JA WestenbergApr 23

A healthy civilisation draws a line around the sacred and refuses to price what's inside it. The line moves, but the line exists.

A civilisation in decay erases that line.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/why-prediction-markets-are-a-sure-sign-that-our-civilisation-is-in-decay/

Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay

Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.

Westenberg.
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@Daojoan I'm not sure that there's necessarily any overlap between genuinely civic-minded policy-makers (facing the epistemic gap you're talking about) and market-driven forces. TBH, I think that the US has basically stopped holding anything sacred for quite some time, so it's been in decay for as long as that. I don't see this new iteration of prediction markets is a sign of a tipping point... it's just another sign in a long line of grotesqueries.

A couple of things that come to mind... Nietzsche’s observation that very few individuals are insane, whereas most societies fit that bill. The other is the film "Ikiru" and how the civil servant has to come to an awakening to the indifference the state has to the horrible conditions that its people have to live in, and how he himself has been part of that self-perpetuating machine.

Apr 23 at 5:39amWeb