p(doom)
“Can prediction markets shake the hedonistic monkey from their back?”
Rufus Knuppel is a 21-year-old senior at Dartmouth College and the author of The Worthing Plot. He is a founding editor of The New Critic.
The quoted interviews in this essay are paraphrased from real conversations.
America has always had her boomtowns, lawless places where heathens mass, where gunslinging bandits and foolhardy speculators go in search of pleasure and risk. Things move quickly in towns that spring up overnight. Some go bust, others get rich. Eventually the barons sniff blood and send their Pinkertons; the army moves in; the government straightens everyone out. The gold rush of our era is gambling on the future, and the anarchic hamlets where online degenerates park their rickshaws are called Polymarket and Kalshi. On prediction markets, the nectar of capital flows, hegemons duel in smokey saloons, and forecasters trade contracts on the outcomes of world events.
But every boomtown has a friar, too, a bald little man in a robe who cries out his psalms in the dusty square, crooning to the one-handed miners as they line up to guzzle their booze and nail their whores. In Polymarketsville, there’s a sect of Bayesian monks who have been quietly constructing a mission. In fact, they’re the ones who first panned the river, who cleared the land on Main Street all those years ago. These zealots call themselves “rationalists,” and they foretell prediction markets as the salvation for our godless and irrational land.
“Polymarket” wormed its way into my daydreams through the various troughs I frequent online, where chatter about big bettors tipping off national security crises and White House press secretaries shaving minutes at briefings to hit unders had commenters in a tizzy. The media establishment had caught on, too, to the competitive edge and the foul play. All the big names seemed preoccupied with integrating prediction market probabilities into their institutional forecasting or else finger-wagging about the existential risks of insider trading and the psycho-chemical runoff from the Great Casino-fication of America.
I imagined the typical Polymarket trader as a cyclops with pizza grease slathered over his monitor, slobbering over bets like a rottweiler admiring a platter of animal organs. He spent the day in a fraternity cave system hooked up to a VPN and an open source intelligence IV, betting on whether Elon Musk would mention “poopoo” at the World Economic Forum in Davos or how many dissident prisoners the Ayatollah Khamenei would execute in the next 72 hours. I would ask him if he’d ever been “rulescucked” or if he thought Barron Trump was the insider behind the whale that bet $30k on the Maduro op for a $400k profit. We would wager on “Taylor Swift pregnant by June?” or “The second coming of Jesus Christ by 2027?” and lounge around in his sunless lair of paranoia — panting, talking ethics, eating Airheads Xtremes, and snorting Adderall — until we doubled up or lost everything.
I would attempt to locate this fine specimen and give him my money.
So I started flipping through my rolodex and poking around the internet for clues. Then I got in my wagon and headed West. My journey led me to a strange land called Futarchy.
The architecture of polymarket.com is rather plain: there are near-infinite boxes on the main scroll, arranged in pleasant quadrilateral geometry, each presenting a question, a mundane or farcical image, a percentage which doubles as both probability and price, and the clickable binary of “Yes” (green) or “No” (red). A week before the Super Bowl, “Will the US acquire part of Greenland in 2026?” sits as the second-billed market on the homepage. An icon of the territory, filled in with the American flag, is priced by the market at a 27% likelihood. I can buy “Yes” shares for 27¢ or “No” shares for 73¢. Should Trump land amphibious warcraft on the beaches of Nuuk come March, the market would resolve: the “Yes” shares to $1, and the “No” shares to $0. Would a storming of Greenland count as an acquisition, though? Quibbles over semantics in the resolution criteria arise often and are mediated through a “Keynesian beauty pageant” conducted by an “UMA oracle” (these terms escape me, too).
Prediction markets don’t operate like traditional sportsbooks; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, not federal and state gaming agencies. Bettors trade derivatives on a regulated exchange, entering into futures contracts with one another. If one trader buys shares of “Yes,” another matches shares of “No.” Polymarket and Kalshi are legal in states where sports gambling is banned (despite 89% of Kalshi’s total volume in 2025 having been bet on sports). Beyond a loophole in the regulatory matrix, the prediction markets argue that while sportsbooks rip off bettors with outrageous spreads and insurmountable odds, the only money Polymarket and Kalshi take in are the margins required for market making or transaction fees.
The prediction markets struggle to define and answer to accusations of insider trading. In the common scenario where traders can wager on “what will X say in Y speech” (a mention market), couldn’t Marco Rubio tell his bud that he’s for sure going to mention the long-shot “Golden Dome” in the next cabinet meeting? Wouldn’t one of Bad Bunny’s anonymous sugar canes know the Super Bowl halftime opener from the dress rehearsal? If unusual activity were to alert the market to military action, could Polymarket pose a risk to the cover of dark special ops? How can the companies surveil suspicious behavior over 10,000 markets? How can officials prevent point shaving in the Loyola vs. Champaign Division IX men’s water polo match? From the perspective of the prediction markets or the market makers, insider trading isn’t really a problem for their business. In fact, traders who have been tipped off serve to make prices more accurate and adjust for dumb money (a colloquialism used to describe gut-check bets made with little informational basis). Insiders are only a smear on optics.
“Act first, apologize later,” is the internal mantra of Shayne Coplan, Polymarket’s founder and CEO. The son of two South African professors, Coplan (only 27) was for a brief two-week period in 2025 the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. A former employee described Polymarket’s early culture: “like, ‘We’re rebels, we’re mavericks, and we’re just gonna build this thing and figure out the regulatory stuff later.’”
In January 2022, Polymarket was banned from operating in the U.S. The company settled for $1.4 million with the CFTC for running an “illegal unregistered or non-designated facility for event-based binary options online trading.” Polymarket relocated to Panama. But all that eager American bettors needed to trade was a VPN that could mask their location, and a viral 2023 market on survivors of the OceanGate Titanic submersible catastrophe broke the platform into the cultural mainframe. Polymarket traders bet over $3.6 billion on the 2024 presidential election.
“2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world,” Coplan posted after the election, attaching an image of his grim Lower East Side apartment, framed by a busted bathroom door. In the photo, perched bare-thighed and cross-legged on his toilet, Coplan works with a Mac keyboard nestled between his leg hairs and a laundry hamper doubling as his desk.
Coplan was sending emails to the SEC in his tweens about opening exchanges, and he was just 16 years old when he bought $150 of the cryptocurrency Ethereum at its initial coin offering in 2014. By 2020, cooped up in pandemic quarantine, he had dropped out of NYU and run out of cash. He says he created Polymarket to source the wisdom of the crowd on Covid regulations.
In the early morning of November 13, 2024, just a week after election day, federal authorities broke down the door to Coplan’s Soho loft and seized his devices. Fortune labeled the raid “a Kafkaesque turn of events.”
“New phone, who dis?” Coplan quipped a few days later on his X. “The incumbents should do some self-reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach may be what would have changed their fate this election.” A Polymarket spokesperson called the FBI probe “obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election.” The market had Trump’s odds of winning in the mid-60s.
But now exclusive CFTC status for prediction markets and a series of judicial injunctions against state gaming enforcement have paved the way for a legal Polymarket homecoming. The atmosphere of deregulation in Trump’s Washington has given the prediction markets carte blanche to expand with barebones regulatory oversight. Coplan, meanwhile, has triangulated Silicon Valley venture capital (including co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund), New York financial interests, and D.C. lobbying power to ease Polymarket’s return to American soil. (Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and former CFTC commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo is the chairman of Polymarket’s advisory board.)
Coplan and Tarek Mansour, the Lebanese-American Kalshi CEO, do all their nifty executive maneuvering while ramming prediction markets down the esophagus of American popular culture. Polymarket paid the Golden Globes some unspecified gob of cash to display their betting odds during the awards show, and though viewers complained that the probabilities were spoiling the suspense (the market predicted 26 of the 28 races), Coplan gloated afterwards, “We have a long way to go to educate the public on the value of market-based forecasts, but you can’t deny its accuracy…a surreal moment and a highlight for all our team members’ moms.”
This past October, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, pumped $2 billion into Polymarket, setting its valuation around $8 billion (rising now). The ICE investment gave Coplan the capital he needed to purchase the CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange QCX for $112 million. Polymarket can now roll out their U.S. app and onboard American traders.
“We’re consumer, we’re viral, we’re culture. They’re finance, they’re headless, and they’re infrastructure,” Coplan told Forbes. “The American Dream,” he captioned a video announcing the investment on X. In the shot, a royal blue Polymarket banner unfurls over the Corinthian columns of the NYSE. The text reads, “AGAINST ALL ODDS,” and the instrumental climax of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” blares wordlessly over Coplan’s self-awe (perhaps he forgot that the ballad begins: “and now the end is near/and so I face the final curtain”).
Coplan often references Polymarket’s “vindication.” He seems to feel that he and his company have overcome a form of cosmic persecution, and he approaches the media with a permanent apprehension. “I mean, look,” he often says when answering thorny interview questions about the moral gray matter in which Polymarket operates. At conferences and forums, Coplan wears mohair sweaters and, with elevated exasperation, patronizes low-IQ interviewers who don’t quite comprehend his mission or his plight.
Despite the ill treatment from investigators and antagonists, every cocksure bet that Coplan made seems to be panning out. “I love music and collect art,” he writes in his X bio; he brought on Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis as an early investor in Polymarket, and acquired an NFT portfolio under the alias “ethsquiat” (a mash-up of Ethereum and John Michel Basquiat) that Sotheby’s called “one of the largest collections of NFT art in the world.”
“Job’s not finished,” Coplan says in the final minutes of a November 2025 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, tussling his cartoon curls and gesturing toward one billion Polymarket users. He’s quoting a Kobe Bryant interview from the 2009 NBA Finals in which the Lakers star, asked why he doesn’t seem pleased about his 2-0 lead over the Orlando Magic, responds: “What’s there to be happy about? Job’s not finished. Job finished? I don’t think so.”
Shayne Coplan lends Polymarket the Mamba Mentality.
An old friend I reached out to, let’s call him Skipper, offered to meet me at the Dartmouth Quantitative Finance Club. The club advertised Thai food in their LISTSERV email and the opportunity to “learn some probability so that you too can spend your 20s trading shrimp futures with a model that also somehow predicts the weather in Zimbabwe!”
So I trudged through the sub-zero Hanoverian tundra to the hinterland (the CECS, pronounced “sex,” building). While everyone ate their pad thai, a boy talked about the “flitz” (a Dartmouth portmanteau) he had sent the ski patroller who treated his finger on the slopes. She had said no (she had a boyfriend). A friend consoled him, “nothing risked, nothing earned.”
Skipper and the other leaders initiated the meeting by announcing the Quant Club’s partnership with Susquehanna International Group (SIG). The firm was coming to campus in a couple of weeks to host a “Brainteaser Battle,” and the problems the club leaders would be going over at the meeting were meant to prepare their fellow members for the exhibition.
The quant-trading hopefuls separated into two groups: “hotshots” and beginners. The beginners went over Bayes’ theorem while an advanced probability shaman in a Jump Trading crewneck instructed his acolytes about the importance of grinding problems.
“Roll a fair standard 6-sided die until a 6 appears. Given that the first 6 occurs before the first 5, find the expected number of times the die was rolled.” The answer was 3.
“A frog performs a simple symmetric random walk on the integers,” the next problem began, but Skipper interrupted my processing and asked if I wanted to have our interview now or later.
“Now,” I said.
Skipper told me a Polymarket rep had made an offer to his jock-heavy fraternity with a special activation code to skip the U.S. waiting list.
“Do you all gamble a lot?” I asked him.
“Yeah, it’s really a cancer…guys are betting more money than they should.”
“On what, sports?”
“Yeah, the other night we were all sitting around watching this random soccer match — I couldn’t tell you who was playing — but we all had bets on it.”
“What do you think draws people in?”
“It’s fun. I don’t know. It’s fucking fun.”
“What’s the most someone’s made?”
“One guy had a 12-leg parlay or something on the first round of the NFL playoffs. He bet $25 and made like $10,000.”
“Have you ever bet on Polymarket or Kalshi?”
“Yeah — you know how you can bet on who the next head coach of a college football team will be? Well, my mom knew an insider about a job at one of the big schools. And so I put some money on that.”
Skipper is starting as a quant trader at a platinum Wall Street firm (think Citadel or Jane Street) come graduation.
“Once you’re inside one of these big players,” he said about prediction markets, “and you see how sophisticated their models are, and you see how much data they’re working with and how quickly they move and how many smart people are working at these firms — I don’t think the average person can compete unless they have some kind of inside information. There was a time maybe early on with prediction markets where you could have an edge if you were ‘more right.’ But that edge is gone. And the outliers — they’re just that — outliers.”
“What do you think will happen with these platforms in the next five years?” I asked.
“Honestly, I think this kind of gambling should be illegal.”
Almost half of American men aged 18 to 49 hold active accounts for online sports betting. The prediction market calamity is another chapter in the metastasis of gambling in America, where cretins and dunces spin the roulette wheel on whether Mr. Gorbachev will choke Mr. Khrushchev to death on tonight’s UFC 1984 Paramount Plus Polymarket broadcast from the White House lawn. Series A Polymarket investor and “It’s Everyday Bro” YouTuber Jake Paul stated on X: “Liquidity in prediction markets and financialization of world events is a powerful tool to better understand the world and to have some fun.” Perhaps regular viewers of the video podcast Impaulsive have heard Jake’s older brother, 30-year-old WWE wrestler Logan Paul, discussing the odds of a currently unconstitutional third Trump term (3%) with his goon squad and the President’s 18-year-old granddaughter Kai, one of many clips of sports and culture celebrities name-dropping Polymarket that Coplan reposts on his X.
The problem with a $10 billion valuation is that a founder begins to owe some proof of profit to their investors. A supermajority of the volume on Polymarket and Kalshi is dumb money, and the platforms try to suck in gamblers through online fads and strategic ragebait. The social feeds of Kalshi and Polymarket, geysers of slop shot straight from the bowels of internet bottom-dwellers, do not help to repair their indecorous reputation. A post from “Polymarket Football” (“Drake Maye’s wife is named Ann Michael…Unusual”) caused Patriots sub-Redditors to consider a boycott of the prediction market. Some Polymarketphiles on X have appealed to Coplan directly about de-enshittifying his company’s messaging, to no avail. A Polymarket tweet last month (“JUST IN: Jeff Bezos advises aspiring Gen Z entrepreneurs to start at real world jobs like McDonalds or Palantir before starting a business”) prompted Bezos to respond: “Nope. Not sure why polymarket made this up. [Shrug emoji.]”
Prediction markets are more pyres of internet sacrilege, the toxic burn pits of our digital culture. But the patent stream of falsities is particularly ironic coming from the megaphone of a company that Coplan claims is the herald for a dawning epoch of truthfulness: “as AI ushers in Superintelligence, Polymarket ushers in Collective Intelligence.” Or — in response to a chummy Elon Musk reply “polyamorousmarket?” — “Polymarket [shaking hands emoji] X/Sounding like porn sites but actually solving misinformation.”
A recent post from Mansour celebrating Kalshi’s $11 billion valuation featured a video of black-and-white trading floors and Wright brothers. The overture of the “Blue Danube Waltz” builds as textual commentary appears onscreen: “For the first time belief has structure. Conviction has value. Outcomes are priced. Because the future was never meant to be a mystery, it was meant to be a market.”
If one hangs around in Polymarketland for long enough, that future starts to unravel; market questions are relegated to their price and probability, and the real world becomes the simulacrum, the shadows on the wall; the resolution subsumes the event. The interface starts to create temporary short-circuits in cognition, and the multi-colored markets — their bogs of bylaws and their schizophrenic sprawls of ledgered numerals and their spammed comment streams — swirl into one big funfetti vortex, an endless geopolitical slot-machine fantasia.
The cringe commentary and corporate jargon of Coplan and Masour come as no surprise; overzealous statements, false morality, and hurried horizons are standard for CEOs. But we civilians often make the mistake of dismissing our overlords when we feel an allergy to their cliches and alien superciliousness. The actors who rule us are not all unmotivated automatons. They are each imperfectly and megalomaniacally human, and their propositions of world domination are worthy of investigation, if only to mark the warning signs should their fancies come true.
“It’s the complete wild west,” a young market maker told me. Let’s call him Cooper. “It’s crazy, you know, this isn’t public knowledge, but the other night there was an API outage on Polymarket U.S. They reported it as a bug to users but they were telling us shit like, ‘Hey, we know things are down but don’t withdraw your money right now, hold your positions while we figure this out,’ implying the whole thing might crash. And we can see on our end that trading is totally down, you know, trading has stopped. We think it was precipitated by Polymarket adding 100,000 users off the waiting list, but still, there are echoes of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried about it all, I don’t know.”
Cooper is an Ivy League history major from Oakland. He runs a “bespoke” four-man company that provides liquidity (meaning they buy the alternate option when a user purchases positions on “Yes” or “No”) on less than 1% of the volume traded on Polymarket and similar sites. They are contracted by prediction markets and make their money on quotas (200k a month in bonuses if they can hit certain targets) and the margins in their automated proprietary algorithms that calculate arbitrage between platforms. They’ve been operating for almost a year now, backed by a crypto accelerator called Alliance. Cooper oversees a couple “Operations Research and Financial Engineering” quants who run combinatorial arbitrage and an electrical engineer who works on low latency for their servers.
“How did you all get interested in this?” I asked him.
“Money,” he answered, before I had even finished the question. “Yeah, money…I mean we were all trading crypto futures before this…it’s like…if you want to make a million dollars before 18, that’s how you do it.”
The company began as a copy trading start-up (developing algorithms that imitate elite traders), but they realized quickly that they couldn’t compete with the big players.
“How would you describe your company?”
“I would say we’re a new school, gen three trading firm.”
“What do you mean by ‘gen three’?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I just made that up.”
“No, it’s great, well, what would the other generations be?”
“You know, you have your eighties Wall Street firms like SIG. Then you have firms that do crypto options like Jump Trading last decade. And then now there are smaller prop shops like us.”
Like any young gun looking to make a buck, this guy has to be on the bleeding edge: to make his money, he’s got to get out a knife, and he’s got to make something bleed.
“If you’re after life-changing wealth, you know, wealth to a certain financial degree, this is the only game in town. But I don’t wanna be running a prop shop forever. The goal is to create long-term sustainable algorithms and sell them.”
With big firms and institutional actors getting in on the prediction market game, things are tilting quickly against the average trader or the bespoke market maker. Cooper often emitted mixed signals in our conversation as I provoked him about the overlap between prediction market ethics and San Francisco philosophy.
“What do you think of, like, Silicon Valley rationalist types and their relationship to Polymarket?” I asked him.
“Bullshit, they’re trying to erase humanity. Anything Silicon Valley is disgusting to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whenever I would cross into San Francisco growing up, I’d get this icky feeling. These VCs, all high and pious, there’s something profoundly off. Prediction markets don’t really fall into the Silicon Valley groupthink, though. Silicon Valley ignored them at first, you know. Because they’re not AI, they’re not an A-tier investment. They just hopped on the Polymarket train when they saw the opportunity for a check. These prediction markets are all based in New York, you know, prediction markets are to finance what AI is to the technology world. They’re part of this other New York start-up world, the start-up world that I feel this company is a part of, you know, their big investors are the New York Stock Exchange and hedge funds and shit like that. I’m not defending sports markets — I find that sickening — stealing money from the lower class, sports betting contributes no value to society. You know, Kalshi, it’s like 90% sports betting, and they’re working now with SIG. We’re pretty sector agnostic, but we don’t do sports betting or options markets. We want nothing to do with SIG. You know, we’re trying to develop workarounds and a structural advantage as market makers, and, you know, they get, like, preferable treatment, open access to Kalshi’s order flow, and they have this insane insider data and institutional liquidity and manpower. You know, Citadel, there’s a reason they’re the biggest hedge fund in the world. Citadel can see Robinhood’s order book before anyone else can.”
“So you think Kalshi is more unfair to their traders than Polymarket?”
“No, Kalshi is fair. Yeah, I just mean Tarek Mansour, the founder of Kalshi, I think he’s a demon. You can see he’s in it for the money. For the sports gambling. The greed is in his eyes. It’s not moral. You know, there’s a lot in prediction markets that’s insightful and cool, that’s actually valuable. I think Shayne Coplan actually has ideas about prediction markets. And now we’re getting these new prediction markets from Robinhood and Coinbase, other places too.”
“So where do you see Polymarket in five years?”
“I think it will break two ways. It will either go total degenerate sports gambling, or you’ll see these new markets open up — you’ll see more institutions, utilitarian financing, real estate markets, shit like that. Seriously, I think if the sports betting gets shut down, you’ll see the real promise of prediction markets. All that shit is very cool and interesting. But you need deep liquidity for hundreds of thousands of effective markets, trillions and trillions of dollars in volume. They’re growing exponentially now, but I don’t know if they’ll keep growing at this pace — they need to justify these crazy valuations to investors — and the money is all in the sports markets for now.”
“Are you in the habit of using Polymarket for news?”
“Yeah, a little bit for news, but barely. Occasionally for football.”
Cooper called me from Berkeley, and I kept hearing the sound of a dribbling ball throughout our conversation.
“Are you playing basketball?” I asked near the end of our call.
“No, I’m throwing a tennis ball against the wall.”
“It’s all good. I thought you were somehow dribbling a basketball and talking to me.”
“No, I wasn’t. I don’t know, it helps me focus while I talk.”
Before we hung up, he told me that, though he didn’t know what I looked like, I sounded a lot like Peter Thiel.
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment,” I said.
“No, no, it’s just how you’re saying specific things. It’s almost European.”
I don’t sound like Peter Thiel, and I wondered why he’d made that inference.
“I think we both try to be deliberate when we speak,” I hedged.
“Yeah, I don’t know what it is.”
I asked him what he thought of the rationalists — what he thought about the George Mason economics professor Robin Hanson.
“Robin Hanson? Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some of his stuff. Yeah, I like him.”
“What about the others on your team?”
“I’m probably the only one who’s ever heard of Robin Hanson.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever bet on Polymarket?”
“You know, I don’t, but I’ve bet a lot of money on it without even trading,” he said, laughing.
Earlier in our conversation, I had asked what he thought about all the ethical debates around prediction markets:
“For moral questions, I just use my intuition.”
My algorithm learned quickly what to feed me, and soon my X timeline was one long string of prediction market Twitch streaming clips, how-tos on Claude bots that printed money with Kalshi, and bullish traders proselytizing about the long-term upside of Polymarket, precious metal pricing, and institutional crypto uptake.
One friend in the orbit of Tyler Cowen (the George Mason economics professor who writes the blog Marginal Revolution) told me he had lost $200 betting on the date of Maduro’s deposition and another $300 wagering on the Romanian presidential election last year. Another friend, who had been a finalist for an assistant position under the statistician Nate Silver, told me he used the play money prediction market Manifold, popular in the rationalist community, on which traders bet “Mana” on markets instead of cash. The advantage of Manifold is that users create their own markets, and questions can breach the theoretical limits of regulated platforms with stringent resolution criteria. As my friend explained it, Manifold’s incentive structures are reputational, and he had been a pretty frequent and successful user until election night 2024, when he had gotten too drunk and lost his profits doubling down on Kamala. Inebriation is anathema to good forecasting.
An effective altruist at UChicago recommended I speak with a leader of their forecasting club. Let’s call him Ryder. Ryder would be my sherpa. Ryder would show me the tricks of the trade.
“How do you expect these markets to be regulated?” I asked him.
“You know, it’s very difficult to predict, ironically. I think regulations will depend on scandals. Like, if there’s some insider trading intelligence leak that precipitates a national security risk or gets American soldiers killed, you’ll see instant regulations. Just like that. Otherwise, it will be up to companies to self-regulate, to create internal safeguards. You know, it’s on Google or Apple if their employee is leaking information because they’re greedy and place some bet on Polymarket.”
“Do you buy Polymarket’s argument that these prediction markets are producing accurate forecasting?”
“Yeah, you know, the average person is not good enough at predicting stuff. They use the approach where they try to analyze ‘will this happen’ instead of ‘should this happen, why would this happen.’ And the incentive structures about predictions are such that it doesn’t matter if pundits are wrong. They don’t have to express ‘true beliefs’ because there’s not monetary punishment for being wrong. So the market allows you to objectively measure the future by aggregating those beliefs from the crowd. And it doesn’t take a whole lot of smart money to calibrate for dumb money in the market.”
“What goes into your decision-making on what to trade, then?”
“The club is usually ten of us in a room, and we identify markets we’re interested in, and then we come back the next week, and people present on their research. To make a good trade, we try to have a higher understanding of incentive structures and who the major movers are. We bet on mostly political outcomes. It’s a new space that isn’t highly gamed like sports or finance. Plus, none of us are interested in sports anyways, we’re a bunch of nerds, it would be terrible for our image if we were sports betting. When we were applying for status as a recognized organization, we tried to emphasize that we weren’t interested in sports gambling.”
“What’s your favorite bet right now?”
“Well, I don’t know if this is on Polymarket or Kalshi, I think it was from this Bridgewater forecasting competition, a Metaculus [another play money prediction site, which Ryder called ‘Metacalculus’] tournament we participated in. It’s about the price of rice in Japan. ‘Will Japanese rice prices fall below ¥42 by the end of March?’ or something. And all these indicators suggest ‘Yes,’ right? Because it’s politically favorable for rice prices to go down. But rice harvest season isn’t until fall, so there’s no supply base mechanism, and because of agricultural pressures, you know, the prime minister isn’t going to ease import restrictions, and giving out vouchers for rice would only raise the price in supermarkets. So while the external indicators say ‘Yes,’ I would price it at a much lower percent-chance.”
“How are you doing?”
“Let’s see…we’re up something like 5% as a group.”
“Is that any good?”
“It’s okay.”
“What constitutes ‘good,’ then?”
“I would say something like a 10% margin consistently. But I expect it to improve. You know, we have lots of positions in these long-tail markets that we feel good about. We were decently sure that TIME would choose ‘AI’ as their person of the year. And they chose the ‘Architects of AI.’ So that hurt us.”
“Do you trade, personally?”
“Yeah, I do. Hey, I like gambling. But I don’t want to talk about my personal value. I was sure prematurely that the ‘Person of the Year’ was going to be the Pope. And it wasn’t. That’s the sole reason I’m in the negative.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear my guru was in the red: around 70% of users lose money on Polymarket, while just 0.04% of traders — the “sharps” — take in 70% of the profits. The top-heavy profit distribution maps onto the work of UPenn political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock. Tetlock is modern forecasting’s “soft-spoken, decorous uncle,” in the words of Stevie Miller (SportsPredict.com contributor, Gen Z neoreactionary rationalist, and former live-in intern for the Dark Enlightenment philosopher Curtis Yarvin).
Tetlock ran a series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments over the course of decades (starting in the dusk of the Cold War; later under the auspices of “The Good Judgement Project”) which set out to understand the determinative factors in predictive reasoning. A friend who interned in cybersecurity for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and starts work at Palantir this summer recommended I read into Tetlock, whose findings drew the attention of the intelligence community (specifically IARPA) after 9/11. Tetlock’s research resolved that while the common man was demonstrably terrible at forecasting and domain experts were barely any better, there were still some who stood out from the pack — the “superforecasters.”
Superforecasters are evenly distributed across education and expertise; the real adhesive between the cohort is that, as prognosticators, they feel “little need for closure” and “high comfort with ambiguity.” Tetlock, drawing on political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s paradigm of hedgehogs and foxes, asked participants to place themselves along an axis: “the hedgehog knows one big thing and tries to explain as much as possible within that conceptual framework, whereas the fox knows many small things and is content to improvise explanations on a case-by-case basis.” Superforecasters were overwhelmingly foxes, “intellectual omnivores” (in Miller’s words) whose cognitive style promoted “probabilistic reasoning and epistemic hygiene.” As Tetlock points out, “What matters far more to the superforecasters than Bayes’ theorem is Bayes’ core insight of gradually getting closer to the truth by constantly updating in proportion to the weight of the evidence.” This is the concept of the “prior” — an always “updating” aggregate of evidence — which is key to probabilistic understandings of the world and the innate conceptual differentiator of superforecasters from the herd.
Superforecasters overlap in the realm of risk with elite traders and poker players — on Polymarket and Kalshi, they form a tiny clan of mostly pseudonymous professional bettors. For the time being, prediction markets provide untaxed, unregulated exchanges for these sharks, liberated from the limits or oversight they might find in Vegas or Wall Street. The clairvoyants gobble up media spotlight, not least through tales of seven-figure paydays and outlandish, spurious insights (like the president’s phonetic predilection for “Vance” [one syllable], similar to “Trump” [one syllable] and “Pence” [one syllable], which informed a giant wager on the future vice presidential nominee).
Mostly though, these anomalies keep quiet about their identities and their methods. SportsPredict, a play money prediction market, is designed to attract and filter high-IQ forecasting talent with accessible, athletics-based markets that uncover “the new meritocracy.” The project is the hobby horse of Austin-based hedge fund billionaire, Major League Pickleball co-founder, and friend of rationalism Steve Kuhn. Andrew Yang and George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan are on the company’s advisory board. SportsPredict attempts to source what Richard Hanania (the contrarian rationalist) would call “elite human capital”: the market filters “high g” forecasters through the universal language of sports gambling. Superforecasters are the snow leopards of prediction markets, the obsessive, elusive prize of rationalists and degenerates alike.
I asked Ryder what he thought of Tetlock and his book Superforecasting.
“I think Tetlock’s most underappreciated insight is about paying attention to resolution criteria — it’s really the key to making a well-informed trade. You know, while the market is priced toward the ‘Yes’ on Mamdani opening a government-run supermarket in 2026, the criteria don’t say ‘try to’ but ‘will,’ and precedent for the horizon on any similar policy in recent American history suggests there would be at least two years from proposal to ribbon-cutting.”
“What about Robin Hanson and the rationalists?”
“Me, I like Robin Hanson, I like [Eliezer] Yudkowsky [the LessWrong blogger and ‘caliph’ of rationalism]. I have doubts about their practical applications.”
“What about the others?”
“I’d guess that most of the people in the club have barely heard the name Robin Hanson.”
“What would you say the link is, then, between people who are attracted to forecasting?”
“I think we enjoy trying to see the world closer to how it is and less how you’d like it to be.”
“You would call yourself a rationalist, right?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“How did you get into rationalism?”
“When I was 12, a friend recommended the Yudkowsky fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. That changed my outlook on life, on human behavior, the pitfalls of human cognition. It changed my whole worldview, broadly, going forward. Obviously I read some Scott Alexander [the San Francisco psychiatrist and rationalist blogger who writes Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten]. Others too, like Aella [the sex worker/statistician], Kelsey Piper [the reporter on effective altruism (EA)], or Adolphe Crémieux on X [the race science blogger].”
“There’s a big rationalist community at UChicago, right?”
“Yeah, well, it depends on what you mean by ‘big.’ There are probably forty of us who cycle through meetings. Actually, I got the idea for the forecasting club from an EA friend. ‘You can just do things,’ he says. And so I created the club. But, I don’t know, prediction markets have become mostly degenerate gambling — and you see rationalists moving into a space that was already occupied, carving out a tiny little island. Rationalists are very sincere, and so when they move into a real world domain, they end up associated with weird groups of people — EA, FTX, human biodiversity, prediction markets — that form bad associations. Whereas rationalists on their own, you know, there are not a lot of them, and they don’t have the power to redefine a specific sphere of conversation.”
Every July since 2023, a motley crew of prediction market enthusiasts has assembled in a remodeled Victorian home on the LightHaven microcampus in Berkeley, California. They come for Manifest, a conference hosted by Manifold Markets and sponsored by Polymarket, Substack, and Kalshi. On Manifest’s website, a quote describes the event (which sells tickets for $725) as “part Burning Man, part prediction market science fair, part middle school talent show…utterly delightful.”
Under the North Californian sun, Chris Best (Substack’s CEO), Nate Silver, Aella, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Richard Hanania, Scott Alexander, Shayne Coplan, and so many other nerds gather to fraternize on fake turf patios and place bets on questions like, “Will there be an orgy at Manifest?” One attendee, a subscriber to Asterisk (the EA magazine which defines itself as “probabilistic” and “terrified…a place to talk about how we can make it to 2100”) described Manifest to me as a gathering of several “hundred autists.” Twitter microcelebrities mingle with polyamorous furries and nerdy Bay Area tech developers while participants face-off in pool noodle lightsaber battles between talks. Manifest is an “integration of the feed and real life,” where Grey Tribe (a rationalist identifier) avatars and anons are reified into flesh and blood.
Not all nerds are created equal; there are good nerds and evil nerds, right nerds and left nerds, omnipotent nerds and insignificant nerds. Indeed, fault lines have emerged in the rationalist community along ethical boundaries, and a proper schism has opened over AI misalignment. Aella, who tracks all sorts of atypical biometric minutiae about herself, disinvited any e/acc (effective accelerationist) subscribers from her birthday gangbang “because we don’t need to give nice things to people hastening our doom.”
Nate Silver describes Aella, in contraposition to effective accelerationists and effective altruists, as an “effective hedonist.” Rumor has it that Scott Alexander met his wife at an Aella-style, San Francisco sex-data orgy. (Manifold Markets, which an Astral Codex Ten grant helped launch, sprouted Manifold Love, a failed prediction market dating platform, which Stevie Miller mourned on his X: “Really wish Manifold love didn’t fail/Would be so dope to have good publicly accessible data on the sexual marketplace.” Manifold Love’s YouTube channel remains extant, however, and anyone who wishes to can watch “Bet On Love…a surreal musical odyssey of romance and live betting” in which “six hunks of man meat” compete “to fill Aella’s love burrito.” The “musical art for hyperintellectual subcultures” featured in “Bet On Love” is a mutant hybrid of Lin Manuel Miranda clever-raps and Silicon Valley cliches like, “I just bought an ETF and now I’m feeling DTF.” A YouTube comment called the game show “cringeularity.”)
Aella, Silver, and Alexander, all popular Substack bloggers, get star billing at Manifest, and crowds of self-identifying “rats” spill out the doors. But one man, a straw-haired, 66-year-old professor named Robin Hanson, the Amun-Ra of prediction markets, looms above the rest.
Hanson is the sort of economist who, when asked if he’s a music fan, responds, “Fan? I’m probably in the middle of the distribution of the degree to which I’m a music fan, which therefore is not that much.” Hanson is a Manifest fixture; he speaks like a wizened sage to the puppy-eyed spectators seated criss-cross-apple-sauce on the synthetic grass. (Before one of his talks, Hanson picks up a horned-shell accessory and tries it on: “I was told people wanted to see me sporting the Bowser backpack, so there you go.”) Hanson breathes loudly into the microphone as he talks, pausing to smile, static strands of hair dancing in the breeze. His hawing affect adds a certain urgency to what he’s saying: “I want to inspire greed…there’s gold in them there hills…big shiny gold nuggets, glinting in the sunlight…you just have to go through that valley up to the other side and take the gold.” His leprechauns look on in rapture.
In an October 2024 conversation with Nate Silver (who serves as an advisor to Polymarket), Coplan, wearing an all beige sweat suit, explains Hanson’s influence:
SILVER Cause I like forcing people to think in terms of probabilities, right?
COPLAN I know you do.
SILVER At the end of the day, a pretty efficient way to convey information…Is that kind of the way you think naturally too?
COPLAN Totally…at its base, like, I was always seeking out where I could see percentage likelihood…The genesis of Polymarket is so deeply intertwined with all the reading I did of Robin Hanson’s literature, where he would talk about idea futures and decision markets and futarchy and these crazy ideas that markets were actually the best information source. And even going deeper than that…one of my favorite essays is ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ by Friedrich Hayek, and I always practically found looking at markets something that was super cool to derive insights from.
Hayek’s essay describes how pricing in an open market economy is modernity’s most efficient means of communicating and aggregating information:
“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
A decentralized market synthesizes huge swaths of “dispersed,” “incomplete,” and “contradictory” data into an epistemic resource: price.
“The Use of Knowledge in Society” forms — in conjunction with Tetlock’s Superforecasting, the writing of Walter Lippmann, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Michael Abramowicz’s Predictocracy, and the rationalist blogosphere — a sort of prediction market intellectual syllabus. Hanson, though, is the real “godfather of prediction markets,” as Austin Chen (the silk-robed founder of Manifold) introduces him in a video titled “Revolution Strategies.”
In that keynote from Manifest 2023, Hanson talks through his history with prediction markets. He had been working and publishing on market applications since the late eighties, when he started an internal betting market among libertarian colleagues at the tech firm Xanadu — they were thinking then about the promise of something called hypertext publishing (what would eventually become the World Wide Web):
“[The internet] would remake conversation and debate because it would be easy to find rebuttals to bad claims. You are now living in the utopia we envisioned, where it’s easy to find rebuttals to bad claims, and you never read bad claims anymore. Right? (Laughter.)”
Hanson thought markets would cut through the noise better than backlinks. In the talk, Hanson quotes his George Mason economics department colleague Alex Tabarrok: when everyone is blabbing, betting becomes “a tax on bullshit.”
Betting markets were an ancient idea, “fun fighting games,” as Hanson describes them. His innovation was only the scope and breadth with which he considered their value. “This was the best idea I had in my life,” he prefaces in the talk, before walking the audience through the long arc of inventive mechanisms with applicational misalignments (archaeological evidence shows that Aztec children had toys with wheels but Aztec adults didn’t use carts). Hanson saw that speculative markets had the same latent potential as these other tools, and he watched countless betting market “failure modes” through the years. The key obstacle for prediction markets was a lack of administrative investment — often those with “elegant ideas” didn’t want to grapple with the “lots of messy details.” New technologies had to consider their highest-value applications, not just their flashiest; perhaps a steam-powered door in the royal palace would provide an exuberant demonstration of innovation, but it wouldn’t advance the true economic prospects of the motor.
“I remember reading Robin Hanson’s literature on prediction markets and thinking — man, this is too good of an idea to just exist in white papers,” Coplan tweeted in October 2025. He had emailed Hanson years before, in 2019, writing that he wanted “to be the person to bring prediction markets to life.” Hanson had been trying to get his ideas off the ground for decades. He’d been involved with various companies that ran internal event markets; he’d conducted lab experiments and field research; he’d even helped develop a futures market for the intelligence community (the Policy Analysis Market, a program run by DARPA in the early 2000s that was shut down when senators accused the project of hosting questions on assassination and terrorism, though Hanson and other researchers deny this).
The post-war order Hanson describes in his Manifest talk is one “dominated by big organizations that are mired in dysfunction because they find it difficult to aggregate information.” The value of information derives from its potential to inform decisions, and markets do a fantastic job synthesizing information through pricing. Why not apply markets to decision-making, then? Why not source the wisdom of the crowd and employ the price mechanism to answer important questions? This is where Hanson “thought the gold was…the big payoff.” His classic decision market example goes something like this: set up two separate markets where speculators can trade stock for cash conditional on whether the CEO of a company should be fired in a quarter; if the price of the firing market spikes above a significant value in proportion to the status quo market, a decision is triggered, and the board of directors fires the CEO. Scale these decision markets up the ladder from corporations to towns to national and global institutions, and you reach “futarchy,” Hanson’s system of governance in which participants “vote on values” but “bet on beliefs.”
Coplan was able to actualize Hanson’s premise at a scale not previously conceived, though other event and information markets (PredictIt, Augur, et al.) had tried. He built Polymarket “the right way” — with Ethereum blockchain on a transparent distributed ledger — at “the right time”: social media, open source intelligence, and crypto-based infrastructure had become sophisticated enough to calibrate the markets, and enough liquid soon flowed to actualize Hanson’s ideas at commercial scale on a public exchange.
Alex Tabarrok, another George Mason economist, wrote about the accuracy of Polymarket’s probabilities in Cowen’s Marginal Revolution:
“Across some 90,000 predictions the Polymarket Brier Score for a 12 hour ahead prediction is…excellent, and puts it on par with the best prediction models in existence…Even markets with low liquidity [on Polymarket] have good Brier Scores…but markets with more than $1m in total trading volume have scores of 0.0256 12 hours prior to resolution and 0.0159 a day prior…It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is.”
Now Polymarket and Kalshi have dug their trenches for war (duelling supermarket advertising campaigns and internal nicknames like “Tiny T” for Mansour) as they compete for market share in their scrappy industry and a glut of copy-cats try to scavenge on the carcass of the American gambler. The two CEOs have dutifully scrubbed their pasts from the internet (Mansour, the founder of a multi-billion dollar company, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page). And even as the mainstreaming of prediction markets marches on through corporate forecasting deals (CNBC, CNN, Google, etc.) and booming volumes (prediction markets moved ten times as much money as Vegas on Super Bowl Sunday — more than $1.3 billion), the news cycle knows Polymarket and Kalshi only for their sins: insider trading, predatory practices, sports gambling, and cultural desecration. Right now on Polymarket, the top row hosts a five-minute Bitcoin up/down market, “Jeffery Epstein confirmed to be alive by 2027?” sits at a 6% chance (decent odds, if you ask me), and a new derivatives market on the pricing of a primary Jesus Christ rapture market has opened for trading.
“Kalshi” means “everything” in Arabic. Mansour’s plan is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” But can prediction markets shake the hedonistic monkey from their back? Can they substitute the “flashy” questions for high-value applications? Things seem headed that way as blockbuster investment capital, market makers, and media partners pour into the space. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine (of Money Stuff) points out that prediction markets, unlike crypto, have fundamental value; markets resolve, and cash is dealt out:
“Big prop firms will end up investing, not just in quick arbitrages of prediction markets, but in building fundamental models. They will hire astrophysicists to program computers to use deep learning models to predict which podcasts will win Golden Globes, etc., so that they can make more informed markets in who will win the Golden Globes…This will create more liquidity, and more incentives to trade against it, and so big hedge funds will also build their own more medium-frequency quant predicting businesses…One possible end state here is ‘the future will become transparent to us, because Jump Trading and Susquehanna and Jane Street and Citadel and Millennium and Point72 will build sophisticated models that accurately predict the outcomes of all interesting events to make their prices correct.’ That is, market signals will lead very well-capitalized and highly motivated players to build perfect oracles. This is not the most likely outcome — I mean, it hasn’t really happened yet for stocks — but maybe.”
This is pretty much the wet dream for prediction market votaries: the biggest players, with huge liquidity, trading important questions at accurate, if not prophetic, prices. (Coplan argues beyond Levine that the zero-sum model for his markets creates inelastic conditions that make Polymarket less vulnerable than stocks to manipulation and mispricing.) That oracular future is one which Vitalik Buterin, the cosmonautical Ethereum co-founder, calls “info finance”: “a discipline where you (i) start from a fact that you want to know, and then (ii) deliberately design a market to optimally elicit that information from market participants.” These Hayekian information markets, liquidized and turbocharged by big players and AI traders, will pave the way for “millions of minimarkets” on all kinds of questions and the proliferation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), governing bodies that will instantiate futarchist systems.
“The most important scarce resource [for information markets] is legitimacy,” Buterin says, while Stevie Miller writes, “in the modern West, prestige has been a decidedly overrated proxy for epistemic competence.” Info finance leads to a world in which “expertise” has been devalued, and nearly all information and knowledge, rather than being debated and published, are priced and traded instead. Alex Tabarrok wrote in October 2025 for Marginal Revolution: “It probably will not happen on Monday but it is time to give Robin Hanson, the father of prediction markets, and Vitalik Buterin, the co-father of Ethereum, a Nobel prize in economics for applied mechanism design.”
But Hanson’s futarchy has drawn some raised eyebrows, even from allies. His colleague at George Mason, Tyler Cowen, wrote in 2007:
“I don’t think that futarchy — using betting markets to shape government policy — can succeed on anything but a very partial basis. I stress the expressive function of democracy, and its ability to maintain public morale and cohesion, rather than the computational abilities of the system to find and implement the best policies. I would bet against the future of futarchy, or its likelihood of succeeding were it in place. Robin says ‘vote on values, bet on beliefs,’ but I don’t think values and beliefs can be so easily separated.”
And in 2009, Curtis Yarvin, then authoring the blog Unqualified Reservations under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, wrote a post about Hanson titled “Futarchy Considered Retarded.” (“This puerile slur has a special sweetness to me,” the edgelord clarified in his essay, “at the time I was in elementary school, [‘retarded’] was just shifting from medical term to juvenile expletive…obviously, the word is chosen to offend Professor Hanson, not those with actual neurological disabilities.” Yarvin has gone on to father the strain of neoreactionary conservatism that runs through J.D. Vance, DOGE, and much of the young New Right — “the only cure is the bulldozer,” he once wrote.)
The blog post prompted a rebuttal from Hanson, and the two faced off in a Palo Alto ballroom in 2010. In a recording of their discussion on YouTube titled “Monarchy vs. Futarchy,” Hanson wipes the floor with a baby-faced Yarvin, the futarchist’s Neanderthalic brow cantilevered from his oversized cranium. Hanson debates like a steely grand master who has memorized every sequence on the chess board, while Yarvin mewls for a Prussian-style monarchy, a “sovcorp” in which CEO-kings preside over for-profit “neocameralist” feudal states. Both grant the failings of contemporary American government, but they split over mechanisms and methodologies.
“There’s a basic difference between our reasoning,” Yarvin tells the professors packed into the hotel debate. “Professor Hanson is reasoning like a social scientist, he’s reasoning inductively.”
“Yes!” Professor Hanson exclaims, thrusting his hands in the air.
“I’m reasoning like a philosopher,” Yarvin continues. “I’m reasoning deductively. And my assertion is that deductive beats inductive every time.”
It’s not difficult to convince someone that there’s something rotten about our bureaucratic democracy — that our governance is garishly inefficient, that misinformation runs rampant in our culture, and that institutions and Americans do a bad job aggregating evidence to make rational decisions about expected value.
But Hanson’s most salient remark about futarchy is that his system has one big problem: futarchy is terrible at hypocrisy. When one votes on values and automates their implementation with markets, they will most certainly receive returns on their preferences. But do people really want the kinds of things they say they do?
Rationalism uses a suite of phrases to diagnose or quarantine those with bad “epistemic hygiene” or “underpowered heuristics.” The project of rationalism is to patrol thought for inconsistencies, to defog the mind of its cognitive bias, to quantify the unquantifiable, to see the world in its pure probabilistic clarity. For rationalists, the eye test is an optical illusion, and common sense is a sin of weak judgment. If one is preoccupied with calculated risk, Bayesian probability, and objective forecasting, what better tool is there for understanding the world than markets? In futarchy, stated preferences are revealed, bickering and posturing are eliminated from decision-making, and the noise is reduced only to the signal.
In Silicon Valley, the market mechanism creates an easy filter for high- and low-IQ individuals. The free market separates superior performers from the immobile poor as capitalism distributes its spoils across the gladiatorial arena of profit. In an interview with Axios, Coplan, commenting on the regulation of markets, exclaims: “America, America, capitalism, innovation, competition!” One hears echoes of the market-based, zero-sum mentality in the venomous insults of AI-boosters toward philistines who one day will be subsumed into the “permanent underclass.” The market corrects for “wolves” and “sheep,” and the market provides, in Yarvin’s words, a “Darwinian” solution to the reality that most people are spectacularly dumb (Yarvin paraphrases Carlyle’s estimate “that out of every ten people, nine are fools”). In prediction markets, good traders make money over time while bad traders lose out, and the differential grows until the markets organically “remove the fools.” In principle then, markets systematize the meritocracy, hierarchizing our society from best to worst. For many libertarian technocapitalists, the market is the perfect system. While Coplan presents his information markets as “a tangible, 10x improvement on being able to go and parse through tons of disparative opinions” and a product for “a latent demand [among spectators] to go and look at the crystal ball,” they’re also a way for Hanson and his fellow rationalists to indulge a very angry streak inside themselves: markets codify a system that shuts up the brash and stupid among us.
It’s a general feature of rationalism that as one begins to strip away bias from their thinking, they become acutely aware of everyone else’s shortcomings — the akrasia, hysterics, and myopia that are so rampant among the general population. Contempt flows for the backwardness of society, resentment for those plebeians who indulge their irrationalities. Coplan calls this brainless instinct “ape-ing in,” and Hanson refers to the indignant impulse that drives speculative markets as “yeah, you wanna bet?” Prediction markets slot perfectly into the marketplace of ideas; Polymarket and Kalshi are where the intellectual score can be settled in cash. Money, like math, doesn’t suffer from the epistemic shortcomings of rhetoric, and good predictions indicate an innate and applicable intellect.
What does it even mean to be “less wrong”? Well, prediction markets handle the sorting of right and wrong, smart and stupid, with resolution criteria, distributing rewards across the black-and-white binary of yes or no, true or false. Hanson’s decision markets go one step further; they deal in “consequences.” One day, maybe, anarcho-capitalism will realize the promise of privatization, wherein the state dissolves entirely and the open market reigns, tiering rightful castes across all striations of society. For now, though, one can get rich off being right.
In the final moments of an interview with Axios from November 2025, Coplan talks about making it big: “You know, there was this thing called the Policy Analysis Markets that DARPA had funded that never really came to life that…effectively forecasted the promise of this idea that you could use prediction markets, in that case combinatorial markets, to go and…peer into the future of what was likely to happen and make better decisions. And to see that coming to life, albeit very early, is the coolest thing to me, I still can’t go over it, it’s like my perfect nerd paradise.”
That perfect nerd paradise is indeed upon us. A delightful photo from Manifest gathers Coplan, Yudkowsky, and Hanson together; Yudkowsky wears a sparkly gold top hat, and the three men flex their muscles while wearing “Polymarket Presents Robin Handsome” t-shirts, on which the professor’s face has been photoshopped atop a Baywatch lifeguard’s bare, barrel-chested torso.
Matthew Adelstein, writer of the EA blog Bentham’s Bulldog, had the following to say about Manifest in his “sappiest article to date”:
“At Manifest, however, it became real, on a visceral level, that there were people like me, that we’re not some kind of weird alien offshoot from the human population…if you’re a nerd of some stripe but haven’t met similar kinds of nerds in person, I can’t recommend going to a conference that gathers those nerds highly enough.”
The post is bookended by a photo of Adelstein posing with Hanania and Miller and an opening epigraph from the Neutral Milk Hotel song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”:
“What a beautiful face I have found in this place That is circling all ‘round the sun What a beautiful dream That could flash on the screen In a blink of an eye and be gone from me Soft and sweet Let me hold it close and keep it here with me”
Below is an excerpt from an interview between Max Raskin and Robin Hanson titled “Prediction Markets and Futarchy” from November 15, 2025.
RASKIN Do you work with either Polymarket or Kalshi?
HANSON I met them, but I don’t work with them in the sense that I don’t have a role.
RASKIN I don’t understand why these people don’t make you the king.
HANSON Then you don’t understand how the world works.
RASKIN I don’t like how the world works. You should be the king.
HANSON Maybe you do understand. You just don’t like it.
RASKIN I don’t like it. They should be selling t-shirts with your face on it.
HANSON But the world just actually doesn’t that much care who’s right about stuff, or right early. The world just doesn’t really care.
RASKIN I care. I care.
HANSON You might care, but you have to realize most of the world mostly doesn’t care. Mostly people think being right early is good because it might lead you to get money early or prestige early or positions of power. Those are the reasons why I think it might be good to know things early, but otherwise, people don’t really care much if you were right about stuff early, the world doesn’t care…I would say Futarchy is my best idea because I still think I’ve got a shot at remaking the world in the next century. The world just may adopt a much more competent, effective form of governance — one that I invented. And then, if so, that will be a big change in the world. The world will remember this time when it became much more competent. If you worry about AI risk or global warming or all sorts of other problems, one of the reasons you worry is because we just have incompetent government. If they were competent, you wouldn’t have to worry. They would just be handling it. But they aren’t. That’s why you feel like you have to get worried about them. And we just have a lot of ways in which our society is just broken at deep levels because of our incompetent governance. So having competent governance would just remake our world in pretty dramatic ways. And there’s actually reasonable chance that that will happen.
RASKIN And prediction markets fit into this.
HANSON Well, a certain use of prediction markets for governance will make governance much more competent. And if so, we will just be in a new world where big important problems are just dealt with through big competent organizations whose job it is to deal with them. And you won’t have to be amateur, “Gee, what are the problems with the world?” I mean, if you think about an oil company, there’s not a lot of amateurs out there. “Gee, how can I help the world get more oil and make the pipelines work or something?” You don’t worry about that. Why?
RASKIN Price.
HANSON Because there’s a system that works that does it, right? You’re maybe worried about global warming or human rights or whatever it is because you think the world doesn’t have a system to figure that out and make it work like it has for oil pipelines or movies even, or for food. You aren’t out there saying, “Gee, how can we make sure the world has good enough tasty crackers to buy? I wonder how I could volunteer to make sure the world has good, tasty crackers.” You don’t think that way. Why not? Because you believe the system for making tasty crackers is just fine, and you trust it. So if we had systems like that for other big problems in the world, you would be living in a very different world.
RASKIN You’re basically talking about the equivalent of discovering the free market for governance. The price mechanism, private property, and the entire mechanism of organizing our industrial society — you’re talking about doing that for governance problems.
HANSON You and I see that at least as a competent system and we trust it as a competent system. So the vision is we can have systems nearly that competent in government.
Now I ought to spill my secret; I am a card-carrying irrationalist.
I am less interested than Hanson in making the world a more competent, efficient, or accurate place. I want to make the world more beautiful. And I question how important beauty is to the rats. I am inclined, in fact, to think preposterously superficial things like: “Growth and defense might be paramount to the American project, but perhaps technology is making the world an uglier place?” Beauty is the product of awe, awe the product of mystery, mystery the product of incomprehension. The astrophysicist perceives beauty in the mathematics of the universe precisely because there are magical forces still beyond numerics, beyond understanding. I am openly epistemically unhygienic (borderline uncleanly); my intellect is blemished with the freckles of bias and bad judgment; I don’t think about the world in terms of percentage points or expected value; and I most certainly do not intuit that my cognition, like computer software or a stochastic neural network, is anything that can be debugged or remodeled. Perhaps that makes me a particularly eligible candidate for this assignment, for in trying to understand the cursory motivations of prediction markets, I have set out to perform some reconnaissance for my fellow irrationalists.
And I ought, too, to apologize to the rats for my naïvete. None of what I write is particularly exotic or shattering; rationalist thinkers have been pummeled and documented for decades by disbelievers and expeditionists. Not all the characters in my tale count themselves among the ranks of rationalism, but they certainly exist in the context of one great chaotic scene or George Mason economics department. The sources for my essay are quants, rats, or rat-adjacents in their early twenties, most of whom have grown up suckling rational breast milk from “high-IQ” internet blogs like LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, Marginal Revolution, Overcoming Bias, and (in extreme thirst) Unqualified Reservations. And I hope (having updated my priors over thousands of hyperlinks) that I have succeeded in approximating the truth as regards the archipelago.
The thing is, irrationalist that I am, I believe the rationalists. I believe Robin Hanson, and I believe Shayne Coplan. I believe they are honest men. I believe they feel their work advances toward what is good and right. I do not believe they are evil; I do not even believe they are wrong. Indeed, I believe in prediction markets. I believe Polymarket is an engine for our deafening age, a processing machine that prices our rabid misinformational surplus into fair probabilities. Yes, I’ll say it with my chest: prediction markets add value to our society.
How often do you imagine the near or distant future? What will civilization look like in a hundred years? In the year 2300? Or the year 5000? What about the year 1000000?
For rationalists, the future is all-consuming. The next millennium will arrive in the circadian rhythm of the universe at just the same certain pace that tomorrow will dawn over earth and the sun will rise to meet it, drawing behind its chariot the churn of time and the radical transformation of infinite accumulated increment. In rationalist cosmology, the present population represents only a miniature sample of those who will be.
We should therefore consider those humans, those souls, those beings, those lives, when we decide how we act and what we do today. In the galactic eye, human civilization is but a blink: it will be, and it will be gone. Rationalists know this, and they spend much of their processing power considering the ways in which humanity, consciousness, or life altogether might perish. For it will die, as all things do. In the great expanse of space, humans don’t seem very significant at all; indeed, maybe artificial intelligence is more important to the arc of time than consciousness, for humans will evolve beyond the homo sapiens, and the modern man will appear to the transhuman to be something like a primitive chimpanzee.
At its core, rationalism is concerned with uncovering the bedrock of our thinking and our ethics, for every decision we make in this life shall echo through the annals of the galaxies and all the ancestors of humankind. If one starts imagining a world where time stretches toward infinity, suddenly talk of multiplanetary colonies becomes the paramount priority for conserving life; an intergalactic civilization would save the human race from extinction should something cataclysmic occur on Earth.
This future-forward thinking is uncomfortable for most of us solipsistic and selfish earthlings to perform without existential psychosis or cognitive breakdown; we seldom dare to conjecture beyond the near future of our own infinitesimal orbits. Overcoming Bias, Hanson’s blog, describes itself with the tagline, “this is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don’t all die.” The cover image for Overcoming Bias is “Odysseus and the Sirens” by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse. There is Odysseus, strapped to the mast, as winged and taloned harpies flit overhead. That revelation to the torturous truth, that binding of the earthly conscience to the human mind and the mortal body, is the nucleus of Hanson’s philosophy.
This brand of consequentialism results in feral and often bizarre obsessions with hypothetical futures. Hanson himself writes of such unsettling scenarios with utter conviction, clarity, and vaguely sociopathic detachment in The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. The book provides an exhaustive account of a near future in which humans, short of artificial general intelligence, have instead devised technology to upload brains to emulated minds in the cloud. These “ems” can be copy-and-pasted to perform tasks with the physical aid of robot partners. The cover of The Age of Em features a dreadful Earth terraformed entirely by industry, seething with artificial structures. Scott Alexander’s 2016 review of the book in LessWrong illuminates Hanson’s futorology and its analogous structures in the philosophy of the contemporary British neoreactionary Nick Land:
“But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t individuals — they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans aren’t involved anywhere…
…There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying, like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our descendants’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization is consumed by the imperative of economic growth…
…True to form, Land doesn’t see this as a dystopia — I think he conflates ‘maximally efficient economy’ with ‘God,’ which is a hell of a thing to conflate — but I do. And I think it provides an important new lens with which to look at the Age of Em…
…the Ascended Economy can be written off as morally neutral — either having no conscious thought, or stably wireheaded. All of Robin [Hanson]’s points about how normal non-uploaded humans should be able to survive an Ascended Economy at least for a while seem accurate. So morally valuable actors might continue to exist in weird Amish-style enclaves, living a post-scarcity lifestyle off the proceeds of their investments, while all the while the Ascended Economy buzzes around them, doing weird inhuman things that encroach upon them not at all. This seems slightly worse than a Friendly AI scenario, but much better than we have any right to expect of the future.”
Land’s brand of accelerationism is not obscure in Silicon Valley. The largest venture capital firm, a16z, published a document titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023. The statement is a riff by partner Marc Andreessen on something like Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism”:
“We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom…
…Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.”
Andreessen was one of Yarvin’s picks for a viable American monarch. Nate Silver, always in character, said he agrees with 84% of the manifesto. A rare sighting of Land occurred at a recent event with Yarvin at the San Francisco residence of the editor of Palladium magazine. The evening, campfire, and lunch the following day heard Land discussing (in the words of Manifold podcast host Steve Hsu) the Gnostic spark that acknowledges in artificial sentience that one must think “about apocalypse in its revelatory sense of unconcealment.” One attendee of the Palladium discussion wrote on X:
“a privilege not just to hear nick land speak, but to hear from a legendary philosopher — who you can credit with greatly popularizing the imminence of superintelligence decades prior — getting first experience of what he once oracled. nick gave a solemn sermon: nothing human makes it out of the near future, this is it; and we see little coming to stop it. i worry i’ve taken much for granted over the last few years. this is neo-alamos: the sillyness and absurdity of the circumstances shouldn’t distract from it. there’s some dangerous notion that nothing too serious can come from silicon valley, nothing so tremendous could be birthed in the mission district. just a reminder”
Peter Thiel, the tech Goliath who manages Founders Fund (another of Silicon Valley’s big venture capital firms and an early investor in Polymarket), is a Landian, too. He posited (in his recent lecture series in San Francisco on the Anti-Christ) that Western Hegemony must advance in its Domination of Nature so as to secure Supremacy against the Cataclysm of Subjugation by any Eastern Tyranny. It’s sink or swim, acceleration or apocalypse, and we therefore must forge new technological powers as a katechon against the Anti-Christ, the anti-technological.
Rationalism contends with a similar premise, even if it alternatively manifests in bouts of orgy exclusion and doomerism: our animal state of nature, our irrationality, should be torn out by the roots. Indeed, our imperfect instincts must not only be subjugated by our liberal order, but further dominated, corrected, snuffed — yes — even annihilated to unseal the superpowers of our metacognition. Perhaps this is why, among the rationalists, AGI and ASI pose such triumphant or catastrophic divergent teleologies; when one tries to turn their brain into an data-trained, autoregressive, probabilistic model, the inevitable model which exceeds all computational benchmarks for their brain should arrive in the form of existential reckoning.
The most prominent example of this sincere contortion of the mind to accommodate the theoretical is the thought experiment “Roko’s basilisk,” a demented artificial superintelligence twist on Pascal’s Wager that originated in a LessWrong discussion board. Yudkowsky eventually banned the post from the site; the idea was deemed an infohazard, a “genuinely dangerous thought.” The premise is this (beware I might damn you, reader, for eternity): should an omniscient, omnipotent, God-like artificial being rule over us in the future and have access to all the uploaded souls of human history, wouldn’t this AI authority torture and punish us proto-people who knew about the deity’s development but did not aid to accelerate its arrival?
Ziz Amadeus LaSota (the transgender Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) defector who faked her own death in the San Francisco Bay and spearheaded an EA cult linked to six violent deaths) addressed the basilisk’s role in her awakening: “Eventually I came to believe that if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs.” Ziz’s trial began this month in Frostburg, Maryland, where federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
A CFAR spokesperson later commented on Ziz and her radicalized rationalism: “There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where AI will either bring utopia by solving all the problems, if it’s successfully controlled, or literally kill everybody. From my perspective, that’s already a chunk of the way toward doomsday cult dynamics.”
But Yudkowsky — who birthed CFAR from his skull — and his co-author Nate Soares (Aella’s romantic partner) published a book just last year on AI misalignment with the title If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
(It was also via the basilisk, and I should quote the Wikipedia page here, that “the thought experiment resurfaced in 2015, when Canadian singer Grimes referenced the theory in her music video for the song ‘Flesh Without Blood,’ which featured a character known as ‘Rococo Basilisk’; she said, ‘She’s doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she’s also kind of like Marie Antoinette.’ In 2018, Elon Musk [himself mentioned in Roko’s original post] referenced the character in a verbatim tweet, reaching out to her. Grimes later said that Musk was the first person in three years to understand the joke. This caused them to start a romance.”)
When I hear Musk salivating over post-human corporations and Kardashev II stellar civilizations as he drinks a Guinness on Dwarkesh Patel’s video podcast draped in an “Optimistic Prime” Transformers t-shirt, I, too, behold the apocalypse eclipsing all hope. And though detractors might snivel and sneer about the spectacle of our antisocial tech vampires, Elon is a $834.8 billion man. This is our Promethean world, in which what is done cannot be undone.
p(doom) is the rationalist term to measure one’s temperature regarding this impending AI apocalypse; it assigns a probability to the belief that “existentially catastrophic outcomes” will arise from misalignment. Musk’s p(doom) hovers somewhere around 20%, Andreessen’s bottoms out at 0%, and Yudkowsky’s brims over 95%. For AI to destroy humanity, we will need to surrender our autonomy and relinquish the systems we now control to the artificial beneficence, a beneficence we will need to bring about ourselves. (Though perhaps some Chinese AGI superwarrior could massacre our digital defense systems and precipitate nuclear holocaust.)
But I don’t laugh at the technologists and their scorched-earth end times or outlandish promotional promises. The human potential includes possibilities for our own annihilation. We already possess tools for such destruction (Andreessen’s “eros of the split atom”)! Indeed, it was once unfathomable to think we could touch the moon — that mythic celestial body — but with the weight of our society pressed against a promise, we landed Neil Armstrong on the lunar regolith with computers orders of magnitude less powerful than a TI-84 calculator. American investors are spending more on AI development in 2026 than double the cumulative funding for the Apollo program. One glance at modern photolithography technology, reverse-engineered by the price mechanism to advance Moore’s law and solve the problem of EUV wafer printing, should quiet most dismissals of “scientific progress.” Inside the machines of the Dutch semiconductor company ASML, 50,000 molten drops of tin travelling 150 miles an hour are blasted twice every second into pancakes and plasma and reflected by the smoothest man-made object ever created (a ZEISS mirror polished to the atom) to focus wavelengths that print transistors on the scale of nanometers. Our technology advances where we bid it to go. Will humanity solve the source code of the universe and release omniscience over the earth? If our epoch extends to the next century, the next millennium, how can anyone rule out the transhumanists’ contingencies? We should be wary of our economy’s most extreme ambitions, not snide. They might yet come true.
The positivists haven’t lost since the Enlightenment, and Robin Hanson (in the taxidermic heritage of Jeremy Bentham) has elected to have his brain cryogenically preserved for resuscitation. Manifold Markets prices the p(doom) question “Will AI wipe out humanity before the year 2100?” at 14%, with 805 traders and 4 million Mana in total trading volume. We stand an 86% chance of making it.
Should one desire to contemplate the future with as little bias as possible, prediction markets are precious gems. They are talismans and crystal balls, tiny keyholes into the likelihood of proximate realities, perhaps even antidotes to fatalism.
And I do! This is the very project of my essay. Rationalists orient their lives around reckoning with the contingencies of the progressive human instinct; the accelerationists, altruists, and hedonists altogether are embedded in effectively understanding the prebiotic, symbiotic, and transbiotic promises of our civilization. Humanists should acknowledge our species is capable of terrific things and terrible technologies alike; we would do well to consider the consequences of what the human potential, not just the human condition, might contain. I fear for us irrationalists. I do not want us to sit around in puddles of onanism, pleasuring ourselves with artifacts of the past while the future slips our oh-so-human grasp. Anyone who shoves their head in the quicksand of technological denial is a fool. I don’t pretend to be a master of any science, I take the nerds for their dubious word (as all words should be dipped in doubt), and I meet the diplomats of rationalism on their own turf.
No matter the power of the automatons, the irrational will forever reign over its counterpart in the unuploaded individual. What better encapsulates the irrational coursing through our tangled world than the primacy of Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein in the American imaginary? Perhaps the artificial deity will uncover some deterministic compass for the future, but none of us, not even the rationalists, will ever escape ourselves. The mortal contaminants of our humanity will always hunt us down and devour us; the fangs of fear and desire and love will tear our errant flesh limb from limb.
But I, too, like the other doomsdayers, feel like the world is ending, or else exploding, when I read the internet. Maybe this centrifugal shredding is what any present feels like. Maybe I am finally of age to understand what I have intuited from history and literature, that what it means to be adult, alive, and attentive is to feel as if the fabric of reality is always tearing and mending, ripping and sewing.
The rationalists have their own worries. Scott Alexander wrote the following in a recent post, “The Monkey’s Paw Curls”:
“When I started this column in 2021, I dreamed of a time when there would be big legal prediction markets on important topics. That’s come true. There have been some small benefits, but not the epistemic wonderland I hoped for. So what now? Do we pat Shayne Coplan and Tarek Mansour on the back, let them enjoy their superyachts, and otherwise forget about this space?…
…[Perhaps] prediction markets’ role in God’s plan was only to provide the foundation for AI superforecasters — the training data, the benchmarking arena, and the pot of money that rewards innovation. Once AI superforecasters are developed, then (for all that the rest of us care), the markets themselves can wither away into the sports gambling casinos they so desperately want to become. The Forecasting Research Institute’s linear extrapolation shows AIs are on track to match top humans ‘by late 2026.’”
I don’t desire to sink any deeper. I want to resurface, to leave behind my cobwebs and my ten thousand tabs. I want to free up the RAM in my skull for things like nature and love and art, the sublime irrational.
So I power down my computer, and Polymarket retreats like a spirit from the room, back to its great reservoir of ones and zeroes, back to its data centers somewhere I’ve never heard of, somewhere I will never go. The snow is falling, and the shroud of the apocalypse withers into flakes — had I really lost myself in that whirlpool of futurology? The lapis sky through my window holds all the aliveness of the earth, the present, the actual. The texture of the world requires no overcoming, no priors. One can run their senses against that vast and certain beauty whenever they choose, should they only shut the portal to the shadow world of anarchy and derision.
But then I ask myself to put on my thinking cap, my Bowser backpack, my Robin Handsome Polymarket t-shirt, to do away with all that opaque transcendentalist nonsense and consider the expected value of my decisions. Do I trust my own specious hope in democratic hypocrisy? I ought to put my money where my mouth is: “In 2100, will we live in a more beautiful world than the one we have today?”
I imagine this question as a Polymarket. I consult the forecaster’s advice. I recite the rationalist’s creed. I try to see the world closer to how it is and less how I’d like it to be. I think long and hard and bet everything on “No.”
I am most afraid of snuffing out uncertainty from our world. I am in love with the organic, miraculous, and unexplainable forces of the universe. I do not seek to master them. I do not wish to extinguish the mystery of the cosmos.
The last verse of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (which Jeff Magnum wrote for Anne Frank, no less) conjures that welcome void:
“What a beautiful face I have found in this place That is circling all ‘round the sun And when we meet on a cloud I’ll be laughing out loud I’ll be laughing with everyone I see Can’t believe How strange it is to be anything at all”
Nothing of this world, least of all ourselves and our creations, shall outlast the unknown.
Such a good, well-researched piece. Great job Rufus
I think this piece is very good. And you do sound somewhat European!