I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've known about it.

It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.

you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of economics dealing with financial markets. Markets "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs, preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an incredibly useful thing.

yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy: stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity on markets.