This is why principled ethical behavior MUST be a cornerstone of acceptable behavior above greed. Even if you are washing and selling greed as “financial obligations” “capital interests” or some other corporate bullshit.

The incentive was already there without prediction markets, just like the incentive to screw with drug trials has been around as long as biotech companies that are publicly traded have been making drugs. Wherever there is a measurement tied to a monetary payout, unscrupulous people will try to manipulate it.

This doesn’t change anything since the incentive already existed before prediction markets, people are getting unreasonably emotional about prediction markets due to headline overload.

Creating a new incentive where one does not exist can create moral hazards, an easy example is introducing wildfire prediction markets.

But yes, there is portion of "investing" that is actually gambling. That is what Enron did and it threw down the economy. Those gamblers usually loose and we have quite a lot of regulations trying to restrict the impact of that gambling.

And yes, the usual suspect hate those regulations.

As with most terrible behaviors when a few people do it the results to society aren't so bad. When it gains potential for mass application of the same behavior it becomes a crisis.

the later would not be affect by betting on clinical trials being allowed or prohibited, so I don't think the comparison proves that this would help