Honestly this feels like a psyop. Like it's just meant to discourage people from wanting to do outdoors stuff together or going out into nature in general.
I've seen a lot of sensationalist articles lately about getting abandoned on hikes. A tiktok got shared to me about it, just some woman ranting in a touristy outdoors area about how she got ditched. Whose to say that even really happened? Almost certainly just pure engagement bait that's being spun into a "trend".
Basically arbitraging human imagination. People love coming up with fantastical concepts because they get attention, but the more exciting a market is, the less likely it is to actually happen. Reality is usually boring.
My general observation is that people tend to underestimate the likelihood of black swan events (covid, financial crisis) even as it's pretty obvious they're happening. And then when they do accept it, they react too far the other way and assume it's never going to end.
I've had success playing the markets in these specific cases. I did fritter away a lot of my gains from the financial crisis thinking I was a genius market timer. But I learned my lesson and didn't waver once I jumped back in after covid.
In both cases I got out before a bulk of the crash and timed the bottom almost to the day. Lucky I know, but I had reasons for both. For the financial crisis it was when Bill Fleckenstein closed his bear fund and put it all in MSFT. For covid it was when it looked like the lockdown was working and NYC hospitals weren't going to completely fall over like Northern Italy or Wuhan.
For any non black-swan scenarios, I assume I'll never get one up on the masters of the universe and just leave everything in blended age-appropriate funds.
I'm very concerned about an AI crash and the future of white collar work in general. But it feels more like a slow death to me than a black swan. So I'm just hedging with bonds and cash and stocks that hopefully don't crash as hard in a recession.
They underestimate the likelihood of black swan because it is very hard for adults to concretely imagine things that have not happened before and then even temporarily fully believe ~"dreams will come true."
One of my go-tos on this is the Fukushima nuclear accident. IIUC there were plenty of folks in Japan who knew of the high risk. Perhaps many interested in nuclear energy outside of Japan, too.
But the average adult if asked about the prospect of a major nuclear incident occurring say, "tomorrow," would narrow their eyes in skepticism. There's almost an instinctual level seeding of doubt.
This can be a good thing. LK-99 was an excellent test of the dissonance from dramatic changes in reality and costs of inaccuracy.
The greatest VCs I have known are exceptional at suspending disbelief to test their ability to basically shape world building.
Yeah, I can't say for sure it's going to happen, but I can clearly see a path where AI ends the middle class in developed countries, which has really only existed in its current form since WWII. Most people can't imagine that.
I would also not want to take even a fair bet against black swan because the day that "S&P500 falls to lowest level since 2016 as Labubus collapse" is the headline is the exact day I least want to lose a big pile of money gambling. If it's the shareholder's money though.... I'm probably getting laid off in that scenario anyways...
This makes sense to me, but isn't there a risk of increasing the potential payoff high enough that someone is motivated to go out and make the yes side happen?
Consider this bot running on us military outcomes or something.
By design it's a game where people with inside knowledge or enough power to bend reality can steal money from people with gambling addiction. Automating your addiction might not be the best move.
This is what markets like Polymarket boil down to. Normies can't win. Some will, of course, but that's just chance and there's no way if ensuring it's you.
It's really no different than a casino: if you ever find yourself with more money than you walked in with, cash out and leave.
Best strategy for most people though is to simply not participate and you'll break even.
I fully agree with not participating and would go even further: it's far worse than a casino, which was already bad. It's not regulated. It has a stronger impact on the outside world. With bets you can put a target on people job or head.
Except, the thing is, a decent portion of the population enjoys throwing money away in casinos. If they feel a similar level of enjoyment/entertainment from this type of market, then it's no different and they're playing for a non-financial purpose that your calculus isn't pricing in. Maybe a stretch but theoretically, if they enjoy it enough, it can serve as a much cheaper alternative to a casino and thus could actually have a positive net return to one's personal finances even while losing.
And, I'm not even contemplating gambling addiction. There's a huge market of people that just go to Vegas once or twice a year and come home thousands of dollars poorer. But they don't need it, they may not gamble outside of Vegas, or nothing that would signal an addiction.
> I don't have a gambling addiction, I just enjoy throwing money away in casinos. I come home thousands of dollars poorer. It's a net return to my finances. Totally healthy.
It's all hypothetical of course but I know Vegas has some high table/game minimums and these markets can be pretty cheap if you just want a piece of action. Also, eliminates the cost of actually traveling.
Again, no idea if anyone sees this as a true substitute or not. My guess is not as Polymarket bets don't feel entertaining at all (IMO). So it's not filling that void for anyone, but it hypothetically could.
You're thinking like an engineer and making the laughable assumption that "prediction markets" are markets. It's totally unregulated with all sorts of grifts and cheats. One of the platforms was promoting a high-return bet against Rory at the Masters yesterday.
You can make money off of all sorts of stuff. You can "sell" the bets, so there's lots of live pump and dump.
We've gone full circle. The bookie with no neck that smelled like onions was more honest than these platforms.
Everyone is saying how awful and terrible this is, but I thought it was quite fascinating.
I showed it some pictures of when I was in a bad headspace and it successfully associated me with introversion, procrastination, isolation, one picture it said an interest of mine was stealing, which was accurate at that time in my youth.
The tech exists and has existed forever, as creepy as it is, I'd rather it be public and accessible than not.
I look for a "social friction" moat. If an idea can be executed entirely from behind a keyboard, the competition is infinite. But if it requires me to sweat, do meatspace socializing, and actually walk into a physical building to hand people a solution, competition drops to near zero.
The literal application of "do things that don't scale."
Beyond that, I look for ROI besides wealth. Even if it doesn't blow up in popularity will it still improve my life if just a few adopt it/appreciate it?
Do you know what "startup" means? A restaurant business isn't a startup. A consultancy isn't a startup. The whole point is to do something that does scale.
VCs won't invest in something that doesn't scale, and therefore angels and incubators/accelerators won't either, if they have any sense.
The software scales just fine, the initial user acquisition doesn't. That's literally the premise of the PG essay I quoted.
But thanks for the pedantic dictionary check on what a VC will fund. Super helpful contribution to a conversation about whether an idea is actually useful to human beings. Not all of us are building just to beg for angel money.
Just an example of how I would accomplish them. The obsession with openclaw is generally misguided. The 'magic' is the LLM. I'm running an OC instance on a server in my home, I have experience here.
I doubt that. Someone who doesn't like reading wouldn't think of "spoiling a book" as a prank category that comes to mind or understands it to be a serious upset rather than just slightly annoying. Also, they'd likely feel that going to a bookstore and shouting things relating to a book serious is "cringe" or whatever you want to call it, if they aren't the type to even go to a bookstore in the first place.
All it takes is one person to go "I did this" and then the others have a good troll/joke to use. Doesn't take a lot of effort and people were more outgoing back then.
I actually liked reading and I was a nerdy kid. To be clear, I never actively participated in the spoiler stuff, just read about the reactions.
I mean, keep in mind I was fourteen when this happened, and fourteen year old boys are very often assholes and I was sadly not an exception to this.
I guess I just found it funny how much of a reaction people had with it. I liked the Harry Potter books too, I was reading them like every other fourteen year old was, and the plot being spoiled for me didn't really bother me very much, cuz, you know, it's just a book. Some people really got upset.
Again, definitely a dick move to do that, and a dick move for me to find it amusing. Kids are douchebags.
I appreciate you for saying that. It's something we're going to have to deal with, high trust societies institutions getting eroded by these types of people only interested in getting theirs.
What particularly bugs me about this, is the made up white man to paint as the slop author.
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