Thanks for the detail—it makes me realize I responded unclearly. I don’t understand your claim (presumably based on this offer of a wager) that “the LessWrong community in aggregate, something has gone horribly horribly wrong.”
I don’t disagree with most of your points—betting is a bit unusual (in some groups; in some it’s trivially common), there are high transaction costs, and practical considerations outweigh the information value in most cases.
I don’t intend to say (and I don’t THINK anyone is saying) you should undertake bets that make you uncomfortable. I do believe (but tend not to proselytize) that aspiring rationalists benefit a lot by using a betting mindset in considering their beliefs: putting a number to it and using the intuition pump of how you imagine feeling winning or losing a bet is quite instructive. In cases where it’s practical, actually betting reifies this intuition, and you get to experience actually changing your probability estimate and acknowledging it with an extremely-hard-to-fool-yourself-or-others signal.
I don’t actually follow the chesterton’s fence argument. What is the taboo you’re worried that you don’t understand well enough to break (in some circumstances)? “normies don’t do this” is a rotten and decrepit enough fence that I don’t think it’s sufficient on it’s own for almost anything that’s voluntarily chosen by participants and has plausibly low (not provably, of course, but it’s not much of a fence to start with) externalities.
I don’t understand your claim (presumably based on this offer of a wager) that “the LessWrong community in aggregate, something has gone horribly horribly wrong.”
If you’re asking how I would distinguish “horribly, horribly, wrong” from “just somewhat horribly wrong” or plain “wrong”, my answer would be that there’s no real distinction and I just used that particular turn of phrase because that’s the phrase that evand used.
I don’t intend to say (and I don’t THINK anyone is saying) you should undertake bets that make you uncomfortable.
Sure, but “bets that make me uncomfortable” is “all rationalist bets”.
“normies don’t do this” is a rotten and decrepit enough fence that I don’t think it’s sufficient on it’s own
I should be clearer yet. I’m wondering how you distinguish “the community in aggregate has gone (just somewhat) horribly wrong” from “I don’t think this particular mechanism works for everyone, certainly not me”.
If making actual wagers makes you uncomfortable, don’t do it. If analyzing many of your beliefs in a bet-like framing (probability distribution of future experiences, with enough concreteness to be resolvable at some future point) is uncomfortable, I’d recommend giving that part of it another go, as it’s pretty generally useful as a way to avoid fuzzy thinking (and fuzzy communication, which I consider a different thing).
In any case, thanks for the discussion—I always appreciate hearing from those with different beliefs and models of how to improve our individual and shared beliefs about the world.
Thanks for the detail—it makes me realize I responded unclearly. I don’t understand your claim (presumably based on this offer of a wager) that “the LessWrong community in aggregate, something has gone horribly horribly wrong.”
I don’t disagree with most of your points—betting is a bit unusual (in some groups; in some it’s trivially common), there are high transaction costs, and practical considerations outweigh the information value in most cases.
I don’t intend to say (and I don’t THINK anyone is saying) you should undertake bets that make you uncomfortable. I do believe (but tend not to proselytize) that aspiring rationalists benefit a lot by using a betting mindset in considering their beliefs: putting a number to it and using the intuition pump of how you imagine feeling winning or losing a bet is quite instructive. In cases where it’s practical, actually betting reifies this intuition, and you get to experience actually changing your probability estimate and acknowledging it with an extremely-hard-to-fool-yourself-or-others signal.
I don’t actually follow the chesterton’s fence argument. What is the taboo you’re worried that you don’t understand well enough to break (in some circumstances)? “normies don’t do this” is a rotten and decrepit enough fence that I don’t think it’s sufficient on it’s own for almost anything that’s voluntarily chosen by participants and has plausibly low (not provably, of course, but it’s not much of a fence to start with) externalities.
If you’re asking how I would distinguish “horribly, horribly, wrong” from “just somewhat horribly wrong” or plain “wrong”, my answer would be that there’s no real distinction and I just used that particular turn of phrase because that’s the phrase that evand used.
Sure, but “bets that make me uncomfortable” is “all rationalist bets”.
I disagree.
I should be clearer yet. I’m wondering how you distinguish “the community in aggregate has gone (just somewhat) horribly wrong” from “I don’t think this particular mechanism works for everyone, certainly not me”.
If making actual wagers makes you uncomfortable, don’t do it. If analyzing many of your beliefs in a bet-like framing (probability distribution of future experiences, with enough concreteness to be resolvable at some future point) is uncomfortable, I’d recommend giving that part of it another go, as it’s pretty generally useful as a way to avoid fuzzy thinking (and fuzzy communication, which I consider a different thing).
In any case, thanks for the discussion—I always appreciate hearing from those with different beliefs and models of how to improve our individual and shared beliefs about the world.