In 2024, Polymarket took the world by storm by proving itself to be more reliable than traditional polling methods to predict election outcomes. Since its breakthrough last November, prediction markets have gained traction as the best way to determine whether certain events will happen. But they represent only the first iteration of something much bigger: a new way to aggregate sentiment and traction of ideas in a structured way.
While prediction markets excel at forecasting discrete events—who wins an election, whether a company hits its earning target, etc—they capture only part of what we need to know. What if we could bet not just on events, but on ideas themselves? What if we could see, in real-time, whether the world thinks a new research paper will be a breakthrough, or whether a new policy will be a success? This is the promise of persuasion markets: a structured way to synthesize sentiment and track the influence of ideas before they become reality.
Information is the currency of the 21st century. It is digital oil. And like any digital commodity, it is easy to copy and distribute. Social media and other internet-based platforms have made it possible to spread insights easier than before. This has led to a proliferation of data. A person from anywhere in the world can now share their thoughts and ideas with the world in a matter of seconds, and have them be taken seriously by millions of people. There is now so much content out there that it is very difficult to sift through and find quality signals that are worth paying attention to. The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed; quality content drowns in sora slop videos. As anybody familiar with machine learning knows, the quality of your data is the quality of your model. Finding new ways to distill intelligence that reflects the collective opinion of the real world is needed more than ever.
People scroll X, read the WSJ, and watch CNN because they want to understand the world. They want to be informed, not only on what has happened, but also the current ideas that are shaping the future. While X and other platforms excel at surfacing emerging trends, they lack the framework needed to synthesize the cacophony into a coherent signal. There's no way to truly gauge which ideas are gaining traction and which are fading. Hence, the need for a new mechanism that allows people to monitor where the world is heading and how culture is changing.
This is where persuasion markets are needed. Imagine betting on accelerationism or AI safety. This is exactly what persuasion markets enable people to do. By allowing people to place money on where they think the world of ideas is going, the public gets the best signal of where the world actually is going. Rather than relying on tweets from your favorite posters, everyone can see the market consensus towards an idea in real time. The mechanics are simple: if you believe an idea will gain traction, you buy shares. If you think it will fade, you sell. The price reflects collective belief about an idea's future.
The implications extend far beyond simple betting. First, persuasion markets would provide real-time intelligence on the collective consciousness. Decision-makers—from investors to policymakers to entrepreneurs—could make choices based on the best available signals about where ideas are heading, not just where they've been. Second, prediction markets would become the derivative markets of persuasion markets. If persuasion markets show that certain policy positions are gaining widespread acceptance, prediction markets can then forecast the electoral outcomes those positions might produce. You'd know a candidate would become president because their positions align with the market's consensus on where ideas are heading. Third, dissenting thinkers could profit from their contrarian views while gaining traction for their heretical ideas in a much more timely manner. A thinker who correctly identifies an emerging idea before it goes mainstream could both make money and accelerate its adoption. In a sense, with enough traction, the world would look at persuasion markets and correct itself in real time to the best intelligence available.
Of course, challenges remain. Could markets be manipulated? What about ideas that can't be quantified? There's also the risk of markets becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, where betting on an idea's success actually causes its success. But these are problems worth solving. The alternative—navigating an information-saturated world without signals—is the default.