Economist says the quiet part out loud in Fortune article about prediction markets (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 days ago by context@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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here's the link: https://fortune.com/2026/04/26/prediction-markets-insider-trading-illegal-kalshi-polymarket-robin-hanson-economist/

here's some selected text so you don't need to use it:

“You want them trading,” Hanson, a professor at George Mason University who helped develop the market scoring rule used by many prediction markets, said of insiders. “You want the most accurate prices. That’s pretty clear. The purpose of the market is to inform decisions.”

For a swath of consumers, particularly younger and male, prediction markets are an attractive arbitrage opportunity. For many policymakers, they’re a troubling scourge, literally equivalent to “gambling.”

“Many people are going to say prediction markets are exploiting people,” [Hanson] said. “But that’s what ordinary financial markets do in exactly the same way.”

Hanson thinks insider trading is “rampant” in traditional financial markets. When a company makes a major announcement, he notes, half the move happens before the news is public, and half of that is due to insider trading, with the rest driven by traders who spot it and pile in. The SEC prosecutes only a sliver of those trades.

His suggested test: any legislation that would bar government employees from trading on prediction markets should, by the same logic, bar them from talking to reporters.

“It’s the idea that certain elites should be in charge of key information aggregation, and ordinary people in these markets should just not be there,” Hanson said. “That’s sort of an elitist attitude that I just have to reject.”

“When you sit down at a poker table, you’re supposed to look around and find the fool,” he said. “If you don’t see the fool at the table, you should get up and go, because it’s you.”

In his view, individuals should recognize their odds and get out. But if they don’t, he doesn’t see that as more of a scandal than an artist starving to pursue their dreams, or one of his friends going into debt because he bought too many jet skis. The modern age allows for a lot of risk-taking, including letting young people choose whom to date, Hanson pointed out.

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[-] culpritus@hexbear.net 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson

He was involved early on in the creation of the Rationalist community through online weblogs.

Nate Silver, in his book The Signal and the Noise (2012), writes:

He is clearly not a man afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. Instead, Hanson writes a blog called Overcoming Bias, in which he presses readers to consider which cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives might constrain them from making optimal decisions. Hanson ... is an advocate of prediction markets – systems where you can place bets on a particular economic or policy outcome, like whether Israel will go to war with Iran, or how much global temperatures will rise because of climate change. His argument for these is pretty simple: They ensure that we have a financial stake in being accurate when we make forecasts, rather than just trying to look good to our peers.

In a controversial 2018 blog post on the incel movement, Hanson appeared to agree with the incel movement's likening of the distribution of job opportunities to "access to sex". He wrote that he found it puzzling that similar concern had not been shown for incels as for low-income individuals. Some journalists, such as Alexandra Scaggs in the Financial Times, criticized Hanson for discussing sex as if it was a commodity.

Hanson is an advocate for cryonics and a member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics organization that preserves corpses with the goal of later resurrecting them.

He's also the supposedly the guy that started the "Great Filter" theory.

The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies that something is wrong with one or more of the arguments (from various scientific disciplines) that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human).

Pretty sure he's at least partly responsible for all the Rocko's Modern Basilisk silliness.

I think I found a photo of him:

The Rationalist community also has many ties with Epstein Regime folks like Musk, Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Ziz LaSota.

George Mason University is also connected to a lot of folks in the Epstein world, and he is currently the associate professor of economics there.

[-] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 9 points 6 days ago

Im glad the great filter theory, one of those existentialist kurgezagt nightmares that clung onto my brain like a parasitic leech, has finally been starved of everything necessary for me to give a shit about it.

"yeah but what about the grest fi-"

oh the theory from that paedo-incel-gambling-maxxer?

"oh, nevermind. marvellous"