Nathan Radke

Yeah, so this is sort of the opposite of that, because this idea of the wisdom of the crowd is based on an experiment.

Back in 1906 at a county fair, about 800 people took a guess about how much an ox weighed.

And then afterwards, it was found that the average of everyone's guess was very, very close to the correct answer.

So what's interesting about that is any individual in the crowd probably wouldn't have gotten it right.

But as a collective unit, the crowd was very accurate.

And so using this concept, it could be argued that Polymarket is the ultimate version of this.

We can use the wisdom of the crowd to determine the likelihood of whether certain events will or will not occur in a given amount of time.

And Polymarket itself has even positioned itself as a kind of oracle to be used by individuals or even governments to make decisions.

Well, and we are starting to see this in mainstream news.

You're completely correct.

And it's because there is something about that veneer of saying, oh, what are the markets saying?

That seems to give it this sort of like this heft, this kind of seriousness.

But as you would expect, and as you've already predicted, there are some serious, serious problems with all of these ideas.

Yeah, there's a reason why we don't want our athletes like putting wagers down on sporting events because that's going to affect the sporting event.

I mean, that's just one of the issues.

I mean, crowds don't automatically have some kind of special insight.

The famous crowd from the experiment that gets the weight of the ox at the county fair, they would have had a lot of experience and knowledge about ox weights.

They weren't just coming in blank.

And as you've pointed out, crowds can be manipulated as well.

If you had primed that crowd ahead of time, even a little bit, even subtly, you could have sent their estimate to higher or lower depending on where you want it to go.