Apr 24
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[kind of add on to this but isn’t really]
Frank Langdon with clumsy reader.
When you went to med school, half the time you spent studying was in his dorm, with an ice pack on your ankle, or head, or knee. You had the uncanny ability to walk into every wall possible yet somehow still do it accidentally; your ankle was practically always twisted.
Frank had the image of your guilty face knocking on his dorm door memorised. Your voice ‘Langdon, you don’t have another spare ice pack?’ Echoing in his head.
When you joined him at the hospital he thought you’d be better, you’d gotten older, more mature, you’d gained more spacial awareness.
How wrong he was.
Whenever you bent down to pick something up he always found his hand cushioning the table or counter for when you came back up and inevitably hit it. When you were walking and engrossed in conversation with him, he found himself stirring you in the right direction. When you were charting he found himself with a hand on the stool so you didn’t fall off (yes it actually happened once), and whenever you tripped his hand instinctively grabbed the collar of your scrubs to pull you up.
He passed it off as instinct, he’d know you almost forever of course he was attuned to your actions and clumsiness. And he was a doctor, he couldn’t bare watching someone get hurt.
Yet every time he gently stirred you in the middle of conversation, or when his hand cushioned your head; someone’s brow raised.
First it was Santos, then Mel, then Dana, then Mohan, then Robby. Money was already exchanging hands and a secret betting board was in place.
(Santons has $20 on 5 shifts until he kisses you, Mel has $10 on 3 until he asks you out, Dana has $10 on 4 until he kisses you, Mohan (and abbot) have $20 on 8 shifts until he asks you out. Robby pretends he’s bigger than betting on relationships but he has a secret $10 on 7 shifts untill you ask him out.)
Getting Lucky - Part 1
Remy LeBeau (Gambit) x GN S/O
Word Count: 3,003
Warnings: Mild injuries, blood and violence.
“Time out. I’m dying.” You complained as you doubled over and put your hands on your knees, sweat dripping off your brow as you began the tedious process of slowing your breathing while trying your best not to pass out from heat exhaustion.
Logan, the utter bastard, had decided that the group would be training outside in the yard instead of in the Danger Room like they usually did, and he was definitely on your shit-list now since it was about 83 degrees outside and you felt like you were cooking under the mid-morning sun.
Saying he just had a “gut feeling” about the U.S.-backed airstrike, President Trump announced Monday that he’d won $60 on Kalshi after betting that he would bomb Iran. “The odds were against me, but somehow I just knew that betting on an airstrike ordered by the president of the United States would hit,” said Trump, who added that when he initially placed a $20 wager online that he would authorize a war leading to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he had no idea it would pay off as much as it did.
Full Story
Goodhart’s Law vs “prediction markets”
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture
The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."
Sure, "incentives matter" if you're seeking healthcare. That's why you're nibbled to death by co-pays and deductibles – if you could get healthcare whenever you felt like it, you might get too much healthcare. "Incentives matter," so we have to make sure that you only seek care when you really need it:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness
But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them.
So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.
But incentives really do matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.
Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric.
There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).
"The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs. This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people – non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it – to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts.
This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" – the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.
Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets – for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come. Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation.
And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money. And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large – more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter.
Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything – how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.
Workplace Betting - Flambert
Word Count: 1,985
CW: swearing, suggestive content, almost smut (not quite), slightly ooc potentially.
Summary: Prism makes a bet that Robert's waist is so small your fingers would touch if you grabbed him. Flambae needs the money and annoying Robert is one of his specialities, this was gonna be easy.
