Polymarket beat legacy institutions at processing information, in real time and in general. It was just much faster at calling states, and more confident earlier on the correct outcome.
How much of that do you think was about what the legacy institutions knew vs. what they publicly communicated? The Polymarket hive mind doesn’t necessarily care about things like maintaining democratic institutions (like not making calls that could influence elections elsewhere with still-open polls) or long-term individual reputation (like having to walk the Florida call back in 2000). I don’t see those as weaknesses.
If you have {publicly competent, publicly incompetent, privately incompetent, privately competent}, we get some information that screens off publicly competent. That leaves the narrower set {publicly incompetent, privately incompetent, privately competent}. So it’s still an update. I agree that in this case there is some room for doubt though. Depending on which institutions we are thinking of (Democratic party, newspapers, etc.), we also get some information from the speed at which people decided on/learned that Biden was going to step down.
I also frankly don’t think they’re necessarily as interested at making speedy decisions based on county level polls, which is exactly the sort of real time stats checking you’d expect prediction market enthsiasts to be great at
(obviously trad media does report on county level polls and ultimately use them to decide if they’re happy to call a race, but they don’t have much incentive to be first and they’re tracking and checking a lot of other stuff like politico commentary and rumours and relevance of human interest stories and silly voxpops)
Throw in the fact that early counts are sometimes skewed in favour of another candidate which changes around as later voters or postal votes or ballot boxes from further out districts within a county get tallied up. This varies according to jurisdiction rules and demographics and voting trends, and it’s possible serious Poly Market betters were extremely clued up on them. But this time around, they’d have been just as right about state level outcomes if much of the money moved on the relatively naive assumption that you couldn’t expect any late swings, and not factoring in that possibility would be bad calibration.
How much of that do you think was about what the legacy institutions knew vs. what they publicly communicated? The Polymarket hive mind doesn’t necessarily care about things like maintaining democratic institutions (like not making calls that could influence elections elsewhere with still-open polls) or long-term individual reputation (like having to walk the Florida call back in 2000). I don’t see those as weaknesses.
If you have {publicly competent, publicly incompetent, privately incompetent, privately competent}, we get some information that screens off publicly competent. That leaves the narrower set {publicly incompetent, privately incompetent, privately competent}. So it’s still an update. I agree that in this case there is some room for doubt though. Depending on which institutions we are thinking of (Democratic party, newspapers, etc.), we also get some information from the speed at which people decided on/learned that Biden was going to step down.
I also frankly don’t think they’re necessarily as interested at making speedy decisions based on county level polls, which is exactly the sort of real time stats checking you’d expect prediction market enthsiasts to be great at
(obviously trad media does report on county level polls and ultimately use them to decide if they’re happy to call a race, but they don’t have much incentive to be first and they’re tracking and checking a lot of other stuff like politico commentary and rumours and relevance of human interest stories and silly voxpops)
Throw in the fact that early counts are sometimes skewed in favour of another candidate which changes around as later voters or postal votes or ballot boxes from further out districts within a county get tallied up. This varies according to jurisdiction rules and demographics and voting trends, and it’s possible serious Poly Market betters were extremely clued up on them. But this time around, they’d have been just as right about state level outcomes if much of the money moved on the relatively naive assumption that you couldn’t expect any late swings, and not factoring in that possibility would be bad calibration.