Betting data shows Harris's chances are on the up but Trump is still leading - eviltoast

Reminder that you guys should go out and vote. Trump has been ahead since September 2023. Don’t let the echo chamber make you feel like it’s a done deal. That’s what I thought until I saw this article.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    Didnt read the article yet but there are these things called “prediction markets” where people bet (usually with play money but sometimes real money) on real world events like politic decisions, elections, wars, but also very small or individual things. Its sort of a stock market for predicting real world events and it tends to be much better than most other systems at predicting stuff.

    For example this one was about Biden dropping out. https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/will-biden-be-the-2024-democratic-n?r=QW5kcmV3Rw

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      From the image … I’m not sure that’s such a great predictor. Over all of the time from the debate it seems like the “market” was leaning “yes” for most of the time, until about the time basically all of the mainstream media was pretty certain it was going to happen (where it seemed pretty clear that plenty of leaks were occurring).

      I mean maybe this reflects the actual reality and it was in the air this much … but either way I don’t think this “market” knew more than the mainstream media was telling us.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        Yeah i think trying to predict election stuff is a waste of time because all the decision making is super irrational. I dont really seriously use it for anything but its interesting to look at from time to time.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        but either way I don’t think this “market” knew more than the mainstream media was telling us.

        No, but it is a culmination of all the available public information (and some private information you won’t find elsewhere) in a single metric. If you read a single article you would assume there is either a 100% Biden drops out or a 0% chance - if you read every single news article in existence, aggregated all social media buzz, polls, etc, into a statistical likelihood, you would likely come out with a number that closely matches the odds.

        Biden was only going to drop out once, so you can’t say how closely these odds matched the actual likelihood on this specific measure, but if you analyze hundreds of predictive markets like this, the implied odds pretty strongly correlate with the actual binomial outcomes