Prediction Markets Hit Their Moment—But Philosophers Wince

prediction markets – At Manifest in Berkeley, prediction-market regulars looked past the celebrity-friendly hype and toward the risks they see in platforms built for sports betting—on deals, addiction, and trading behavior they say are hard to square with the philosophy that once

On June 11, Kalshi rolled out a buzzy ad featuring Timothée Chalamet—an unmistakable wink at pop culture, and a signal that prediction markets were finally arriving in the mainstream conversation.

For anyone watching the market ecosystem closely, it was the kind of moment that feels inevitable: something that captures the zeitgeist the way the 2022 Super Bowl commercials captured it, when it seemed like every other ad had a celebrity selling crypto.

But when the spot came up at Manifest—a festival for prediction markets—the reaction didn’t match the hype.

Most attendees I spoke with didn’t recognize it at all. The room was full of academics, startup founders, job seekers, and people actively trading. They weren’t uninterested. They were just looking the other direction—toward the “bigger picture. ” toward the risks. and toward what they believe prediction markets should be for.

Dan Schwarz. the cofounder and chief executive officer of FutureSearch—an artificial intelligence research and prediction startup—put the tension plainly. “We were all waiting for so long to be in the world we’re in now,” he said. But the platforms, he argued, have run into problems that make the promise harder to defend.

Schwarz pointed to issues ranging from insider trading to sports contracts that, he worries, are fueling addiction. In his view, the harms are not small side effects. To outweigh them, “prediction markets would have to deliver a lot more value than they are now.”

That’s the battle running under the festival’s everyday talk: forecasting philosophers often treat prediction markets like tools for the greater good—mechanisms for truth-seeking. Many people outside the movement see them as something else entirely: a way to bet on sports.

This year’s Manifest took place at Lighthaven. a compound in Berkeley. California. that takes up about half a city block and sits in the middle of the rationalist movement’s orbit. The campus. Schwarz and others would say without needing to spell it out. is also a place where safe development of AI and effective altruism sit close to the cultural core.

The energy at Lighthaven was unmistakably of-the-moment. The vibe skewed heavily male, but the crowd was still eclectic. Clusters of twenty- and thirty-somethings crowded over laptops in the Tudor-style main house. Someone told me I looked like a guy who would have a stick of gum.

Talks about markets competed for attention with sessions about the odds that AI will kill us all and lessons on how to optimize your sex life. A furry meetup drew its own momentum. There were watch parties for the first US World Cup match and for game 5 of the NBA Finals. I couldn’t find anyone who had put money on either event. though a few attendees told me they knew of folks who had made bank.

There were also markets on play-money platform Manifold about the festival itself—whether someone would break a bone (still unresolved), and whether Caroline Ellison would show up (yes).

But the background conditions around the market itself felt oddly off, like a familiar sponsor suddenly choosing to stay home.

Kalshi and Polymarket, both of which sponsored Manifest in past years, were AWOL this time. Both companies declined to comment on the change.

Last year, Kalshi held a session on sports markets—markets it had launched just six months earlier. This year, the companies are instead facilitating billions of dollars in sports trades during what many in the ecosystem describe as an especially friendly political era at the national level.

Sports were also strangely missing from the festival’s programming. During a session focused on strategies for mastering markets around world events and politics. sports didn’t appear the way they often do elsewhere. The shift felt less like an editorial choice and more like a sign of where priorities and incentives have landed.

David Bensoussan, the session’s organizer, is not a casual participant. He has made $1.6 million in profits on the platform. Under the boughs of one of Lighthaven’s trees, he challenged the marriage between the ideals of prediction and the reality of sports betting.

“The truth-seeking mechanism that prediction markets can have in terms of predicting things and making the population more informed—what on Earth does that have to do with sports?” he asked, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the chill of Bay Area shade.

The point of the question wasn’t just semantic. It was about what the market is becoming as it grows—and whether the same momentum that made prediction markets a global phenomenon is also pushing them into a narrower role that philosophers can’t easily defend.

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