The Original Prediction Market Boosters Have Qualms About the Boom

The Original Prediction Market Boosters Have Qualms About the Boom At Manifest, some tech intellectuals wondered whether Super Bowl bets were really helping humanity. On June 13, just as the New York Knicks were clinching the NBA championship in San Antonio, Eliezer Yudkowsky was making a point about prediction markets. It was the second day of Manifest, an annual convention in Berkeley, California, and Yudkowsky, wearing a gold sequined jacket and silver hat, was explaining to a small group of young men that these markets — which aggregate bets based on people’s insights into and beliefs about the future — are humanity’s best shot at establishing collective knowledge. They are, he said, “civilization’s way of knowing what it knows.” Suddenly, news of the Knicks’ historic win arrived via mobile push alert, and Yudkowsky responded with jaunty disdain: “Are those sportsball players?” His disinterest might have seemed unusual at a convention dedicated to prediction markets, given how deeply intertwined they’ve become with sports betting. On Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest platforms, sports account for a large majority of US trading volume. But Manifest attendees are not typical traders. They represent what might be called the purist wing of the prediction market field. If the average Kalshi or Polymarket user bets on the Super Bowl champion or the best picture Oscar winner or the price of Bitcoin, the Manifest crowd professes to be more interested in how prediction markets can be used to improve society.