A couple weeks ago, on a flight, I watched the movie Conclave (2024) which is about the process of selecting the Pope, in a modern context. I thought it was surprisingly good, but felt like a warning call for the next papal conclave as it illustrated how the power some of these individuals face can corrupt. Fascinating to think how this process would have played out in 16th Century Italy.
There’s some fairly deep statistical analysis out there on the Doge voting. To my memory it was only subverted once, leading to some changes. The analysis I remember concludes they have like one more round than needed to meet goals of the voting in terms of fairness, representation and difficulty of capture. Anyway, it’s a very interesting bit of voting history that lasted a long time.
Best not to overthink think. It’s the best random number generator they thought they had. Even ours suck.
They just wanted a member of the Aristocrat to be in charge is the point. An inauguration validated with whatever appears like merit (but the whole thing is rigged since only one type can ever win - the aristocrat (the entire pool is aristocrats)).
What makes you think that movie is an accurate representation of the papal selection process? I watched it too and while the videography is amazing, the plot of the movie is clearly dictated by having an agenda rather than accurately trying to portray reality.
It’s the first time I’ve encountered any information about how a new pope is selected. Period.
As a not-dumb person, I realize it’s just a movie. But the basic premise of being cordoned off from the outside world, voting until someone is chosen, with the voting going on for days and signaled through smoke by burning the ballets - I assume that basic premise is at least mostly accurate?
Edit: Indeed, after some basic googling, the premise of the movie seems to line up with the basic premise of how a pope was selected centuries ago.
I haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book a couple of years ago, published in 2016, and I presume you could get the same information from there.
It's not really a secret how a pope is chosen, it's just not something most people are interested enough to look up (there's a missing "in" in that sentence but I couldn't decide where to put it).
Robert Harris wrote the book and also wrote Fatherland, Enigma and Pompeii. Those are three different books but I'd definitely read a book with that single title.
The premise of the movie is obviously real. I don't think anyone would debate that. I was referring to the portrayal of the political and social dynamics of the process and the views of the Catholic Church.
I was of the impression there are conservative and liberal factions within the Church, and that electing the Pope is a time that that division comes out? No?
All sorts of works of fiction have been sources of knowledge for much longer than film has been around. Aesop's fables and parables in the Bible are intentful examples. I don't find this horrifying.
What sort of agenda did you think the movie had? I suppose there's a slight humanist agenda, since it portrays nearly all the characters pursuing goals that probably aren't considered the ideal religious goals.
The thread of conservative vs progressive cardinals and factions goes through the whole movie, but the ending is the most "agenda" part (although handled subtly).
The ending reveal doesn't even fit neatly into the hot-button American political issue you're associating it with. The film is clearly trying to make the viewer work out their view on the issue, and I think the film takes essentially no stance (unless you think that not taking a strong stance in one direction constitutes endorsement of a different direction).
Some might even say the film lacks courage, both by taking no stance on the issue and by presenting a scenario that only vaguely matches the hot-button American political issue.
It’s a really interesting point; the postwar conclaves have arguably been some of the least (openly?) political in a history. The next one will probably be more politicized than the last one. You can imagine lots of commentary from non-Catholics on who they think “should win,” tied to political or cultural ideas.
In some ways this is new, but it’s also possibly a reversion to the mean on how it’s worked historically? One difference is that in the 16th century, the impact of the Pope on day to day life was higher (at least in Catholic Europe).
One of the reasons that there were historically so many machinations around the election of the Pope was that the Pope was not only a spiritual leader but a temporal ruler as well. The Pope was the monarch of the Papal States in central Italy (along with a number of other territories throughout Europe that changed hands more frequently). So it was a position of immense political power and wealth.
Starting in the 18th century the Papal States began to be chipped away by European powers, and
this culminated in Pope Pius IX losing all control political control of the Papal States in 1870 to the Kingdom of Italy. Since then the papacy's temporal power has been limited to the Vatican City, along with the moral weight of the position.
> in the 16th century, the impact of the Pope on day to day life was higher
Not so. The mass media have instantly made every sneeze of the pope common knowledge, or common fake news. In prior centuries, the pope's prominence in the consciousness of daily life was low. He was a remote figure. You wouldn't hear of his death for weeks.
If you can, try to rewatch it on a proper screen. The clothing and sets are incredible and the costume design and production design were nominated for an Oscar. It really deserves to be seen large.
The first season of the show Borgia: Faith and Fear has an episode or two about the papal conclave that happened after Innocent VIII died, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) ends up winning the election and there’s plenty of backdoor dealing going on.
I know nothing about this stuff. What kind of power a pope has that it is so competitive? I enjoyed the movie, but no idea what would be motivation of the people there.
The Pope directs the spiritual priorities of his Bishops and thereby all Catholics, a lot of people. He's not going to be able to say "Kill, fornicate, and steal now!" without losing all credibility, but he can say, "We're going to ask for contributions monthly for X good cause." There's also money and diplomatic effort to be directed to dioceses around the world.
To add to this, if anyone's interested in the history and geopolitics of the Vatican and understands Spanish, here's an excellent podcast that goes way more in depth about the topic:
>Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market; 500 years before Polymarket, the Vatican fought to stop gambling on papal affairs.
just to be clear, the article offers no evidence that there was not prior gambling art than the papal enclaves. cockfighting, bullfighting, gladiators, horseracing, was there no organized betting? in terms of prediction markets specifically, once there is organized betting, did it never extend to "current events"?
just as a slightly topical aside, the market for "oil drilling" is mathematically equivalent to a (stock) options market. it doesn't take much for markets to uncover probability and statistics.
I feel like these sorts of turns-of-phrase, like "_blank_ was the original _blank_", are increasingly used like memes without any real thought of whether they are make sense or are correct. People are afraid to write without ornamentation, regardless of whether it adds anything meaningful. It's added to meet some sort of perceived standard of "good writing", in an effort to stand out from the crowd.
This may be an obvious thing that everyone else has caught onto, but... if I were to place a bet against someone dying this year (say it was someone powerful), wouldn't I essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove me wrong and make that death happen?
And isn't that exactly what's happening when people are betting on a new pope in 2025? Doesn't that heavily incentivize some violent individual to take that bet and commit murder?
Imagine any business decision that would strongly benefit from e.g. J.D. Vance not becoming the acting president and Trump remaining in his place for the rest of the year/term. Does making such a decision "essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove you wrong", those someone's being your business competitors/rivals?
Or you could even dial the timeline back to right before the last elections, where this question could literally be about the Republicans literally losing their candidate due to sudden expiration.
My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
For example, I'm in Canada. There's a trade war going on. Every business in Canada is now having to hedge their bets for whether and how long and how bad the trade war is going to be. And we all know the trade war is being driven by one person. So yes, "what are the odds of a change in who is running the country?" is part of that risk assessment.
That's not the same thing as saying, "here's $100k if something were to happen to the man in the funny hat".
Technically, you could construe both as hedging your bets. But in the first scenario I'm just making a decision for my business. In the other, I'm offering a reward to make it happen.
Now, that being said, I could see the water getting murky for a publicly traded company that positions itself in such a way that it would truly benefit from such an event, because then a violent member of the public could buy their stock and benefit financially from commitment that violence. But that's not what we're talking about with polymarket.
Polymarket is all about tying a specific financial outcome to a specific real world event that people could choose to influence. It incentivizes outcomes. Some outcomes would be hard to influence this way. For example, I don't think any bet of any size would influence who would win an election. But if the bet was "It would be terrible if someone did X, I'm betting $$$ that no one will", then the only question is whether the $$$ is worth it to someone with the ability to commit X.
I'm not questioning whether it would be worth it. I'm questioning how that would work, and am very much open to being wrong here. I just don't see how it would work.
For example... let's say I bet a trillion dollars that the Canadian Communist Party (a party on the extreme fringes that few Canadians even realize exists) would NOT win the election. How would that incentive lead to them winning? What could anyone do to make that reality happen in order to claim the money?
That's not to say there aren't other ways to use money to influence an election. Of course there is. But you need to spend it in the run-up to the election, not offer it as a prize afterwards.
Am I being naive? (A: Probably. Wouldn't be the first time.)
I've mulled over your comment for a couple days and I still don't really understand what you're saying... feel free not to reply in light of the delay (or to stop the conversation from spiralling), but:
> Throw a baby in water and it can swim, no naiveté anywhere.
Are you suggesting I'm doing something akin to intentionally throwing a baby in water to see if it drowns?
> 1) Putting out a bet that a vulnerable person will take is immoral. But that’s not what we are discussing.
Agreed... I'm just asking if Polymarket can effectively be used as an assassination market, and if so, isn't that a bad thing?
> 2) How would putting out such a bet, a call option, lead to hedging?
I fully admit I'm not an investment expert, so maybe I'm not using the term correctly. But in my mind, "hedging" is putting in place some type of mechanism to benefit or at least limit your losses in the case of your preferred outcome not working out. So in this scenario, a business person could simultaneously make decisions on the assumption of an ongoing trade war, as well as make other decisions that would only be beneficial in the case of the end of the trade war due to someone's demise.
(For clarity, I'm NOT advocating anyone's demise. I'm a peacenik and am not cheering for harm to fall on anyone. I'm simply discussing hypotheticals in an attempt to understand IF Polymarket could be used as an assassination market, and purely because if it could, I feel that should probably be regulated.)
> 3) This can turn into a long ass discussion that I’m not sure you wanna go on.
You're probably right, but I'm not sure where you feel this conversation is headed.
> Driven by one person? The one that said they needed nukes and allies to defend themselves from their neighbour?
Canada doesn't have nukes and has long advocated for nuclear non-proliferation. We're still not looking to have any nukes of our own.
Trump is openly calling for the annexation of our country, and has started a trade war that no Canadian political leader of any stripe wants.
Seriously just put yourself in the shoes of a Canadian. We've supported the USA in everything they've done other than the Vietnam War, and history proved us correct in taking a pass on that one.
The USA called for Free Trade. We said OK.
The USA called for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We said OK and agreed to never have nukes of our own, taking the USA at its word that it would never violate our sovereignty. Now the so-called Leader of the Free World won't shut up about taking over our country.
The USA called for NAFTA, we said OK. Then Trump tore that up and forced a new trade deal on us. We said OK again. Then he said whoever negotiated that was an idiot who did harm to the USA, to which we still say, "Ok, that's weird, it was your deal, Donald. But let's talk."
And now we're in a trade war that no one wants on our side of the border, and that a vast majority of Americans don't want either.
So yes, driven by one person: Trump.
As for the "new world order" comments, Freeland isn't talking about some conspiracy. She's literally referencing that Trump has set aflame to the existing world order (that was largely engineered by the USA) thereby creating a "new" world order. It's a poor choice of words, but I hardly take this as sufficient evidence that Canada is the belligerent nation in this trade war.
I mean, seriously, what are you even trying to say?
The largest volume of short puts ever purchased on DJT / TMTG (Truth Social / Trump Media Stock) was made shortly before the assassination attempt at the Butler PA rally. The investment firm Austin Private Wealth, however attributed it to a clerical error of a 3rd party that accidentally multiplied their transaction by 10,000. Oops.
>My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
As a third party, I don't particularly care who's in the wrong if I'm living in the middle of a civil war.
Most human beings organically find murder too abhorrent to contemplate or I should say plan and follow through with. Modern entertainment media may be twisting your perception here.
Wow, I had no idea. For all I know that's true in Canada too, I'm not an expert on Canadian insurance law, but I was under the impression that suicide was never covered anywhere. Thanks for correcting me!
It's not something insurers, healthcare professionals, or most anyone else is keen to advertise. It's even difficult to Google as most of the immediate results will be for mental health crisis resources. But AFAIU as suicide came to be understood as a consequence of mental illness, and given that the beneficiaries are no less innocent than if someone died by accident or cancer, courts began to favor and then insurance regulators began to mandate coverage.
There's interesting data on the accuracy of US presidential markets if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's especially remarkable how accurate they were (both at predicting the outcome and how close the results were) many decades before modern political polling came on the scene.
>As a basic if unsophisticated measure of the accuracy of the betting markets, the favorite almost always won, the only exception being in 1916 when betting initially favored the eventual loser (Hughes) but swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. In the 15 elections between 1884 and 1940, the mid-October betting favorite won 11 times (73 percent) and the underdog won only once (when in 1916 Wilson upset Hughes on the West Coast). In the remaining three contests (1884-92), the odds were essentially even throughout and the races very close.
Spoiler warning: This contest only involves finding pictures of the Pope. No Popes were harmed by the actual or transubstantial production of Poperoni meat.
Deep Dish Question: Would putting pineapples on pizza whose crust is made of sacramental bread be considered host desecration?
Everyone has their own tastes, but I personally don't understand the appeal of SNL. Even skits that are so called "classics" don't strike me as all that funny. Maybe it's a generational thing.
Thank you for announcing you lack of understanding. I will update my priors. I was hoping somebody wouldn't find it funny, because that makes it even funnier to me!
”Stephen is chiefly remembered in connection with his conduct towards the remains of Pope Formosus. The rotting corpse of Formosus was exhumed and put on trial, before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy, in the so-called Cadaver Synod in January 897. Pressure from the Spoleto contingent and Stephen's fury with Formosus probably precipitated this extraordinary event.[4] With the corpse propped up on a throne, a deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff. During the trial, Formosus's corpse was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for accepting the papacy while he was the bishop of Porto, among other revived charges that had been levelled against him in the strife during the pontificate of John VIII. The corpse was found guilty, stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of three fingers of its right hand (the blessing fingers), clad in the garb of a layman, and quickly buried; it was then re-exhumed and thrown in the Tiber. All ordinations performed by Formosus were annulled.”
The Papacy is lit.
Edit:
"... the scandal ended in Stephen's imprisonment and his death by strangulation that summer."
For anyone, who, like me, wanted to know about how this story truly ended:
> Pope Theodore II (Latin: Theodorus II; 840 – December 897) was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States for twenty days in December 897. His short reign occurred during a period of partisan strife... His main act as pope was to annul the recent Cadaver Synod, therefore reinstating the acts and ordinations of Pope Formosus, which had themselves been annulled by Pope Stephen VI. He also had the body of Formosus recovered from the river Tiber and reburied with honour.
Kind of a different topic but there's a growing number of people who identify as sedevacantist who don't believe Catholics have had a pope since 1958, since the papal claimants since then seen to contradict prior Catholic teachings
For example Vatican 2 taught in Dignitatis humanae:
> This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom ... within due limits
Obviously if I just said that I thought it was fine to steal from you unprovoked because my "religion" gives me the freedom to do so, this would come in conflict with the normal laws against stealing. Thus religious freedom has clear "limits"; Vatican 2 doesn't define where these "due" limits are and is ambiguous, opening the door to all kinds of confusion and contradiction.
Past teaching was clearer that (note that the proposition stated is considered to be "condemned" or false):
> Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, # 78: "Hence in certain regions of Catholic name, it has been laudably sanctioned by law that men immigrating there be allowed to have public exercises of any form of worship of their own." - Condemned.[58]
However it's thought by some that once it becomes apparent these contradictions exist, it will lead to a kind of reorganization of things and an election of a forthcoming pope... and the issue of gambling will present itself again.
500 years ago, betting on the Pope was punishable by excommunication. Today, crypto-powered prediction markets are placing odds on the next conclave. Have we come full circle, or has technology fundamentally changed the ethics of speculation? Should there be limits to what we can bet on, or is ”information price discovery“ an absolute good？
Are decentralized prediction markets a net positive for transparency, or are they just incentivizing bad behavior?
I've been thinking about prediction market designs that could preserve information discovery benefits while minimizing harm - maybe through delayed settlement periods, anti-manipulation mechanisms, or separating financial stakes from informational ones.
As web3 and DeFi make these markets more accessible and resistant to regulation, should we be building more guardrails into the protocols themselves? Or is this an unsolvable tension in market design?
Great article.
A couple weeks ago, on a flight, I watched the movie Conclave (2024) which is about the process of selecting the Pope, in a modern context. I thought it was surprisingly good, but felt like a warning call for the next papal conclave as it illustrated how the power some of these individuals face can corrupt. Fascinating to think how this process would have played out in 16th Century Italy.
You should check out the voting process for electing the Doge of Venice:
https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
There’s some fairly deep statistical analysis out there on the Doge voting. To my memory it was only subverted once, leading to some changes. The analysis I remember concludes they have like one more round than needed to meet goals of the voting in terms of fairness, representation and difficulty of capture. Anyway, it’s a very interesting bit of voting history that lasted a long time.
This is a crazy process. Although I feel like I am a bit confused.
When they say “reduced by lot” then mean by a lottery? By that same original boy or something else?
They also talked about needing approval from electors, I assume that was from the previous small pool. Can’t exactly determine who they mean.
Best not to overthink think. It’s the best random number generator they thought they had. Even ours suck.
They just wanted a member of the Aristocrat to be in charge is the point. An inauguration validated with whatever appears like merit (but the whole thing is rigged since only one type can ever win - the aristocrat (the entire pool is aristocrats)).
Self selected group :)
Have fun with Doge.
It was gratuitously complex the better to hide sleight-of-hand by the powers of the day.
Sounds easier than getting work done in a corporate who got an agile consultancy in.
What makes you think that movie is an accurate representation of the papal selection process? I watched it too and while the videography is amazing, the plot of the movie is clearly dictated by having an agenda rather than accurately trying to portray reality.
I saw the movie recently as well.
It’s the first time I’ve encountered any information about how a new pope is selected. Period.
As a not-dumb person, I realize it’s just a movie. But the basic premise of being cordoned off from the outside world, voting until someone is chosen, with the voting going on for days and signaled through smoke by burning the ballets - I assume that basic premise is at least mostly accurate?
Edit: Indeed, after some basic googling, the premise of the movie seems to line up with the basic premise of how a pope was selected centuries ago.
I haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book a couple of years ago, published in 2016, and I presume you could get the same information from there.
It's not really a secret how a pope is chosen, it's just not something most people are interested enough to look up (there's a missing "in" in that sentence but I couldn't decide where to put it).
Robert Harris wrote the book and also wrote Fatherland, Enigma and Pompeii. Those are three different books but I'd definitely read a book with that single title.
The premise of the movie is obviously real. I don't think anyone would debate that. I was referring to the portrayal of the political and social dynamics of the process and the views of the Catholic Church.
I was of the impression there are conservative and liberal factions within the Church, and that electing the Pope is a time that that division comes out? No?
Those who say film doesn't influence popular attitudes underestimate how many people treat film as a source of knowledge. Horrifying to realize.
All sorts of works of fiction have been sources of knowledge for much longer than film has been around. Aesop's fables and parables in the Bible are intentful examples. I don't find this horrifying.
What sort of agenda did you think the movie had? I suppose there's a slight humanist agenda, since it portrays nearly all the characters pursuing goals that probably aren't considered the ideal religious goals.
The thread of conservative vs progressive cardinals and factions goes through the whole movie, but the ending is the most "agenda" part (although handled subtly).
The ending reveal doesn't even fit neatly into the hot-button American political issue you're associating it with. The film is clearly trying to make the viewer work out their view on the issue, and I think the film takes essentially no stance (unless you think that not taking a strong stance in one direction constitutes endorsement of a different direction).
Some might even say the film lacks courage, both by taking no stance on the issue and by presenting a scenario that only vaguely matches the hot-button American political issue.
I would say it is rather condemning vs forgiving?
It’s a really interesting point; the postwar conclaves have arguably been some of the least (openly?) political in a history. The next one will probably be more politicized than the last one. You can imagine lots of commentary from non-Catholics on who they think “should win,” tied to political or cultural ideas.
In some ways this is new, but it’s also possibly a reversion to the mean on how it’s worked historically? One difference is that in the 16th century, the impact of the Pope on day to day life was higher (at least in Catholic Europe).
One of the reasons that there were historically so many machinations around the election of the Pope was that the Pope was not only a spiritual leader but a temporal ruler as well. The Pope was the monarch of the Papal States in central Italy (along with a number of other territories throughout Europe that changed hands more frequently). So it was a position of immense political power and wealth.
Starting in the 18th century the Papal States began to be chipped away by European powers, and this culminated in Pope Pius IX losing all control political control of the Papal States in 1870 to the Kingdom of Italy. Since then the papacy's temporal power has been limited to the Vatican City, along with the moral weight of the position.
> You can imagine lots of commentary from non-Catholics on who they think “should win,” tied to political or cultural ideas.
I’m not Catholic, but I do think that it makes sense for the next pope to be one.
> in the 16th century, the impact of the Pope on day to day life was higher
Not so. The mass media have instantly made every sneeze of the pope common knowledge, or common fake news. In prior centuries, the pope's prominence in the consciousness of daily life was low. He was a remote figure. You wouldn't hear of his death for weeks.
If you can, try to rewatch it on a proper screen. The clothing and sets are incredible and the costume design and production design were nominated for an Oscar. It really deserves to be seen large.
I saw it on a cinema, and it is truly worth watching it on a big screen.
The first season of the show Borgia: Faith and Fear has an episode or two about the papal conclave that happened after Innocent VIII died, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) ends up winning the election and there’s plenty of backdoor dealing going on.
I know nothing about this stuff. What kind of power a pope has that it is so competitive? I enjoyed the movie, but no idea what would be motivation of the people there.
He's gonna be the leader of the oldest continuously functioning organisation in the world, with 1.5b (nominal) members.
It's a big deal x)
The Pope directs the spiritual priorities of his Bishops and thereby all Catholics, a lot of people. He's not going to be able to say "Kill, fornicate, and steal now!" without losing all credibility, but he can say, "We're going to ask for contributions monthly for X good cause." There's also money and diplomatic effort to be directed to dioceses around the world.
Tangentially related but I watched a Wendover video on The Vatican[1] yesterday and it helps explain the political side of the papacy.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zQ8cFF3DG8
To add to this, if anyone's interested in the history and geopolitics of the Vatican and understands Spanish, here's an excellent podcast that goes way more in depth about the topic:
https://youtu.be/apCBwjxaLO4
So when I started the papal betting pool at my catholic high school all those years ago I was actually practicing and respecting history.
>Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market; 500 years before Polymarket, the Vatican fought to stop gambling on papal affairs.
just to be clear, the article offers no evidence that there was not prior gambling art than the papal enclaves. cockfighting, bullfighting, gladiators, horseracing, was there no organized betting? in terms of prediction markets specifically, once there is organized betting, did it never extend to "current events"?
just as a slightly topical aside, the market for "oil drilling" is mathematically equivalent to a (stock) options market. it doesn't take much for markets to uncover probability and statistics.
I feel like these sorts of turns-of-phrase, like "_blank_ was the original _blank_", are increasingly used like memes without any real thought of whether they are make sense or are correct. People are afraid to write without ornamentation, regardless of whether it adds anything meaningful. It's added to meet some sort of perceived standard of "good writing", in an effort to stand out from the crowd.
There was sports betting going on far far before Jesus showed up. The Romans allowed it and the Holy Roman Empire and the catholics let it carry on.
Also dice games were popular for private betting.
Wait, does this mean Polymarket is also an assassination market?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
This may be an obvious thing that everyone else has caught onto, but... if I were to place a bet against someone dying this year (say it was someone powerful), wouldn't I essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove me wrong and make that death happen?
And isn't that exactly what's happening when people are betting on a new pope in 2025? Doesn't that heavily incentivize some violent individual to take that bet and commit murder?
Imagine any business decision that would strongly benefit from e.g. J.D. Vance not becoming the acting president and Trump remaining in his place for the rest of the year/term. Does making such a decision "essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove you wrong", those someone's being your business competitors/rivals?
Or you could even dial the timeline back to right before the last elections, where this question could literally be about the Republicans literally losing their candidate due to sudden expiration.
My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
I don't think those are the same thing?
For example, I'm in Canada. There's a trade war going on. Every business in Canada is now having to hedge their bets for whether and how long and how bad the trade war is going to be. And we all know the trade war is being driven by one person. So yes, "what are the odds of a change in who is running the country?" is part of that risk assessment.
That's not the same thing as saying, "here's $100k if something were to happen to the man in the funny hat".
Technically, you could construe both as hedging your bets. But in the first scenario I'm just making a decision for my business. In the other, I'm offering a reward to make it happen.
Now, that being said, I could see the water getting murky for a publicly traded company that positions itself in such a way that it would truly benefit from such an event, because then a violent member of the public could buy their stock and benefit financially from commitment that violence. But that's not what we're talking about with polymarket.
Polymarket is all about tying a specific financial outcome to a specific real world event that people could choose to influence. It incentivizes outcomes. Some outcomes would be hard to influence this way. For example, I don't think any bet of any size would influence who would win an election. But if the bet was "It would be terrible if someone did X, I'm betting $$$ that no one will", then the only question is whether the $$$ is worth it to someone with the ability to commit X.
Just scale your argument up, you don’t think it’s worth it to someone to influence an election? What’s all that money for then?
I'm not questioning whether it would be worth it. I'm questioning how that would work, and am very much open to being wrong here. I just don't see how it would work.
For example... let's say I bet a trillion dollars that the Canadian Communist Party (a party on the extreme fringes that few Canadians even realize exists) would NOT win the election. How would that incentive lead to them winning? What could anyone do to make that reality happen in order to claim the money?
That's not to say there aren't other ways to use money to influence an election. Of course there is. But you need to spend it in the run-up to the election, not offer it as a prize afterwards.
Am I being naive? (A: Probably. Wouldn't be the first time.)
Throw a baby in water and it can swim, no naiveté anywhere.
1) Putting out a bet that a vulnerable person will take is immoral. But that’s not what we are discussing.
2) How would putting out such a bet, a call option, lead to hedging?
3) This can turn into a long ass discussion that I’m not sure you wanna go on.
I've mulled over your comment for a couple days and I still don't really understand what you're saying... feel free not to reply in light of the delay (or to stop the conversation from spiralling), but:
> Throw a baby in water and it can swim, no naiveté anywhere.
Are you suggesting I'm doing something akin to intentionally throwing a baby in water to see if it drowns?
> 1) Putting out a bet that a vulnerable person will take is immoral. But that’s not what we are discussing.
Agreed... I'm just asking if Polymarket can effectively be used as an assassination market, and if so, isn't that a bad thing?
> 2) How would putting out such a bet, a call option, lead to hedging?
I fully admit I'm not an investment expert, so maybe I'm not using the term correctly. But in my mind, "hedging" is putting in place some type of mechanism to benefit or at least limit your losses in the case of your preferred outcome not working out. So in this scenario, a business person could simultaneously make decisions on the assumption of an ongoing trade war, as well as make other decisions that would only be beneficial in the case of the end of the trade war due to someone's demise.
(For clarity, I'm NOT advocating anyone's demise. I'm a peacenik and am not cheering for harm to fall on anyone. I'm simply discussing hypotheticals in an attempt to understand IF Polymarket could be used as an assassination market, and purely because if it could, I feel that should probably be regulated.)
> 3) This can turn into a long ass discussion that I’m not sure you wanna go on.
You're probably right, but I'm not sure where you feel this conversation is headed.
Driven by one person? The one that said they needed nukes and allies to defend themselves from their neighbor?
Oh, you mean Trump.
[0] https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1741301040.34_chrystiafreelan...
in case that isn't ick enough for you, here's "new world order" - in full, above they say "new order" - from the "former" Canadian Foreign Minister:
https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1741301040.34_chrystiafreelan...
> Driven by one person? The one that said they needed nukes and allies to defend themselves from their neighbour?
Canada doesn't have nukes and has long advocated for nuclear non-proliferation. We're still not looking to have any nukes of our own.
Trump is openly calling for the annexation of our country, and has started a trade war that no Canadian political leader of any stripe wants.
Seriously just put yourself in the shoes of a Canadian. We've supported the USA in everything they've done other than the Vietnam War, and history proved us correct in taking a pass on that one.
The USA called for Free Trade. We said OK.
The USA called for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We said OK and agreed to never have nukes of our own, taking the USA at its word that it would never violate our sovereignty. Now the so-called Leader of the Free World won't shut up about taking over our country.
The USA called for NAFTA, we said OK. Then Trump tore that up and forced a new trade deal on us. We said OK again. Then he said whoever negotiated that was an idiot who did harm to the USA, to which we still say, "Ok, that's weird, it was your deal, Donald. But let's talk."
And now we're in a trade war that no one wants on our side of the border, and that a vast majority of Americans don't want either.
So yes, driven by one person: Trump.
As for the "new world order" comments, Freeland isn't talking about some conspiracy. She's literally referencing that Trump has set aflame to the existing world order (that was largely engineered by the USA) thereby creating a "new" world order. It's a poor choice of words, but I hardly take this as sufficient evidence that Canada is the belligerent nation in this trade war.
I mean, seriously, what are you even trying to say?
The largest volume of short puts ever purchased on DJT / TMTG (Truth Social / Trump Media Stock) was made shortly before the assassination attempt at the Butler PA rally. The investment firm Austin Private Wealth, however attributed it to a clerical error of a 3rd party that accidentally multiplied their transaction by 10,000. Oops.
>My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.
As a third party, I don't particularly care who's in the wrong if I'm living in the middle of a civil war.
Most human beings organically find murder too abhorrent to contemplate or I should say plan and follow through with. Modern entertainment media may be twisting your perception here.
I don’t believe you’re being against a specific person, so you don’t have a 1-1 incentive based on the bet you’re placing.
I guess what I'm asking is whether there is anything stopping you from betting against a specific person.
I'm being vague because I don't want to put the idea out there about any specific individual.
I believe you can put positive or negative votes on specific people on Polymarket.
Maybe similar to life insurance re suicide?
With life insurance, they investigate and won't pay out if they discover it was a suicide.
Is there any similar mechanism with Polymarket for detecting, shall we say, unethical bets?
In the US life insurance is required to cover suicide, though an initial exclusion period of up to 2 years (depending on state) is permitted.
Wow, I had no idea. For all I know that's true in Canada too, I'm not an expert on Canadian insurance law, but I was under the impression that suicide was never covered anywhere. Thanks for correcting me!
It's not something insurers, healthcare professionals, or most anyone else is keen to advertise. It's even difficult to Google as most of the immediate results will be for mental health crisis resources. But AFAIU as suicide came to be understood as a consequence of mental illness, and given that the beneficiaries are no less innocent than if someone died by accident or cancer, courts began to favor and then insurance regulators began to mandate coverage.
There's interesting data on the accuracy of US presidential markets if you're interested in this kind of thing. It's especially remarkable how accurate they were (both at predicting the outcome and how close the results were) many decades before modern political polling came on the scene.
>As a basic if unsophisticated measure of the accuracy of the betting markets, the favorite almost always won, the only exception being in 1916 when betting initially favored the eventual loser (Hughes) but swung to even odds by the time the polls closed. In the 15 elections between 1884 and 1940, the mid-October betting favorite won 11 times (73 percent) and the underdog won only once (when in 1916 Wilson upset Hughes on the West Coast). In the remaining three contests (1884-92), the odds were essentially even throughout and the races very close.
https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/BettingPaper_final(JEP...
https://www.sportsoddshistory.com/other/potus-odds/
Father Guido Sarducci: "Find the Popes in the Pizza" contest:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3mdp5n/find_the_pope...
Spoiler warning: This contest only involves finding pictures of the Pope. No Popes were harmed by the actual or transubstantial production of Poperoni meat.
Deep Dish Question: Would putting pineapples on pizza whose crust is made of sacramental bread be considered host desecration?
Everyone has their own tastes, but I personally don't understand the appeal of SNL. Even skits that are so called "classics" don't strike me as all that funny. Maybe it's a generational thing.
Thank you for announcing you lack of understanding. I will update my priors. I was hoping somebody wouldn't find it funny, because that makes it even funnier to me!
No need to get defensive. GP just doesn't share your humor.
You say there's no pizza transubstantiation, but I see cheeses all over
This guy is in contention for pope, and he's definitely got an edge in this contest.
https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/pierbattista-...
At least he doesn't zing rats and cover for pedophile priests.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/10/pope-paedophil...
Related, a great new video just dropped as an intro to prediction markets:
https://youtu.be/ngX1nIvnMOM?si=QykC_5gSObT8o8e7
Yes, but market making was difficult.
The original insider info is here
Similar thread from a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151152
The markets on Polymarket for Xi and Putin's successors are going to be 100x bigger in terms of both market size and as a topic of conversation.
Went through a series of all the popes once, and man was there some bad ones:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Stephen_VI
”Stephen is chiefly remembered in connection with his conduct towards the remains of Pope Formosus. The rotting corpse of Formosus was exhumed and put on trial, before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy, in the so-called Cadaver Synod in January 897. Pressure from the Spoleto contingent and Stephen's fury with Formosus probably precipitated this extraordinary event.[4] With the corpse propped up on a throne, a deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff. During the trial, Formosus's corpse was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for accepting the papacy while he was the bishop of Porto, among other revived charges that had been levelled against him in the strife during the pontificate of John VIII. The corpse was found guilty, stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of three fingers of its right hand (the blessing fingers), clad in the garb of a layman, and quickly buried; it was then re-exhumed and thrown in the Tiber. All ordinations performed by Formosus were annulled.”
The Papacy is lit.
Edit:
"... the scandal ended in Stephen's imprisonment and his death by strangulation that summer."
The Papacy is fucking lit.
For anyone, who, like me, wanted to know about how this story truly ended:
> Pope Theodore II (Latin: Theodorus II; 840 – December 897) was the bishop of Rome and ruler of the Papal States for twenty days in December 897. His short reign occurred during a period of partisan strife... His main act as pope was to annul the recent Cadaver Synod, therefore reinstating the acts and ordinations of Pope Formosus, which had themselves been annulled by Pope Stephen VI. He also had the body of Formosus recovered from the river Tiber and reburied with honour.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Theodore_II
How the hell did you 1up my very particular historical tidbit?
Sounds like a great Jeopardy topic. “I’ll take Bad Popes for 1000 Trebek.”
Is there a bad Pope list?
There's a classic book!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Popes
You can start here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum_obscurum
The era is seen as one of the lowest points of the history of the papal office.
> “New Pope in 2025?”
Kind of a different topic but there's a growing number of people who identify as sedevacantist who don't believe Catholics have had a pope since 1958, since the papal claimants since then seen to contradict prior Catholic teachings
For example Vatican 2 taught in Dignitatis humanae:
> This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom ... within due limits
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/modernproblems/vatican2/...
Obviously if I just said that I thought it was fine to steal from you unprovoked because my "religion" gives me the freedom to do so, this would come in conflict with the normal laws against stealing. Thus religious freedom has clear "limits"; Vatican 2 doesn't define where these "due" limits are and is ambiguous, opening the door to all kinds of confusion and contradiction.
Past teaching was clearer that (note that the proposition stated is considered to be "condemned" or false):
> Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, # 78: "Hence in certain regions of Catholic name, it has been laudably sanctioned by law that men immigrating there be allowed to have public exercises of any form of worship of their own." - Condemned.[58]
However it's thought by some that once it becomes apparent these contradictions exist, it will lead to a kind of reorganization of things and an election of a forthcoming pope... and the issue of gambling will present itself again.
According to the Wikipedia there's even a weird subset who view Benedict's resignation as the point of separation (not Vatican 2).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism
People get up to the wildest ideas. Thanks for sharing
Unrelated. Just finished watching the series 'The Young Pope'. What a visual spectacle it was.
Strongly recommend The Great Beauty from the same director (Paolo Sorrentino), IMO his greatest work by far.
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500 years ago, betting on the Pope was punishable by excommunication. Today, crypto-powered prediction markets are placing odds on the next conclave. Have we come full circle, or has technology fundamentally changed the ethics of speculation? Should there be limits to what we can bet on, or is ”information price discovery“ an absolute good？
Are decentralized prediction markets a net positive for transparency, or are they just incentivizing bad behavior?
Didn't read this article but one of them I think said the 1917 Code of Canon Law removed the excommunication for this kind of gambling.
Gambling itself within reason I think was not condemned ("Gambling" in Catholic encyclopedia): https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06375b.htm
I've been thinking about prediction market designs that could preserve information discovery benefits while minimizing harm - maybe through delayed settlement periods, anti-manipulation mechanisms, or separating financial stakes from informational ones.
As web3 and DeFi make these markets more accessible and resistant to regulation, should we be building more guardrails into the protocols themselves? Or is this an unsolvable tension in market design?
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