this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
68 points (84.7% liked)
Technology
70048 readers
3941 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, here's how I think about it.
Let's assume there are 10 candidates with a 1% chance to win each, and 9 candidates with a 10% chance to win each, as given by betting odds. Let's also assume the odds are off by 2x for those bottom 10 candidates, and 1.1% point for the top 9.
The smart move is to bet on the bottom 10 candidates because your expected return is much higher than expected.
However, you still have an 80% chance of failure. That's fine if you have enough instances to bet on, but you have maybe two or three in a lifetime. That's not a high likelihood of winning long term, not to mention that most of your bets will fail even if you win once.
But that's me thinking from an investing perspective since I'm not a gambler.
I think the idea is that there are other events with similar risk profiles, the papal election is just an example of one.
Could you give a few examples? The papal election seems very unique.