The Great Intrade Sock Puppet Fire of 2012

Photo by Bastique

Seems Putin's asymmetric war on public opinion may have been fought with an army of sock puppets.

Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites.

At Intrade in the spring and early summer of 2012, I was commenting regularly in the "Obama to win" market. For every liberal commenter, there would be at least ten "conservatives." I would get pounded with insults, Gish Gallops, every kind of fallacy in the book behind some of the most horrific arguments for terrible things you've ever heard of.

It got so bad that Intrade changed the policy to only allow paid accounts (people actually funding their accounts for betting) to comment.

It got so quiet all of a sudden that I still call it The Great Intrade Sock Puppet Fire of 2012.

Why Haven't We Seen More Doghouse Riley Tributes?

Sam Wang's Meta-Margin, Princeton Election Consortium

Scott Clevenger over at World O' Crap dug up some awesome quotes from the late Doghouse Riley.

Jesus, think what these people would be like without the humanizing effect of Christianity.

Since I'm a fan of poker who discovered the far superior form of gambling known as prediction markets, this one really stuck out:

“Postive expectation” is a measure of a bet’s ratio to the total pot multiplied by the odds of winning. So if you’re facing a $10 raise for a $20 pot, and your expectation of winning is even, you’d make the bet because you win $20 half the time and lose only $10 the other half. Of course, for every positive expectation there’s an equal and opposite negative expectation, and that doesn’t count your ability to estimate the chances of winning, or the rake, but then I’ve never yet met a(n amateur) gambler who didn’t tell you how much in won in Vegas while leaving out what he spent to get it. It’s the triumph of hope over mathematics, which is why schools hold bake sales and bookies don’t.

I'm really going to miss that guy.

That's a whole lot of Positive Expectation right there.

Nate Silver Should Start the New Intrade

So many great buying opportunities.

Kevin Drum is skeptical that Nate Silver has anything to add on weather and economics.

But weather, economics, and education? I'm skeptical that you can just parachute into those fields and add a lot of value. They're far more complex, are already heavily populated with sophisticated statistical modeling, and generally require some serious subject matter expertise in addition to raw number-crunching skill.

I don't know what he wants to do on education, but weather and econ sound interesting. It sounds a lot like the Intrade markets I did so well in: climate, politics, and economics. What I want to see is Nate and some rich friends of his create a new Intrade, by taking advantage of the new state laws in NV and NJ for online gambling, which the DoJ said they weren't going to challenge.

This week, New Jersey became the third state, after Delaware and Nevada, to pass an online gambling bill. This came thanks to a complete reversal in policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. For years the agency had said online gambling was illegal—a violation of the Wire Act of 1961 that bans betting across state lines—and had prosecuted the owners of online gaming sites. Then late last year it told states wanting to start online lotteries that the Wire Act applied only to sports betting and not to other games. Industry observers were shocked. “The Justice Department came out 180 degrees opposite of where it was before,” says David Stewart, a lawyer specializing in gambling law at Ropes & Gray. “I’ve never seen that.”

So, I guess I should thank Eric Holder for the eventual return of my denier's tax revenues.