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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.
Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.
I think a major influence was "Wisdom of the Crowds" which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There's an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml
There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.
CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie
Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?
RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.
I can't find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :
So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.
The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or "revise and resubmit." But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?
Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
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