It's a bit late to reply now, but Robin Hanson just weighed in on the current thing, or, if you prefer, doubled down:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/its-your-job-to-keep-your-s...

Apparently there's also something about the duration of a White House press conference where the press secretary may have been deliberately helping some people?

I continue to think prediction markets are potentially extremely useful and valuable, but I feel like there's a huge conceptual muddle about why people would (1) care about an outcome of a market and (2) be willing to bet on the outcome of a market. And perhaps (3) whom else they would be happy or unhappy to have participating in the market with them. I doubt people will be super-content with prediction markets until those issues are a bit clearer for more participants in any given market. (And I don't know exactly how we can make them so.)

It's funny to think that the most villainous markets might be some of the humorous prop bets where the person creating the market (or a friend of the person creating the market) literally completely controls the outcome. Like "will I say SOME_WEIRD_WORD on stage at the conference tomorrow?".

Although maybe the villainy would come in more from deceiving people about whether or not an event was under your control, more than merely encouraging people to bet on an event that was clearly and unambiguously under your control.

As I said in a parallel comment, Hanson was also thinking about scientific questions, where there are asymmetries in knowledge but people can often invest in research that improves their own knowledge (like by performing an experiment or a scientific expedition or something). So, Hanson believed that prediction markets could incentivize people to invest in scientific research in order to get an edge over other market participants in such questions. That doesn't exactly make them insiders, though.

Interestingly, it doesn't necessarily incentivize them to publish the detailed results of their investigations. They're incentivized to reveal what they expect to happen (based on how they bet), but not necessarily incentivized to reveal why they think so, or how they know. E.g. if you became able to predict the weather more accurately than other models over some timeframe, prediction markets would incentivize you to reveal (some aspects of) your predictions, but not your method for making those predictions.

Well, it's confusing because you have markets on questions with very different characteristics in terms of whether they are exogenous or not (and whether they are exogenous from the perspective of particular groups), or just with different degrees of asymmetry regardless of whether there are literal "insiders".

Like, prediction markets have questions ranging from what the weather will be in a certain year, to who will win elections, to what stock prices or exchange rates will be, to whether companies will announce specific products, to whether particular people will start dating, to whether a specific person will say a specific word during a conference (some of the Manifold "prop bets" for Manifest).

These are not the same kinds of questions in terms of whether there are insiders at all or who the insiders are. Maybe we can't expect prediction markets to have the same dynamics in all of these cases.

Depending on what you want out of a prediction market, there's probably a sweet spot in terms of whom you should expect (or want) to be trading in it.

In the most exogenous events, those that are most outside of the control of individuals or groups, I think Robin Hanson hoped (in proposing "idea futures") that people would be incentivized to invest in research in order to gain a statistical edge in the market, but also assumed that there wasn't anyone who was inherently drastically better positioned to get information about the question than anyone else. E.g. "I will spend $X to get a better estimate of this probability (hopefully by otherwise ethical means?), and that will make my expected return from buying $Y worth of prediction contracts greater than $(X+Y)". Indeed not something retail investors or gamblers should probably participate in.

It's also true that in some cases where there are true insiders it can give the insiders a financial incentive to reveal confidential information. From the point of view of trying to get the most accurate possible estimate of the likelihood of future events, that would indeed also be a success, even if the process was "unfair" to non-insiders.

> It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities

The confusing thing is that this goal nonetheless appeared in some original marketing and explanations about the web PKI from the late 1990s when it was first introduced. There was another smaller burst of this when people were arguing over the formalization of DV certificates and of Google's UI changes that stopped treating EV specially (as some people found both of those changes objectionable).

I agree with you that the goal of authenticating entities was impractical, but the mental association and expectation around it still hasn't been completely dispelled. (I think I saw some form of this when doing support on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum, as people would sometimes complain that a site shouldn't have been allowed to have a certificate, either because it wasn't the organization they expected, or because it was malicious somehow.)

I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively asking smaller sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to the spread of the norm.

It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.

DJB has been complaining about this NSA position since 2022 (I guess long before it was an issue at the TLS WG):

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20220805-nsa.html

I'm actually quite surprised that anyone is advocating the non-hybrid PQ key exchange for real applications. If it isn't some sort of gimmick to allow NSA to break these, it's sure showing a huge amount of confidence in relatively recently developed mechanisms.

It feels kind of like saying "oh, now that we can detect viruses in sewage, hospitals should stop bothering to report possible epidemic outbreaks, because that's redundant with the sewage monitoring capability". (Except worse, because it involves some people who may secretly be pursuing goals that are the opposite of everyone else's.)

Edit: DJB said in that 2022 post