the rootclaims debate made me update to a higher P(bioweapon|lableak) because of the thing about the furin cleavage site being designed to look like a frameshift mutation -- designed for plausible deniability if it's designed at all.

benefits to the CCP of releasing covid:
1. drastically reduce odds of trump re-election, ending US-China trade war
2. enable lockdowns in Hong Kong, ending the protests there
3. an excuse for more authoritarian control of people's movements

costs to the CCP of releasing covid:
1. ~4% slower gdp growth for a couple years
2. Bad PR if you botch the coverup
3. killing a lot of your own citizens

Authoritarian communist regimes aren't above killing a lot of their own people, getting bad PR, and slowing GDP growth, if it helps them consolidate power (e.g., concentration camps in Xinjiang) If Xi Jinping had access to covid in September 2019 and was told exactly what it could do, there's at least a 25% chance he would let it loose.

Super interesting compared to your other market; so 67% think it was an unintentional lab leak and 5% think it was intentional? Of course both markets don’t necessarily overlap, but if they did, my assumption would be right?

@JaimeSantaCruz Prediction markets aren't a poll. A market that's at 72% doesn't mean that 72% of people think it's 100% likely to have occurred, it means that the weighted average (weighted by funds) belief of all market participants is that it's 72% likely to have occurred.

@IsaacKing Thanks a lot for the explanation, I’m just starting on prediction markets and I notice there’s a lot I don’t get correctly

@JaimeSantaCruz Yeah, they can be weird for people not used to thinking in terms of expected value. Here's a more in-depth explaner:

https://outsidetheasylum.blog/prediction-markets-are-not-polls/