This market is gross and provides no benefit to society.

@JoshuaWilkes If you think timely and accurate information about the number of lives lost in this horrific event has no benefit, you disagree with me and every newsroom on the planet. This is a fast moving situation and reports are still conflicting. The benefit is obvious, and not a single person is a harmed in any way

@brod name me a real benefit that comes from knowing there to be 26 vs 9 fatalities, in this case and at this time.

Death markets should provide information that will change people's actions.

Mass casualty death markets rarely do this, because mass casualty events typically provoke overwhelming responses where there is effort/capacity to save more people faster than the actual number.

@JoshuaWilkes To answer your isolated demand for rigour, 9 vs 26 deaths is clearly predictive of the scale of government response, eg if there will be more restrictive gun control enacted

There were many massacres in Australia in the 80s and 90s, for eg, but it took until 36 people died in Port Arthur for Howard to introduce sweeping gun legislation, and it is laughable to argue the scale of death was irrelevant to that decision.

Now name me a single person who is harmed by this market in any way.

Edit: this what a little harsh. But I don’t see the different between this market and Al Jazeera reporting a live feed updating the death toll, it’s just prediction markets are better at information. It is just obvious to me that the death toll is the most relevant fact out of a mass casualty event (see: every headline in the last 12 hours)

@brod

I think the crux of it is that I believe that betting on something is different from reporting on it, and I believe that there are sets of questions where betting on their outcome is inherently unseemly (or 'gross').

I also think that the value of predication markets is negatively correlated to the extent that participants are updating based on live reporting.

But fundamentally, this is just about death markets. I believe they are inherently unedifying in a foundational way that is intuitive to most people ( and I accept not to all). I am not religious but I think that saying they are 'spiritually' damaging is a good proxy for how I actually feel about this. So I think they are harmful to everyone who participates in them or is proximate to them, but because I think that my belief is mainstream I believe there is also reputational harm for Manifold and all of us associated with it.

I completely accept that this will not be persuasive to you, my reason for posting on death markets is mostly not because I think I will change the creator's mind - it is because I want to publicly express my discomfort in the hope that it creates an environment whether others can do the same. This has been successful in the past but not to my recollection the last time you created a death market I thought was reprehensible.

To develop my argument but also to address the point I think you are making wrt to isolated demand for rigour, it is undeniably the case that some death markets have real predictive value that can benefit society.

When will Trump die?

Will an Airbus crash in 2026?

How many people will die of famine in Gaza?

are all markets that are deeply unpleasant to me in the way I have described above, but where the value of generating answers to these questions is obvious, such that I believe the correct course of action is to allow them and explain why. I am sure that this is not completely true, but in general I think that:

'Death markets should have the clear potential to prevent deaths'

The point I have always tried to make about mass casualty death markets, is that people are betting largely on:

i) how many deaths are currently unreported

ii) how many people will succumb to their injuries

rather than

iii) are there future deaths that can be prevented

There just isn't anything there to justify the 'cost' of being a death market (and a highly emotive one at that). And specific to your answer to my question, it's clear to me that information about Australia's future gun policy fails this test of preventing deaths, because there's no true urgency to that information - it can simply wait for the accurate reporting that will follow 'live update reporting.'

@JoshuaWilkes Briefly, your objection to markets that update on live reporting proves too much (the social value of Polymarket on the evening of November 5th, 2024 is self evident). And you are misremembering my having created another death market previously, I have not, nor had this argument with you before.

I do think the crux of the issue is that, as you say, you viscerally find these markets ‘unedifying’, ‘unseemly’ and ‘spiritually damaging’. It is hard to argue with ‘yuck’. I just do not share the feeling. The events in Bondi were horrifying, I am a resident of Sydney and it is deeply distressing, this kind of terrorism is extremely rare in Australia. But I do not find aggregating information on the event with a market mechanism any more objectionable that doing the same thing via news feeds or social media. The substance is the same, only the aesthetics are different.

James Surowiecki makes this case better than I can. I will quote at length from chapter 4 of ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ discussing DARPA’s briefly run Policy Analysis Market. The analogy is not perfect but many points apply:

“Senator Wyden dismissed PAM as a fairy tale, and suggested DARPA would be better off putting its money into ‘real world’ intelligence. But the dichotomy was a false one. No one suggested replacing traditional intelligence gathering with a market. PAM was intended to be simply another way of collecting information. […]

The hostility towards PAM, in any case, had little to do with how effective it would or would not be. The real problem with it, Wyden and Dorgan made clear, was that it was ‘offensive’ and ‘morally wrong’ to wager on potential catastrophes. Let’s admit there’s something viscerally ghoulish about betting on an assassination attempt.

But let’s also admit that US government analysts ask themselves everyday the exact same questions that PAM traders would have been asking. How stable is the government of Jordan? How likely is it that the House of Saud would fail? Who would be the head of the Palestinian authority in 2005? If it isn’t immoral for the US government to ask these questions, it’s hard to see how it’s immoral for people outside the US government to ask them.

Nor should we have shied from the prospect of people profiting from predicting catastrophe. CIA analysts, after all, don’t volunteer their services. We pay them to predict catastrophes, as we pay informants for valuable information.

Or, consider our regular economy. The entire business of a life insurance company is based on betting when people are going to die. With a traditional life insurance policy, the company is betting you’ll die later than you think you will, while with an annuity, it’s betting you’ll die sooner. There may be something viscerally unappealing about this, but most of us understand that it’s necessary. This is, in some sense, what markets often do: harness amorality to improve the collective good. If the price of better intelligence was simply having our sensibilities bruised, that doesn’t seem like too high a price to have paid.”

@JoshuaWilkes I think you're right about this type of market harming Manifold's reputation. The reaction I saw from normies to Polymarket's "When will Russia capture Myrnograd?" market (the one that was defrauded by an ISW contributor) suggests that quite a lot of markets here – including many of my own – would be repellent to the average person, even with no real money at stake.

Given the declining number of active users here, it may be in Manifold's interest to appeal more to normies, which it cannot do while markets like this one exist. But I worry about where that would lead. To me, the appeal of Manifold is the ability to ask virtually any question and know that anyone who might find the question absurd or offensive will usually just bet accordingly or ignore it. If we start self-censoring to cater to puritans, low decouplers and the stubbornly uninquisitive (not saying this is you at all, btw) I think we will ultimately be left with very few markets – none about death, none about war and only a handful about politics – because those people are fundamentally ill-suited to the world of prediction markets. We may just have to be comfortable with Manifold being a niche thing instead.

I realise that I'm only engaging with one aspect of your post (reputational harm) and haven't addressed your other arguments (partly because I agree with some of them). I'll leave you and Brad to debate those