On further edit: apparently I’m a blind idiot and didn’t see the clearly stated “5 year time horizon” despite actively looking for it. Sorry. I’ll leave this here as a monument to my obliviousness, unless you prefer to delete it.
Without some kind of time limit, a bet doesn’t seem well formed, and without a reasonably short time limit, it seems impractical.
No matter how small the chance that the bet will have to be paid, it has to be possible for it to be paid, or it’s not a bet. Some entity has to have the money and be obligated to pay it out. Arranging for a bet to be paid at any time after their death would cost more than your counterparty would get out of the deal. Trying to arrange a perpetual trust that could always pay is not only grossly impractical, but actually illegal in a lot of places. Even informally asking people to hold money is really unreliable very far out. And an amount of money that could be meaningful to future people could end up tied up forever anyway, which is weird. Even trying to be sure to have the necessary money until death could be an issue.
I’m not really motivated to play, but as an example I’m statistically likely to die in under 25 years barring some very major life extension progress. I’m old for this forum, but everybody has an expiration date, including you yourself. Locating your heirs to pay them could be hard.
Deciding the bet can get hard, too. A recognizable Less Wrong community as such probably will not last even 25 years. Nor will Metaculus or whatever else. A trustee is not going to have the same judgement as the person who originally took your bet.
That’s all on top of the more “tractable” long-term risks that you can at least value in somehow… like collapse of whatever currency the bet is denominated in, AI-or-whatever completely remaking the economy and rendering money obsolete, the Rapture, etc, etc.
… but at the same time, it doesn’t seem like there’s any particular reason to expect definitive information to show up within any adequately short time.
On edit: I bet somebody’s gonna suggest a block chain. Those don’t necessarily have infinite lives, either, and the oracle that has to tell the chain to pay out could disappear at any time. And money is still tied up indefinitely, which is the real problem with perpetuities.
On further edit: apparently I’m a blind idiot and didn’t see the clearly stated “5 year time horizon” despite actively looking for it. Sorry. I’ll leave this here as a monument to my obliviousness, unless you prefer to delete it.
Without some kind of time limit, a bet doesn’t seem well formed, and without a reasonably short time limit, it seems impractical.
No matter how small the chance that the bet will have to be paid, it has to be possible for it to be paid, or it’s not a bet. Some entity has to have the money and be obligated to pay it out. Arranging for a bet to be paid at any time after their death would cost more than your counterparty would get out of the deal. Trying to arrange a perpetual trust that could always pay is not only grossly impractical, but actually illegal in a lot of places. Even informally asking people to hold money is really unreliable very far out. And an amount of money that could be meaningful to future people could end up tied up forever anyway, which is weird. Even trying to be sure to have the necessary money until death could be an issue.
I’m not really motivated to play, but as an example I’m statistically likely to die in under 25 years barring some very major life extension progress. I’m old for this forum, but everybody has an expiration date, including you yourself. Locating your heirs to pay them could be hard.
Deciding the bet can get hard, too. A recognizable Less Wrong community as such probably will not last even 25 years. Nor will Metaculus or whatever else. A trustee is not going to have the same judgement as the person who originally took your bet.
That’s all on top of the more “tractable” long-term risks that you can at least value in somehow… like collapse of whatever currency the bet is denominated in, AI-or-whatever completely remaking the economy and rendering money obsolete, the Rapture, etc, etc.
… but at the same time, it doesn’t seem like there’s any particular reason to expect definitive information to show up within any adequately short time.
On edit: I bet somebody’s gonna suggest a block chain. Those don’t necessarily have infinite lives, either, and the oracle that has to tell the chain to pay out could disappear at any time. And money is still tied up indefinitely, which is the real problem with perpetuities.