The latest episode of Hard Fork has a 20 min section dedicated to prediction markets! Kevin Roose and Casey Newton go into much more depth in this podcast than in the earlier NYT article, covering the history of prediction markets, the rationalist movement, Google’s internal markets, insider trading, etc. They even talk about embedding prediction markets in the New York Times!
You can listen to the full podcast here (the segment runs from 29:30 to 48:15); a transcript is available there too. Some highlights:
Casey Newton
Kevin, you did some great reporting this week about prediction markets, and it all started at something called Manifest, which — I read that and I thought, well, is this just a festival for men? Tell us about what manifest is.
Kevin Roose
[LAUGHS]: So this is a field trip that I had been planning for a while. This was a very fun and interesting reporting trip to a conference for what they call forecasting nerds, so people who like to predict the future and bet on the future. And this was actually something that came out of an episode that we did several months ago about LK-99. Do you remember this episode?
Casey Newton
Yes, of course.
Kevin Roose
So this was the room-temperature superconductor that a group of scientists in South Korea had claimed to have come up with. And there was this period of maybe a week or two where people were hotly debating whether this was real or not. And we mentioned on the show the existence of something called Manifold Markets, which is a prediction-markets platform where people can go and wager fake money on real-world events. And one of the most popular markets was about LK-99. And it was a way to track, like, what the smart-money people thought was going to happen and whether this prediction of a room-temperature superconductor would pan out. Now, it did not, right? LK-99 did not turn out to be a room-temperature superconductor. But I heard from one of the founders of Manifold Markets who said, if you’re interested in prediction markets, we’re actually having a big conference in a few weeks in Berkeley called Manifest, and you should come report on it. And I thought, well, that sounds like a fun trip.
Casey Newton
Yeah, I’d actually predicted that you were going to go to that, so that was interesting. [KEVIN LAUGHS] So you get there. And sort of describe the scene. Because what you’ve described — I’ll say it — sounds a little bit dull, but then I read your story, and it actually seemed like it might be a good time.