A note before beginning. This piece is conspicuously gendered. It speaks of manhood, of young men, and of the contests by which boys have historically become men. Women bet, trade, and lose money to these products too, and much of what follows applies to anyone with the app open at one in the morning. But I am not the one who did the gendering. The prediction industry chose its market before I chose my subject: its advertising, its influencers, its growth demographics, and above all its implicit promise — that to know what is coming is to have arrived as a man — are aimed at young men with a precision that deserves to be met on its own ground. The piece also grows out of a book I am writing with my colleague Peter la Grand on lostness and young men, and it carries that book's address. I am following the industry's targeting, not endorsing it.
There is an industry whose product is the future. Not the future itself (i.e. the inventory is not yet in existence) but the claim to it: the position of the one who knows what is coming. Its storefronts are familiar:
- The sportsbook on every phone.
- The prediction market where you can stake money on elections, wars, the date of the next pandemic.
- The latest crypto coin that is, we are assured, about to "moon" (the industry's own term for the vertical ascent that makes everyone rich).
- The brokerage app with its candlestick charts glowing at one in the morning.
The products differ in costume; the thing being sold is the same in every case, and it is being sold most aggressively to young men.
Let's call it the prediction industry.
I want to take this industry seriously and put two questions to it. The first is empirical: simply... does it work? That question has been answered, and the answer is short. The second is the one that interests me: what is being sought? What is the psychology of a person who attempts to stake a claim to what-is-going-to-happen? The second question is the one the industry cannot afford to have asked, because the answer dissolves the product.
Q1: Does it work?
Philip Tetlock spent two decades tracking the accuracy of expert forecasters — hundreds of professionals, tens of thousands of predictions about political and economic events — and found that their accuracy was barely distinguishable from chance, with a perverse twist: the more confident the expert, the worse the forecast.¹ His later work identified the small minority who do modestly better than chance, and what distinguishes these folks is everything the industry is not. They think probabilistically. They update constantly. They hold every forecast loosely, ready to take it back.² The people best at prediction are precisely the people least willing to sell it.
The consumer end of the industry tells the same story in harder currency. Since the United States Supreme Court opened the door to legalised sports betting in 2018, economists have been watching what happens to households, and the findings are not subtle: measurable damage to credit scores, savings, and solvency, concentrated among young men in the poorest areas.³ Searches for help with gambling addiction have surged alongside the sportsbooks: millions of people typing some version of am I addicted into the void.⁴ The aggregate arithmetic of the industry is not in dispute, least of all by the industry. The house's margin is the business model. The customers, in aggregate, are mathematically guaranteed to lose.
Even the industry's most vaunted saint testifies against it. Warren Buffett is famously called the Oracle of Omaha. Let's recall what oracles are: in antiquity, they were religious functionaries. They were embedded in temples, spoke in riddles, and claimed privileged access to what mortals could not see. Buffett's honorific imports that religious authority and launders it through the language of analysis: here is a man who can see the future, and you can become such a man, or at least pay one to see it for you. Buffett himself, whenever he speaks plainly, says the opposite. He does not know what the market will do. His entire method is built on refusing to pretend otherwise: holding a handful of positions for decades, in businesses whose fundamentals he can roughly understand and affirm, and... with no attempt to time anything. He is an oracle in the only narrow way one can actually be one: i.e. to know for certain that the future is unknowable and that oracles are a sham.
The empirical question: answered. Oracle-level insight is not for sale, because it was never in stock. Everyone half-knows this, including the young man with the app open... which makes the second question the real one.
Q2: What is being sought?
For most of human history and in most places, manhood has been adjudicated, not simply conferred: e.g. earned, tested, and demonstrated, in performances and before witnesses.⁵ The contest is the canonical form: the match, the race, the fight, the hunt. And it is worth noticing what a contest is, structurally speaking. It is prescribed and bounded. There are rules, an opponent, an arena, a clock, and, critically, a finite field of possibilities. It is also informative. Whatever else it does, the contest returns a verdict about you... about your body and your preparation and your capacity to perform under pressure. Win or lose, you learn something about the self that showed up, and others witness the learning. The verdict arrives, it is about you, and it is delivered in the presence of others.
The wager wears the costume of the contest but has none of its structural components described above. It is staked not against an opponent but against indeterminacy itself... against the open future, which is the most open and probabilistic field in existence! This is the dramatic reading of what the prediction industry offers, and I think it is the accurate one: masculinity, once adjudicated in bounded conflict is now being adjudicated on the grounds of beating indeterminacy. Let me repeat this point, because it speaks to the madness of the moment in which we are living. This isn't outperforming a rival; this is outperforming the unknowability of what has not yet happened. Good luck on this count, lads.
And here the structure betrays the seeker, because the wager's verdict carries no information about the bettor whatsoever. The parlay that hits tells you nothing about yourself that the parlay that misses does not; both are samples drawn from a distribution you did not shape.
Variance is not feedback.
So the new adjudication of manhood runs on a mechanism constitutively incapable of returning the verdict sought. The verdict never arrives, so you bet again. The compulsion is not a weakness of will laid on top of the practice — it is the very structure of the practice itself! The trials of old were designed to conclude. In the Jewish tradition, after a thirteen year old has concluded his Torah portion, he is told, "now you are a man." The boy studies for months and then gets up in front of his community and performs the rite of manhood, after which... he is a man. The wagering tradition, such as it is, recurs because it cannot conclude. And where the old verdict was witnessed (embodied, public, delivered in the company of others) this one is a number on a private screen at one in the morning.
The demon at the gate
In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a tiny being stationed at a gate between two chambers of gas. The being does no work — it only watches. It sees each molecule approaching, knows its speed, and opens the gate for the fast ones alone, sorting hot from cold by knowledge and nothing else... and thereby, it seems, reversing entropy for free.⁶ Maxwell's demon was a thought experiment about whether information alone can beat the second law of thermodynamics. That is, precisely, the position the prediction industry sells: stand at the gate of the future, sort favourable outcomes from unfavourable ones by foresight alone, and harvest order from indeterminacy.
Physics spent a century working out why the demon fails, and the resolution is the one that matters here. Information is not free. Acquiring it, storing it, and above all erasing it carries an irreducible thermodynamic cost, and once the cost is counted, the demon's books always balance against him.⁷ Tetlock's forecasters and the sportsbooks' bankrupted customers are the same finding at two scales. Losses are not bad luck. They are not deficits in cleverness, remedied by better models or listening to sharper podcasts. These losses are the invoices constitutive of the second law of thermodynamics. The house always wins. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The metric
There is one more piece to the structure, and it is the one that explains why the whole adjudication is scored in money.
Living things, the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed, stay alive by feeding on order — importing it from their surroundings and exporting disorder in exchange.⁸ Money, I want to suggest, is order in its most condensed, portable, and exchangeable form. Money can be understood as something like structure-in-waiting, convertible into nearly any local organisation a life might need, e.g. food, shelter, warmth, time, or the labour of others. (This is a claim I am developing at length elsewhere; here I only present it in outline.) If manhood is now adjudicated by beating indeterminacy, money is the natural scoreboard, because money is the universal solvent of order.
But the solvent property cuts the other way, and Georg Simmel saw it a century and a quarter ago. Money is the great leveller: it dissolves every qualitative difference into a single and determinative quantitative axis.⁹ It is, in this exact sense, thermodynamically dense and informationally empty, i.e. a number with one dimension, up or down, absent any qualities.
Gregory Bateson defined information as "a difference that makes a difference,"¹⁰ and money is the medium in which differences go to die. And this is the trap at the centre of the scoreboard. The young man betting against indeterminacy is trying to announce something qualitative... that he is someone... that he has arrived... that he is the kind of man who knows. This produces a person who we recognise in the title of Robert Musil's unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.¹¹ The man who measures himself by a singular quantitative metric, even the most wildly successful at a world-historical scale, is fated or cursed to be absent qualities.
The product
What does it look like to be a man without qualities? Let's take a peek at his phone, at his monitor, on which he views his score. Because his adjudications are ongoing, unlike his forebears who crossed a threshold, he sees a record of them. The past becomes an archive of positions; the present becomes the maintenance of them; the future contracts to a series of single moments, where you are proved right or wrong, where you are the master of indeterminacy or its bitch. This is descriptive language of the man without qualities, because in the constant work of adjudicating one's manhood, to lose to the indeterminate future is to cede your manhood. There is no depth to this future, no medium in which anything could grow or become. There is only a sequence of points at which a number will move.
There is a clinical structure that has exactly this shape. It is a way of being organised around a continuous and never-ending cycle of shoring up one's sense of self through self-verification. This is a way-of-being in which the world is gathered inward as material for confirming one's position: the central metric is rank and comparison, and the temporality is narrowed to an open future foreclosed, solely, into the next verification event. (I am writing about that structure at length in a volume on narcissism, and I won't unpack it here.)
The thing to note is this: there is an upsetting convergence here between the young men whose perceived route to manhood is characterised by a singular non-qualitative metric and the narcissistic structure characterised by the singular metric predicated on rank (which is on its face qualitative but formally quantitative). These two share a temporal structure, an informational strategy, and a profound brittleness of spirit, because a self staked on a single metric is a self with a single point of failure. Qualities can bend, compensate, and absorb a loss. A number can only rise or fall.
One's own future
The future cannot be known. Say it with me: "no shit." This is not a flaw in the future, to be arbitraged away by the sufficiently clever. This is what the future is: the open, probabilistic field in which everything not yet determined will be determined. The only question is what you bring to it with you.
Here is the alternative the contest used to train, but the wager cannot. You can carry into the unknowable future the things you have taken up as your own: capacities practiced into your body, claims you are willing to stake yourself on, and constraints you have authored for the self who will arrive there.
These do not narrow the future by enumeration.
You cannot price every contingency, rehearse every line, watch every chart, or squint hard enough to squeeze determinacy out of the indeterminate. To walk into the future, into a land that is definitionally unknown and unmapped, is an act of courage. The indeterminacy of the future can only be narrowed by trust. The man who knows himself to be resourceful does not need to map out everything that might happen. The futures in which he meets what comes are the only ones for which he needs to be ready, and he is already becoming ready for those.
The man without qualities requires enumeration, and enumeration has to be purchased again every single goddamn morning. That is its business model, and the prediction industry is that business model at scale. Trust, once it is yours, does not have to be bought back. The future is what you walk toward. It is not what you watch.
Bibliography
¹ Tetlock, Philip E., Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
² Tetlock, Philip E., and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, New York: Crown Publishers, 2015.
³ Hollenbeck, Brett, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio, "The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling," working paper, SSRN, 2024, revised May 2025.
⁴ Yeola, A., M. R. Allen, N. Desai, et al., "Growing Health Concern Regarding Gambling Addiction in the Age of Sportsbooks," JAMA Internal Medicine, vol. 185, no. 4, 2025, pp. 382–389, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2024.8193.
⁵ Gilmore, David D., Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
⁶ Maxwell, James Clerk, Theory of Heat, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871, ch. 22.
⁷ Szilard, Leo, "Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen," Zeitschrift für Physik, vol. 53, 1929, pp. 840–856 (translated as "On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings"); Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process," IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 5, no. 3, 1961, pp. 183–191, DOI: 10.1147/rd.53.0183; Bennett, Charles H., "The Thermodynamics of Computation — A Review," International Journal of Theoretical Physics, vol. 21, no. 12, 1982, pp. 905–940, DOI: 10.1007/BF02084158. The negentropy–information bridge is formalised in Brillouin, Léon, Science and Information Theory, New York: Academic Press, 1956.
⁸ Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944.
⁹ Simmel, Georg, Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900; English: The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
¹⁰ Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
¹¹ Musil, Robert, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930–1943 (unfinished); English: The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.