to be an oracle that tells you the future. It can and will be wrong, sometimes hilariously wrong. The goal is to be BETTER than the alternative. A better flashlight to look ahead at the murky future.
And always bear in mind that in the absence of prediction markets, you are left purely with punditry that is unmoored from any incentive to be correct. And actually, punditry is getting worse, and the world is awash in bad punditry. Because the world needs "content" and opinion/punditry provides a lot of it. And there are actually high incentives to provide entertaining and not great predictions, especially in information silos, because people love hearing what they WANT to hear and not necessarily what is true or they need to hear. Prediction markets cut through the biased punditry BS that is flooding the world.
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Thank you,
Scott Supak
* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-lobbying-kansas.html
