this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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This is from USA Today. This is where political journalism is:
Betting on me losing my rights is wild.
And yet it doesn’t even make the top ten fucked up shit for today.
Human behavior is depressing.
Alternatively: Humans are capable of adapting to intensely negative situations orchestrated by a few people in positions of great unearned power and privilege. Some people do their best to survive by betting on their own continued lack of survival, because they see no other options and the buy in is low.
TBF the betting platforms had higher accuracy than aggregate polls in 2024.
Betting platforms aggregate the beliefs of the people betting on them, but this means that biases of that group affect the odds.
People who receive and respond to polls are also a subset with biases.
yes, but pollsters will try to account for that in their models
So do the bookies setting odds and the people betting. People don't win money by getting their bets wrong.
For every mathematician who beat the lottery there are millions who did not.
That's not how bookies set odds! They do it based on what people bet, so if 10 people bet against something and 20 bet for it, the same account each, the odds will be 2:1, reduced a bit so the bookies makes a profit. This guarantees that the bookies make money.
How is that any different from what I said? The simple ratio is an automatic adjustment for Bias.
OK bear with me, I'm going to lay out an example to make sure we're really on the same page:
Suppose I am a horse racer in a two-horse race and have been paid to lose, so I know that the odds are 100% on the other guy. 100 people place bets of £1 each on each of us, believing we're equally matched, so there's £50 on me, £50 on the other racer. The bookies will now be offering evens odds - less their take - on each of us. Suppose now that another 100 people, tipped off by the racer fixer, place bets of £1 each on the (known) winner, so there's £150 on him, £50 on me. While this is going on, the bookie adjusts the odds so that what they offer is more like 3 - 1 for the winner.
The odds the bookie offers change in accordance with the bets placed by the punters, even though the actual odds of the race never changed. This was due to the the bias of the punters. If we re-ran the experiment but the punters instead for some reason believed I was likely to win, the bookies odds would reflect that biased belief - a bias that would then be incorrect rather than correct.
So, assuming you do agree with all that, where do we actually differ? My point is that while, sure, "people don't win money by getting their bets wrong", you can't rely on the people betting to be correct. "But FishFace" you may say, "you can rely on people in aggregate to be as accurate as it's possible to be! You can't beat the market!" And I'd agree with that too, so here is the crux: the people placing bets are not "the people in aggregate". The people placing bets may have some bias not reflected in the population as a whole. The bookies cannot correct for this: it only evens out the risk so the house always wins. If the bias is like people acting on a tip-off about a fixed race, they'll be more accurate than the general population. But if the bias is, for example, smart people being less likely to gamble, and smart people being more likely to think a particular outcome is likely, you might end up with bookies' odds being less accurate than the general population.
There's another confounder, which is the concept of emotional hedges where people bet not according to whom they think will win, but so that they get some money if their preferred outcome fails to materialise. Bookies' odds just fold this into all the rest of the bets to produce odds. But if for example a lot of people in favour of this bill emotionally hedged, the odds would say it has lower chances of passing than it actually does.
If you were paid to throw the race and half the betters knew it then either the odds are correct for favoring your opponent or you're about to have your legs broken.
Guessing you didn't read the rest. Have a good day.
My response being many times more concise than yours does not make it shallow.
Really stupid analogy to start with by leaning on a premise of everything being rigged.
So the fact that you have nothing to say about the second scenario I laid out is not because you didn't read it, but because you, what? Didn't understand? Couldn't come up with a useful reply?
None of these options leave you in a good light.
Are you being serious?
Are you?
That's true, but also a group that has a real and vested interest in getting the answer RIGHT. That helps.
I definitely trust the prediction markets more than just about any poll.
Why would I need Steve Kornacki or whoever when I've got degenerate gamblers?
Nah, I once made a hundred bucks because they had Doug Jones losing to that pedo. They'd just as fallible as anything else.
I mean, nothing is 100%.
Well, nothing anyone would allow you to bet on.
IDK about that, but credit where due they aren't a terrible source.