It's fine, of course, to be for/against/etc. and have whatever view you have. Just please engage with the specific article. It will make for a less repetitive and (therefore) more interesting thread.
edit: I'm also going back to my bayesian theory days and would be super interested to see a deep dive into whether these markets are rationally updating their beliefs in time. My recollection is super vague here, but I recall something like non-transitive belief loops can lead to dutch-books (so like Johnny Punter things that Trump will win an election against Biden, Biden would win against Ross Perot, and Ross Perot would win against Trump). I'd like to know more about whether these kinds of issues are showing up in these markets?
The right test of this is to take the _same_ markets that run for 90+ days, and check accuracy 90 days out vs 30 days out. I've done this on other prediction market datasets, though not on Kalshi and Polymarket, and found that forecasts are in fact more accurate 30 days out.
I agree that if they weren't, that would be incredibly suspicious!
Studying prediction markets is one of my current research areas. In my latest paper (preprint at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6443103), we find that on Polymarkets, markets are, on average, quite accurate and unbiased. We did see a similar non-pattern between trade volume and accuracy, past a certain threshold.
Some summaries, like on some prediction markets, have objective accuracy that is much better than chance.
Obviously they are based on current knowledge. Nobody has any actual crystal ball.
But the outcomes are with regard to future events. So the correct term is predictions.
And they don't "just summarize the current knowledge". The whole point is that they better reflect the knowledge of people who presumably know better because they are willing to put their money where their mouth is, and ignore the vast majority of nonsense. That's not summarization. That's judgment. That's the whole point.
What counts as "little predictive ability"? Do weather forecasts count as "predictions", or are they "indicators" too? Sure, they might have a more consistent track record, but then again weather is less susceptible to human interference than whatever happens in geopolitics within the next year. Prognostications about future climate might be less reliable, do those have to be downgraded to "indicators" too? On the flip side, prediction markets have a very good track record when forecasting certain events, such as interest rate decisions. Does that mean whether it's a "prediction" or a "indicator" depends on what you're forecasting?
Getting better calibrated really is worthwhile, I just wish there was more of an appetite to do that without involving money.
Even doing this, it's not apples-to-apples. One thing is, in this article, I filter only to "interesting" markets, so that controls for the % that are "easy" as you describe.
>Ive thought hard about how to sell prediction markets to consumers. In 2020, I created Google’s current internal prediction market. Since then, I’ve served as the CTO of Metaculus, a non-market-based crowd-forecasting website, and now run FutureSearch, a startup that provides AI forecasters and researchers.
I feel like openly saying you professionally try to make people believe in markets reduced the impact of any further claim.
>Still, there is a benefit to speed. On March 11, 2026, the Financial Times reported that, upon news of Iran War escalation, the Polymarket odds of inflation at or above 2.8% rose to above 90%. This illustrated an immediate domestic impact to US foreign policy, which could influence the public in a way that updates months later from professional economists might not.
I don't understand the idea that this or similar predictions are of any value? "People strongly believe a war will worsen inflation" is information you could get anywhere and not necessarily based on any high quality decision making.
https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
Fun times.
The only complain I have ( not really directed at the article, but.. ) is to put all these theories and somewhat private experiments into the same room as pure gambling schemes turbocharged by "the algorithm" and political corruption.
While far from Heaven's gates, some guy trying to predict the price of corn next year is not in the same plane as those who had the "very original" idea every guy in his early 20s had at some point but never went further because he read some articles about "the law". Like it or not, the laws or the remnants of it were put in place due to the obvious degenerate attitudes and it's consequences gambling was always known for.
And no, it's not a "market", even Uber appears to have some usefulness to offset all the lying, corruption and criminality they had to do in order to become what they are. These ones don't even take you places other than gambler addiction.
End of run, sorry.
DARPA did have a big role though, too.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vGjnJPxdnBKwag3Q9Uy_...