Deep dive: Perception

The world through the lenses of a forecaster.

Slow periods are a moment when you can touch some grass and reflect on yourself and the world around you. This is valuable time to refine yourself and prepare for another busy season, regardless what you are doing in life. While the importance of such actions gained some traction in the recent years, we are still far off from the optimal state of awareness. That being said, if you are looking for guidance in the former go and read eastern esoteric texts. If you are looking for guidance in the latter, you might enjoy this article.

As I like to mention, you need a specific point of view to successfully navigate through the world of politics and geopolitics. Up until popularization of prediction markets there has never been a way to actually prove it. Now we can see that highly partisan bettors end up losing the entire bankroll in the matter of weeks. While it is mostly evident with far-right - “Kamala is an alcoholic and for sure they will swap her for Michelle Obama at the DNC”, we can see similar level of delusion on the far-left - to paraphrase the classic by AnonBidenBull: “Wake up, buy more Biden Yes on nomination market, go to sleep, repeat”. For those of you who are not familiar with this character, long story short is that he / she lost over a million dollars betting that Biden will be Democratic presidential nominee, even after the disastrous debate performance.

Bad point of view is easy to spot once you know the telltales. But what about a good one? What does it entail? I guess I am doing an intellectual leap between the last paragraph and this one. Because in simple terms a good point of view must go beyond partisanship. But the underlying fundament of this is much more complex.

The Illusion of Choice

Politics in democracy is an interesting problem for the general population. To be more precise the problem appears in a representative democracy. As a person grows up, they are increasingly introduced into a seemingly never ending series of problems that a country stands against. From very basic social issues like abortion or LGBT rights, through economic challenges of interest rates, inflation, taxes or minimum wage to foreign policy issues like terrorism, wars, international trade. Modern world is a complex one and only minority of population is truly interested and educated enough to focus on the whole array of problems.