B and C seem like arguments against “simple” (i.e., even-odds) bets as well as weird (e.g., “70% probability”) bets, except for C’s “like bets where I’m surer...about what’s going on”, which is addressed by A (sibling comment).
Your point about differences in wealth causing different people to have different thresholds for meaningfulness is valid, though I’ve found that it matters much less than you’d expect in practice. It turns out that people making upwards of $100k/yr still do not feel good about opening up their wallet you give you $3. In fact, it feels so bad that if you do it more than a few times in a row, you really feel the need to examine your own calibration, which is exactly the success condition.
I’ve found that the small ritual of exchanging pieces of paper just carries significantly more weight than would be implied by their relation to my total savings. (For this, it’s surprisingly important to exchange actual pieces of paper; electronic payments make the whole thing less real, ruining the whole point.)
Finally, it’s hard to argue with someone’s utility function, but I think that some rationalists get this one badly wrong by failing to actually multiply real numbers. For example, if you make a $10 bet (as defined in my sibling comment) every day for a year at the true probabilities, the standard decision of your profit/loss on the year is <$200, or $200/365 per day, which seems like a very small annual cost to practice being better calibrated and evaluate just how well-calibrated you are.
(continued, to address a different point)
B and C seem like arguments against “simple” (i.e., even-odds) bets as well as weird (e.g., “70% probability”) bets, except for C’s “like bets where I’m surer...about what’s going on”, which is addressed by A (sibling comment).
Your point about differences in wealth causing different people to have different thresholds for meaningfulness is valid, though I’ve found that it matters much less than you’d expect in practice. It turns out that people making upwards of $100k/yr still do not feel good about opening up their wallet you give you $3. In fact, it feels so bad that if you do it more than a few times in a row, you really feel the need to examine your own calibration, which is exactly the success condition.
I’ve found that the small ritual of exchanging pieces of paper just carries significantly more weight than would be implied by their relation to my total savings. (For this, it’s surprisingly important to exchange actual pieces of paper; electronic payments make the whole thing less real, ruining the whole point.)
Finally, it’s hard to argue with someone’s utility function, but I think that some rationalists get this one badly wrong by failing to actually multiply real numbers. For example, if you make a $10 bet (as defined in my sibling comment) every day for a year at the true probabilities, the standard decision of your profit/loss on the year is <$200, or $200/365 per day, which seems like a very small annual cost to practice being better calibrated and evaluate just how well-calibrated you are.