Do prediction markets enhance our understanding of the world or corrupt it?

A.B.C. Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. For decades, a quantum computer has been just around the corner. So, where is it? If you'd asked me very early on, I would have been very pessimistic. The race to build a quantum computer. Then I got more pessimistic. Can anyone actually do it? And more pessimistic. One of the biggest tech stories on Earth. I'm Jacinta Bola. Search for science friction, dead and alive on A.B.C. Listen. Or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, over the years, I countless people. Listen, there's even family members have threatened to design a game of mind-filled bingo. Mostly around Scots phrases. Never around mind, of course. Imagine gamifying the mind-filled in that way. But what would it start? What if it became your whole prism through which you saw the mind-filled? And money changed hands and so on? I mean, what would we have begun? Welcome to the mind-filled. Will Italy is my name? Scott Stevens is my co-host, hella. Hey, Willie, how are you doing? I'm alright. Gamification. That's a lovely way to kick things off. You like it? I do. Sorry, I should say. I hope the listener understands that I don't say stuff like that. Just randomly, with no connection to the topic at hand. We are going somewhere with this. Isn't it interesting, though, that everyone wants to play mind-filled bingo? I wonder if that says something about the. Just what's in the air? The kind of things we reach for when we try to interact with things. Look, I think that's right. I mean, one of the things that mind-filled bingo. I can't believe this is how we're beginning. But what it suggests is a degree of intimacy and longevity. And playfulness. And playfulness. But, you know. Willie, how do you go with listening back to yourself? Don't bother with that. Yeah, me neither. And, you know, why? Because when you listen back to yourself, you hear the verbal ticks. You hear the phrases. You hear the things that pop up that you're saying, not when you so much don't have anything to say, but they're kind of those little verbal placeholders of thought. I'm going to put this in here while I'm trying to leap to the next thing that I might want to. And then there are just the various things. I think I'm sure I've mentioned before. Yeah, so like, for example, I might say. I don't know if I do this, but I might say, you know what I mean? Whereas you might say, "Pierras envelop." It's the same thing. Yeah. And look at the other thing. I'm sure I've brought it up on the show before. As a young man, I had a terrible speech impediment. And the way that I find my little paths of connection. From one thought to another. Is sometimes by means of little phrases that let me sort of leap the circuit. And you know, it's just one of those things. But what I think is so interesting is that when you begin then panning back and you try to look, and if you were to gamify that, if you were to try to see sort of patterns or expectations amid the randomness, then you're in a slightly different territory. Then you're not just listening to the things that are taking place and then being delightfully surprised when, I don't know, Pink Floyd or Pierre Roosevelt or Hannah Arant or in some respects, or to put this another way where to pick up. Instead, where you are is you're in this soup of chaos and what you're listening out for are the little things that are going to let you fill out your bingo card. Yeah, so you're not listening so much as playing. That's exactly right. And the reasons I bring that particular thing up. We've talked a couple of times on this show about the advent of and the corrosive effect of sports betting on sports watching. There are plenty of people that I know that don't really care for sport very much at all. I'll confess that I'm not a huge sport person. There's a particular sport that I like. There's a particular team that I enjoy. There are some who don't watch sport as much as they do engage in forms of profit making or betting and the sport then becomes the platform on which they try to match their same game parlay in which they try to hit their over under, in which they try to hit a particular bat or try to hive off or rectify losses from the week before. In other words, the sport doesn't become so much an object of enjoyment in its own right, but it becomes merely the platform upon which and through which certain wagers are made. I think something that's been so interesting to me, though. And we haven't talked about this. It's kind of interested in what you make of it. So the big explosion in online sports betting was from 2018 onwards. It's not that it didn't exist, but because of certain things that happened going to a Supreme Court ruling in the United States, the infrastructure was created because so much of certain aspects of Australian cultural life seems to be kind of derivative. There are things that start elsewhere that make their way to our shores. Certain things that happened in 2018 in the United States have led to sports betting catching fire. It has now permeated the ecosystem of sports viewing generally, that even if you are not a gambler as I am not, even if you are not, it is impossible to escape the rhetoric of betting. When these things are then integrated directly, well, directly into the sports broadcast itself, or when certain say sports podcasts, or certain forms of commentary or coverage, are themselves sponsored by sportsbooks. Then you have this, you know, you have prediction and speculation baked into the very experience of watching sports. It almost becomes the air that we breathe. And what I've noticed over the last eight years is that the language of prediction, the language of speculation, the language of hitting over is unders, even when not being used by gamblers. That language has become so normalized within cultural discourse. It's come to so permeate our common vernacular that it seemed to me to only be a matter of time before that kind of language jumped the fire break, that it then spread to broader things in culture that yes, maybe previously we have gambled on, you know, markets have always sort of indulged in, or not always, but for a long time, who's going to win an election, what's going to be the outcome of a congressional race or whatever. But for this language of rampant speculation, and the ease with which that speculation can be turned into online bets, it was a matter of time before it jumped the fire break. And now we're in a very interesting position, I think, given the explosion just over the last 18 months in what are called prediction markets. I am one of the preface everything I say by making it really clear that I think Mindful Bingo is a wonderful idea, and I would still love to say a wonderful business pursue it. So I'm not disabusing anyone of that indulgence, but you're right, there is this thing that exists where betting markets become not an adjunct of the world, but a lens through which people possess it. Well, sir. I remember which election was it? I'm guessing it was 2016, where Laurie Oaks, the legendary political correspondent, a federal political correspondent, as part of the election coverage that night, kept changing his tie. Do you remember this story? Yes. So you just kept changing his tie. And I wasn't watching the election coverage that night, so I don't know how quickly or at what point anyone clocked it or anything like that, but he was finally asked about it. And he said, well, I noticed that there was a betting market on what the color of my tie would be. So I thought, well, why shouldn't everyone win? And just cycle through. The colors that people were betting on. Now, I've admitted, I loved that, because there was something about subverting. There's something about betting on that. That is, I know, on one view, a bit of fun as the expression would probably be, it's just a bit of, you know, Australian scallywag behaviour, right? Not even, actually. Just adding some kind of spice or sweetness to what can otherwise be a quite serious, even potentially drab affair. Sure, sure. That's one way. It was also the fact that it was Laurie Oaks. It was the fact that it was Laurie Oaks delightful. Well, his response, yeah. But the other way of looking at it, the thing that's important here is, what a horrible situation we've gotten into, where people are that attached to the idea of gambling, that they're prepared to do it on something like that. That the objective gambling, once upon a time, it might have just been in horse races or whatever. But seeing the world through the lens of gambling had become so thorough, at least for enough people to support a market for it. That anything could become its object. Anything. And so when you talk about the proliferation of gambling, prediction markets. Now there's something quite specific I think that you might be getting at the prediction market as opposed to just any other betting market. But I think when you talk about the proliferation of it, I think needs to be highlighted here is it's not just that a particular practice has grown. It's that a world viewer or a way of engaging with the world that expresses itself in that practice has grown. And that's a bit that I think, well, all of it worries me. And you know, my position on gambling obviously very clear. I've totally opposed to it. Not that that matters to anyone else, but that is my position. So of course, I would not be attracted to this sort of thing. But it's the world view that's attached that's fascinating. So let's go back to the sport example. I will use this term, I think on a recent show, I'll use the phrase "chips" in. That's a gambling reference, different sort of gambling, but still a gambling reference. When I want to follow my team, one of the things I will consult is the odds of this and that because I want to get a sense of what the likely outcome seems to be. But to me, that can be replaced with, you know, the supercomputing that does a probability analysis and says the chances of this team winning today is X and the chance of this team winning is Y and then when someone scores whatever the probability changes or the probability of this team winning the championship or the title or whatever that is this at this point. So that to me is mathematical probability. I find that interesting, but I'll stand in for that. The high-falutant version of this argument though is that when we're talking about say betting on the outcome of an election, something like that, that betting markets are actually the best way to try to read. It's basically sociology because what it's doing is it's taking the aggregated wisdom of masses and little bits of information, special information that some people might have that all feeds into this final result of where the money is going and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, there's something beneath that though, which I think is also interesting. So people, when they respond to a pollster, might engage in a little bit of, a little bit of kind of self-curation, yeah, a degree of virtue. So there might be something that they don't actually agree with. There might be a party that they actually do quite like, but they don't want to, or there might be a policy that they don't really support, but they don't want to admit that to a pollster. Where is Shai Trump there? You guys back about in 2016. Yes, whereas if you've got money on the line, if you're putting your money where your mouth is for one of a better phrase, then you're more likely to be truthful about what it is you really support and what it is you really want. Okay, so can we at this point draw a distinction? There's a question that falls out of that, which I think you will want to address, which is that is this actually a meaningful and accurate way of understanding, betting markets and understanding the world. That is, can we, whatever else we want to say about this, acknowledge their epistemic capacity, right? But there's a second question here, which is surely we then have to draw a really hard and fast distinction between betting markets that are on those things that no one can control really, as against those things that they can. So the Lorry Oaks example is a really interesting one. He had total control over that, having spotted the betting market. He was really the master of its outcome. I remember being the subject of a betting market myself once, which I found a really disorientating experience. And it was about what I would mention in a particular thing. I was like, wow, I could have totally manipulated that whole thing. Let's take it to really serious places. Betting markets that have to do with whether America is going to engage in what military activity in a particular sphere or a particular theater. This isn't hypothetical. No, it's not. And in fact, not even generally. But will such and such a strike happen on such and such a date? One of the things about betting markets, will it, is that they are zero or some? These are up and down, yes or no. What are called event contracts? There's something really interesting going on, by the way, with that very phrase. Event contracts. So a particular event that has to have a certain degree of specificity, such that it lends itself to a straight up yes and no answer. And then the odds of what the payout might be are determined by the number of people who think that one is more likely than the other. In other words, there's no house. There's no, there's no one external to the question who is setting the terms, who is setting the odds, who is determining the payout. It's determined by those who say that it's more likely than not, that this specific thing will happen on a particular time or to a particular person. But where those things are, I don't know if this is saying it too absolutely, where those things are in the gift of someone? This is a major problem now. Or when someone is in the United States Army and is involved in the planning of, for instance, the seizure and the imprisonment of Venezuela and President Nicola Maduro, and then that's what I mean by in the gift of someone. Like betting on an election is not really in anyone's, sorry, the result of an election is not really in anyone's gift unless you want to say, you know, one of the leaders might throw the election and say something that absolutely rules them out of winning because of the betting market. That's just hard to imagine that that wouldn't ever happen. I'm prepared to leave that as a hypothetical side. But we're not talking about hypotheticals here. That, it seems to me, has a really hugely corrosive and distortionary effect on human behaviour. It's no longer an epistemic thing. It's now itself a structuring thing. And obviously, just a corrupt thing. It's the reason that, you know, athletes are not allowed to bet on their own sport, for example. Even if the particular bet that they have doesn't have much in common with, or would be in their own interests, like they're going to win the game and they bet on their own team to win it, for example. Even that, you could argue that doesn't corrupt anything. But actually, it's just the whole exercise of it. It's the relationship that exists between these two things. That is, I think, the problem. All right. Can I try to take this from two different directions? In a second. This is the minefield. I'm going to see Radio National. Well, that's Alex. My name is Scott Stevens. He's my co-host and I guess we'll be alone very soon. So look, there's so much strange stuff happening here. And I appreciate your attempt to divide between, say, the epistemic value of, let's call them knowledge markets. I mean, those who are sprucing the benefits of prediction markets say that there is a very high epistemic value because what you're doing is you're finding a mechanism to marshal the wisdom of crowds. And you get more and more people together voting on a particular thing. And there's something about that very act of collectively determinate, collectively attempting to determine something that is more likely than not to direct us, to point us in the right direction. I mean, I'm already a little bit suspicious of that. But of course, the footnote that goes with it is that, and then when you bring some kind of profit motive, when you bring a financial incentive, you are more likely to have that crowd to bring its true wisdom, or you're incentivizing people who maybe know things that they shouldn't necessarily know or have access to information that isn't publicly available, to bring that out into the light. And then once that's out into the light, then you have a kind of, you know, you have a magnetizing effect where also it's people then follow along with that. So there is supposed to be this epistemic value. I've got all sorts of questions about the epistemology of this to begin with. I mean, we've done, we've actually done a back to back show on the wisdom of crowds. I'm not necessarily opposed to wisdom of crowds. But but as soon as you bring a certain incentive to it, as if that incentive, particularly if it's a financial incentive, is going to increase the likelihood of truthfulness and accuracy, rather than increasing the likelihood of, let's call it, illicit information. I mean, there are ways of knowing and there are ways of knowing. There are ways of coming across information in the right way within adjusted a democratic society. There are ways of information that never should have been brought out of the public, that then comes out into the public. And it's in many respects wrong for it to have done so. The relative truthfulness of it doesn't mean that it's becoming public, then makes it illicit. Isn't the argument here, though, that such information in the context of a betting market isn't becoming public? It must be private. It's just then being factored in to what is effectively a probability distribution. So the information doesn't have to be declared. It just needs to be accounted for in this kind of invisible way. That's right. That's right. But I think this is the possibility of an internal corruption of the very notion of the wisdom of crowds. That for me is the broader point. So look, I have questions about the epistemology of this sort of two core. You raise the issue of what is effectively insider trading. I have knowledge about something that is peculiar to my position within an organization. I have proprietary knowledge. And then I go about betting on the basis of that knowledge that something will happen that only a handful of people could possibly know about. So there is the internal corruption. And something about these prediction markets, because it's so difficult to make money on them. And I think that just needs to be said straightforwardly. It's very, very difficult to make money when your only chance of making money is to bet in the affirmative that something that is highly, highly unlikely to happen will in fact happen. So what we have seen over the last four years in particular is a preponderance, a preponderance, a skewing of the ratios when the bets that are made, when the event contracts that are taken up have to do with military action. That for me is immensely, immensely concerning for reasons that I think hardly need to be explained. But then when you move one step beyond that, so look, when sports betting began taking into account such things as not even, you know, Will Embape become the all-time goal scorer in the World Cup, but began getting into the realm of whether Justin Bieber and BTS perform in the World Cup half-time show. I'm not making these up, these are real bets. You're beginning to get into not just the realm of trivia, but you're also getting into the realm of culture more generally, where the whole realm of kind of fascination with celebrity sightings and with trivia and with banality and with the not so much the mundane, but the kind of the solaceously intriguing. When you then have betting markets beginning to get into that dimension of culture, given the fact that so much of culture has already been handed over to for one of the better term, content makers. And there's only so much content that you can pack into a podcast, right? There's only so much content that you can draw upon to make an Instagram clip or a TikTok video. So the idea that speculation and prediction can then become this vast new resource for possible content for a business that's already in the market for spinning content. There's something about this that then means not just the gamification of culture more generally, but then as you put it before, this becomes the way that you begin looking at everything, prediction, speculation, ratios, odds become the way that you look after the world. For anyone following the World Cup over the last few weeks, it was impossible to escape not just sports betting, but also prediction markets. It was there running alongside the pitch side tickerboards. Yeah. In fact, when you combine sports betting and prediction markets, some analysts have called the World Cup the most bet-upon sporting event in sporting history. And then it seems to me, Willie, you have this other step. I'm not sure if you saw this, but at the end of 2025, three otherwise reputable news outlets announced that they had engaged in a partnership with a couple prediction markets for the odds, the information about certain event contracts, about certain bets would be seamlessly integrated into the news coverage itself. This is dark stuff because now it's not even, you know, part of the promise in the middle of the 19th century about the moral formation that goes hand in hand with watching news that it doesn't necessarily affect your life directly, is that there is a certain virtue in having a degree of emotional and political wiring about what's going on in the world more generally. So then see the news, not as having to do with the kind of geopolitical or global citizen responsibility, but news becomes a new quarry that I can mine for my latest lot of event contracts for the latest round of bets. There's something about that that I find particularly corrupting. And now here's my final point. Something that we've talked about on numerous occasions about the whole sort of online ecosystem. The ecosystem that circulates primarily through social media is that it tends to be content agnostic. So if a post is about something unbelievably grave and serious, I don't know, famine, genocide, and a post is about when is Taylor Swift going to get married? The way of measuring the worthwhileness, the relative quality of those posts is what kind of engagement they attract. So something can be true or something can be trivial. Something can be incredibly traumatic and traumatizing, unbelievably grave or something can be made out of whole cloth. It can be AI slop. And it doesn't matter because the way that the metric works is whether or not it attracts engagement. There have been bets about the duration and devastation of the Canadian wildfires. And whether Jesus will return before 2027. The idea that they can exist side-by-side as event contracts, the events are equal. All events are equal because the real purpose is not so much understanding. Nor is it even sort of success in reading the word, you know, one of the virtues that I think many gamblers, many of those who are successful in the world, we talked about this a lot while we did a couple of shows on succession, that there is a kind of virtue in being able to read the world, having the cunning to be able to see past the veneer and understand how things really work. You know, part of the skill that's supposed to go along with being a successful better is that I can see through the emotion, I can look at the cold, hard facts, I can weigh up the probabilities and I can simply make my case, I can put my money where my mouth is. But for that then to be done, when things like this are all placed side-by-side and reduced to the same level of, for one of the better term, ephemera, I find that so epistemologically and morally corrupting that quite apart from the actual insider trading, the actual forms of corruption that the prediction markets invite, and we should say that prediction markets are not legal in Australia, thank God, but when that kind of language begins permeating everything that we see, when the language of ratios and odds and the zero-sum beddings of yes or no, when they're all treated on the same level, it seems to me that it does have that kind of calcifying or callousine of our ability to see the world and to judge rightly the justice of the world. So, I think I agree with what you've just said, I can imagine the counter-argument, the counter-argument goes, well, of course we understand the difference between these things. We just have this as an adjunct to the experience of it. So you're painting a world where everything is merely raw material for our gamification. No, we're gamifying something that we otherwise understand to be very serious and so the gamification is this tiny little aspect of our engagement with the story or the issue or whatever it is. It's not the over arching element of it, so that would be the counter-argument. I guess the observation I would make in response to that. Let's just stick with the sport example. When you see how this becomes manifest in the lives of athletes who receive death threats or online abuse in a way they've never had before, and I know someone who was in this situation, the case even went to court, became a criminal, they will tell you that gambling is at the heart of this. It's someone who missed out on their multi or something like that because you did something or you didn't get enough kicks or whatever. What's happening there is that sport, which at its best, is a wonderful theatre for the gathering of a public, for the sharing of a kind of social moment of a public gaze around something that might be trivial, yes, but in an era where we have precious few of these fora, it becomes transformed into something else, it becomes transformed into something that is not antagonistic in the kind of pantomime sense that sport off it is. I hate calling what I hate Manchester United, I hate Manly, these sorts of things, not in that sense, but in a sense that I now hold you responsible for my misery and I see it as a lizard to express that in the form of a death threat, you are actually changing the social grammar, so that is one thing. But I want to make one final observation, because we're going to get to a guest in a second, but maybe this is actually in some ways the deeper observation to make here, that's not about prediction markets, unfortunately it goes deeper than that and it's probably insoluble. And that is that I wonder if the ability to gamify all these things is ultimately an expression of our alienation from those things, from the stake that we have in them, from the accountability that they have to us, from our input being in any way facilitated or possible to them. I cannot stop the way a distant government in my own country or a distant government in a distant country, behaves militarily. My voice is ignored, there aren't sufficient community connections or local forms of democracy or whatever it might be that allow me to feel that my voice is registered in some way. In other words, there's a radical separation between the decision-making and the demos or me as a member of the demos. And for that reason, well I may as well gamify, that's all it can be to me, that's the only the engagement with it that I'm really interested in. And in some ways, I'm giving it the respect it deserves, not as an inherent event that has a phenomenon that is unaccountable to me. And I wonder if that flows through to sport as well. You know, think about when professional sports teams were actually anchored in their community and drew players from particular areas and so on and so forth, as against what you have now where all the players are from all over the place and an unbelievable amount of money depending on the sport and live lives that have nothing to do with yours. There's an alienation that happens there. And once it's alienated, well, I have no reason to tend to the richer community-shaped bombs that might have otherwise characterized them. I can't recognize an inherent value because the inherent value has kind of been taken away through this process of abstraction. I wonder if there's something really going on there that, I mean, that speaks to all kinds of crises. Look, I think, I mean, so much of me wants to wholeheartedly agree that being disappointed with our inability to nurture the affective connections with things that matter to us and those affective connections might also be democratic affective connections. It then turns us into mere spectators by means of a technology that has cultivated a disposition of spectatorship, of moments of convenient concern, but then, of course, simply being able to swipe away when it becomes too much. In some ways and in my heart of hearts, I think I want to say that what you have just described exists on that continuum. I guess the only thing that I would want to add to that is that at whatever point one reaches where you are so callous that's something that ought to elicit from you a form of grief or reckoning like how long a fire might burn, how many hectares might be consumed, that that then becomes an opportunity for the exercise of a different form of agency. However, disenchanted that agency might be, I guess I would want to say there does come a point where let's just say that the morning that you described, the tacit, the implicit morning you described, is accurate. There does come a point where that morning does, in fact, become a kind of a form of soul blindness. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe become products of that alienation as much as we become victims of it. If you've just joined us, this is the Mindfield on ABC Radio National, well, they dial these my names. God, Steven's is my co-host at this point in his traditional that we have a guest. We do have a guest. Adam Piavachi is a research fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. He's conveniently, for us, lead investigator on a research project examining the ethics and politics of prediction markets. Adam, thanks so much for your doings on the Mindfield. Thanks for having me. I'm very sympathetic to the thought that by betting on things and thinking about things in terms of odds that this kind of corrode our perception and our tension and the way that we relate to people, there's a certain complaints commonly made about capitalism or markets or modern consumerism, which is that everything is for sale. And this is bad because certain things maybe shouldn't be for sale, right? You shouldn't sell babies, you shouldn't sell your vote. The profit motive can kind of flatten the value of everything into what it can be sold for, or people into how much money they can get you. And so it's easy to see prediction markets as a continuation of this trend and open to the same kind of criticism. What's different about these markets, though, is that they're not actually trading an asset. There's no physical item transferred, there's no service provided when one person wins either loses. Because it's just a matter of information and beliefs, these can be about anything. And so I think Scott, what you were kind of getting at earlier, is that there's a dramatic expansion of kind of the things that I looked at in terms of this, you know, what's to say, walk and get me a profit lens. So if I want to bet on whether someone's marriage will survive another five years, right? That doesn't require me to interact with those people at all. I don't need to own anything, I don't need to get your permission to be possible. All the information can be replicated and transmitted very easily. I just need information about marriage, which you can't always control. Another factor that's kind of relevant in the background here of understanding what's been happening is that over the past few decades, there's been a steady loss of trust in institutions and traditional sources of authority. And we just kind of see that in manifesting in the rise of populist movements. So the two main knowledge producing institutions, which are represented here, right journalism and academia, there's various reports showing that the public's opinion of them has declined by quite a lot. And that loss of trust has happened for many reasons, rightly or wrongly. But there's been sort of two main suggested responses to that state of affairs. If you think that the institutions that are elites are basically fine, you think we just need to demonstrate to people that, you know, journalism and academia are sufficiently reliable, we just need to kind of educate and correct them misunderstandings. If you think that populist response has some basis, though, you think that this loss of trust is because those institutions are less trustworthy, then your favorite solution is going to say, well, those institutions need to kind of earn people's trust back. And so, projection markets have the ability to kind of be this third alternative where you can kind of circumvent those traditional institutions altogether, right? A problem that humans, since the beginning of time I've been faced with is who can I trust? Right, who's reliable? And while it's easy to say, well, you should just trust the experts. You can't always tell who's a relevant expert. Some topics are so complicated that there is no expert, sometimes the experts disagree, sometimes experts can have ulterior motives and not be trustworthy, so it makes sense for people to look for different sources. And so prediction markets can hopefully short cut a lot of these issues, right? They can be an alternative, you don't have to worry that they have your best interests at heart, you don't have to work at who the expert is, you don't have to worry experts disagreeing. And so one of the things that's interesting about this, I find, is that although prediction markets could perhaps be kind of a solution to this loss of trust institutions, I think one of the things you guys were picking up on is that they can also perhaps exacerbate that. In some sense, we're kind of just giving up on trying to restore trust in these institutions. In putting the owners on people to kind of think about things in terms of odds themselves, well, that shapes how they look at each other, shapes how they look at the world in a way that can be kind of perhaps really corrosive. Can I pick up on something, though, just to take maybe two little steps back, Adam, I was about to interrupt you, but I decided I didn't really want to. And I'd be interested in what you think make of this, too, will lead. So what you are describing, just before you got into the trust side of things, one of the things you were describing is kind of prediction markets as more or less operating than almost the same as we would any form of crowdsourcing technology. So for instance, if I'm navigating my way home from the ABC, I might look at a website that might tell me this is going to be the most direct way home, or I can open up an app that gives me maps, that gives me more or less real time indication on the basis of data that's collected from all these different cars about where certain forms of congestion are, how long it's going to take me, what a more efficient route home is going to be. So I can see that as information that is good for me to know, and this is a productive way for me to source that information. Let's just leave the profit mode out of it for a moment. If one was to use, say, a prediction market to, is the reserve bank going to increase interest rates next month? And I want to use that as material information that's going to help me determine whether or not to purchase a house or to draw down on my mortgage or something like that. Again, I can kind of, I can kind of understand that you're wanting something that doesn't just rely on the opinion of commentators that may be accurate as much as they are inaccurate. Most of what you're describing though, Adam, that it's taking place on prediction markets. What is the difference between this and what we would refer to in any other circumstance as just gossip? We would call it idle speculation. In other words, these are things that I may be interested in knowing. But to be perfectly frank, I have no business knowing them. And what it then becomes is a kind of insatiable appetite for gossip that we then monetize, that we then gamify to the point of satisfying a curiosity over something that really, when it comes down to it, what's the business in us knowing in the first place? So I guess this is where I can't quite, I understand the epistemological argument that you're making, but I can't quite get past the triviality of so much of what is then circulated on prediction markets. Yeah. So maybe it helps to distinguish between types of questions. Obviously, some types of questions are very, very important. We kind of rely on them for making our decisions as we go about the world. And others, perhaps you might say, look, it's just maybe not your business to know or to be so interested in. There are certain questions where, you know, trying to answer them in terms of the evidence can feel like you're failing to accord a certain level of respect to that thing, right? So again, if you're like the best man at a wedding, maybe you have a lot of evidence that the marriage is not going to last, but you probably shouldn't bet on that. You shouldn't say that. You shouldn't spend too long thinking about that. That's just sort of not the role of a good friend. Even if there's something, even if the evidence supports that morally, as a friend, that's sort of not what you should do, and so maybe that's what we can make a distinction between the types of questions that don't have that feature where it's fine to just sort of ask what does the evidence support. And those where we think given either our roles or our relationships or the nature of the thing that we're forming beliefs about, that that thing requires a certain amount of respect of being treated in a certain kind of way. You're listening to the Mindfield. I mean, it's a wonderful example. It's about the best example I could think of. That voice belongs to Adam Peervaki, his research fellow at the University of Notre Dame in Australia, and Willie D'Ali's, my name is Scott Stavins. I'm sorry, Scott, I got the throw. No, this could probably be landed by the example. No, it's wonderful. Go on. When we're talking about these sort of prediction markets, there's ubiquity. They're an infinite number of markets conceivably available. All you have to do is think them up. It's different to a finite resource, or even if you just restricted betting to the result of events, of matches. You could only have as many bets or as many betting markets as there are matches or events to bet on. Once you start bringing it up into anything you can possibly conceive, then it's infinite. Once you then make it within easy reach, so it's done on an account on an app or whatever, then it becomes perpetual. This is, I think, what facilitates a becoming ambient, just becoming a lens through which you view the world because it's easy and pervasive. It's like putting on the glasses, and then you just leave them there. You don't have to go anywhere to do it. You don't have to make the event betting and event of itself, so it becomes socially transformative in that sort of way. I think there's something very powerful about what's going on there, but I also wonder if there's actually something, it's the continuity between these two things that is really important. That's the fundamental nature. I would say not of betting markets only but of gambling, actually, generally. Then on the other hand, you then have the frictionalism of it, the turning of it into almost a way of being in the world. Do you need me to extrapolate what the social consequences of that might be? I don't know. Adam, if you think I'm overstating things way too grandly there, but it's a pretty dangerous bleak sort of picture. I think it depends upon the dose. Surely there's nothing wrong with having some information encoded in prediction markets and using that occasionally, but if that is your entire way of interacting with the world, then arguably that's bad. You're producing everything down to numbers, and particularly then if you were also participating in these markets as a way to get ahead, that also seems like it could be bad, given the odds are simply not in your favour. But if what I'm saying about friction and lessness is right, then the direction of travel is very much pushing us towards this becoming frequent, to this becoming more and more just a way in which we structure our lives. It's less plausible as an aggregate effect to say, well, people just dip in and out of them and gamble responsibly, please. Especially if the gamble responsibly refers not just to your own financial state, but to the social consequences of this practice. So gambling has always had a lot of costs that we kind of recognise, but what's interesting about kind of our current situation that I think you're picking up on is that it's very easy to kind of gamble in ways that it wasn't before, right? So in the past, when we didn't have smartphones, you would have to actually kind of go down to the TAB, and that's not like a great cost, but the small things like that can have large impacts on people's kind of behaviour. And so one worry is that by making the prediction markets so easily available, that you just get people who are losing money much more easily, but then that these other kind of costs that you guys have been picking up on also start to develop, that it's so easy to check the odds, it's so easy to place a bet, it's so easy to try to look for information for a little edge on something that that becomes a bit more totalising and really starts to impact how you never get the world. So yeah, I think there is a real risk here that if you don't start putting some friction in some hurdles on these kinds of markets, that they could be sort of significant anticipated moral costs in how people see each other and relate to one another. When you do place a wager on something, whether it be a prediction or a bet, you become emotionally invested in that, do you not? I mean, that emotional investment? In a particular way, yes. Yeah, that emotional investment may just be I don't want to lose this money or I do want to gain that money. In other words, by wagering something, you are hoping for a particular outcome. What that happens when that thing that I am anticipating is awful. I mean, you're the best man at the wedding. Sure, whether it's even going to be awful stuff than that. Whether the bushfire season at the end of this year will consume over under as many hectares. Yeah. Now, some of these prediction markets do have an absolute ban, so they say, on sort of death counts or the hoping for what's more or less the equivalent of a kind of death contract, the anticipation that someone might die before in particular this time. But there are, you know, this side of death, there are horrible things that can happen in the world, in the form of natural disasters, in the form of political upheaval, in the form of mass violence, in the form of dramatic economic upheaval. These are all things that are emisorating and dehumanizing in their in their effects. I'm just wondering how a person morally, politically, democratically, extracts themselves from that degree of emotional investment in a desired for outcome that is signaled by the placing of a particular wager. The promise of prediction markets is that they'll provide a way to incentivize accuracy, right? So that they penalize false beliefs based on poor information and they reward people whose beliefs kind of matriality. I think what you're picking up on is that there are two ways though that our beliefs can come to matriality. One is reality as it is and then we just kind of form our beliefs accordingly. That seems fine. But the other way is that I have a certain belief or a hope and then I work to bring that reality about. So this goes back to what you guys were saying about sport stars, losing games on purpose that they can win. But even if you're not personally kind of directly changing the outcome, it's true that you are now invested in that state of affairs. And so as a result of making the best, having that belief, and part because of this market, will now your orientation towards that event has changed. And so maybe this is what you were thinking about when you're talking about the neutrality of these markets, that the market or the betting itself is kind of indifferent between those two different ways of producing a match between belief and reality. And one of them is is intended. One of them is what we want to produce, but there's not sort of an inherent way to distinguish between those two options. As you've been unpacking this, I have found myself just constantly calling to mind the coronic verses on gambling, and the way in which they describe what's going on, what's inherently problematic about it. And there's one verse that acknowledges there is benefit in it, but it says the negative side outweighs the benefit. But then there are two verses back to back in the fifth chapter that talk about gambling and alcohol and also drawing lots and decisions and so on. And it says firstly that this is like a creation or a contribution if you like. This is not literal translation of Satan, so shun them. And then the next verse goes on and says, he wants to stir up hostility and hatred between you with them, and to prevent you remembering God and praying. So then abstain. What's fascinating to me about that framing is how much it corresponds to the critique you've actually offered, the stirring up of enmity and hatred and so on, the dissolution of bonds of love that we've been describing through this, the way in which it's encouraging us to see each other, not as fully human, but as something else. There is something profound that's going on there through the creation of the kind of incentives that you're talking about, but also the element of distraction. If what this is is the instantiation of gossip and the financialisation of gossip, if you like, then what is that but distraction? That can come to take over the way in which you want to engage the world, the lightness in a certain sense, which you want to engage the world, but then also the heaviness and the risk that you place on those things that shouldn't have those things attracted to it. I think what we're trying to scratch around it here, Scott, is this is a forming. practice. This is a deforming phenomenon in our society, in our lives. That raises the question of deforming from what? And I guess that requires us to have some kind of notion of human nature or human potential. I wonder if the reason that this is slipped into our practice so easily is precisely that we don't really have a formulation of that, that we share, of what it is that's special about human beings or what it is that is that the tell us to use a mindful bingo word of human activity or human behaviour or even the orientation of humans. That once that's gone then I guess all of these things kind of become possible because what is there other than the pursuit of whatever it is that might seem pleasing to us in a moment. And the consequences of what it all might be is too abstract, aren't they? They're too long-term, they're too whatever. They can't find their way into our moral or social reasoning very easily and to look back on it and go oh maybe that crossed the line or whatever. It's very hard for us to articulate exactly where that line should be because there's work before it that needs to be done that we're just simply not doing. We've been pretty negative on I guess the potential effects of betting and prediction markets but as you said it really matters kind of what work comparing them too and certainly there could be some kind of costs in approaching the world in this way. Proponents of prediction markets would say that they're also important benefits. One of the reasons you know people tend to be over confident about issues with moral political stakes and you might frame this as a kind of lightness which is bad is that a lot of our arguing isn't conducted with the sole aim of being accurate and sharing information right. Often we're engaging in a kind of expressive responding or trying to signal our beliefs in a certain moral picture of the world or membership in a certain tribe and that can have value but it can have costs. Well there is a problem though is there's little cost attached to being inaccurate so when someone says hey do you want to make a bet in your beliefs now there's a cost to being wrong people tend to focus more on the goal of being accurate way up the evidence and so when we're comparing the effects of these prediction markets compared to something else at current situation I think you do have to have a full accounting of the pros and cons of that as well it's not sort of obvious that it'll only be a negative. Not also the point isn't it benefit but outweighed by the home. Well yes this is this is something that we would need to investigate over the next few years the prediction markets haven't been around for a very long time and those that are you know they've got a very particular set of regulatory circumstances and a political context which might not replicate kind of if they were to be tried elsewhere it's possible that with careful design that we could harness most of the benefits well kind of minimizing the cost. One of the things that sometimes people do when they make public bets is they'll have it be of a small amount and the winner kind of commits to donating it to charity and so that's a case where plausibly it's not the financial motive that's kind of operating but nevertheless there's big in virtual if it being public there's a still kind of social incentive to make your beliefs match reality and to kind of carefully look at the evidence. It's a reputational risk yeah a reputational risk right so that's an example of something where you've still got the betting you still got found a way to make it costly but it's not specifically a financial incentive. I should also say though that making bets is a good way to keep your friends intellectually accountable but it might not be a good way to keep your friends and placidar so it's so you've been warned. Fair warning fair warning Adam thank you so much for joining us today. He went in places I had no way of anticipating it would go a good thing there wasn't a prediction market on it but it's been wonderful to pick your brains. Adam P. Varky Research fell at the University of Notre Dame Australia I guess for this week's edition of The Mindfield which is now at an end you can catch us next week on ABC Radio National of course or anytime you like on ABC listen and we'll see you soon. you've been listening to an abc podcast discover more great abc podcasts live radio and exclusives on the abc listen app