I can’t give you an exhaustive list of the problems I have with betting, but some reasons:
Properly phrasing a bet is difficult, like writing a computer program that runs perfectly the first time, or phrasing a wish to a genie. I’m no good at avoiding loopholes, and there’s no shortage of rationalists who’d exploit them as long as they can get a win. And just saying “I won’t prey on any technicalities” isn’t enough without being able to read your mind and know what you consider a technicality.
Betting has social overhead. This is the “explain to your parents/wife/children why you bet this money” scenario.
Some people value money differently than I do. Some people just have glitchy HumanOS 1.0 which leads them to spend money irrationally. Some people are just overconfident. If I bet against such a person I may win money inbe an overall winner after X years, but until the X years are up, I’ll have essentially lost the argument, because my opponent was willing to spend money—there must be some substance behind his argument or he wouldn’t do that, right?
As others have pointed out, it’s a bad idea to trust random people on the Internet to pay me money in X years. “I have a reputation” is not enough when real money is involved. And I don’t have access to the sophisticated information used by financial services in the real world to determine how likely someone is to be able to pay money in the future based on past performance. And it’s not unknown for a trusted person to run away with money. (That wasn’t even the incident I was thinking of, but I couldn’t find that one.) (Edit: does not apply, since you’d be the one paying the money)
To get over the Chesterton’s Fence bar, you’re going to need more than just “well, it’s been studied and people do it for irrational reasons”. Social customs evolve as memes, and something that people don’t do for reason X may nevertheless have persisted because it is, for reason X, beneficial.
At any rate, I haven’t seen your studies and I’m not going to trust that you’ve described them properly without some links.
Even if I did get links and read the studies, we get into epistemic learned helplessness. I wouldn’t change my mind about betting just because the studies seem convincing and I can’t find any flaw in them using solely my own knowledge. I’d like to at least hear from opponents of those studies and see how convincing they are, and see how controversial the studies are. Then I’d have to check whether they might be subject to the replication crisis. And at this point, the overhead of researching betting will itself make most bets unprofitable.
Rationalists have a habit of stringing together poorly founded estimates to get more poorly founded estimates and acting based on them. I don’t agree with this practice, but concluding that I should risk money here would imply paying attention to poorly founded estimates.
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.
I can’t give you an exhaustive list of the problems I have with betting, but some reasons:
Properly phrasing a bet is difficult, like writing a computer program that runs perfectly the first time, or phrasing a wish to a genie. I’m no good at avoiding loopholes, and there’s no shortage of rationalists who’d exploit them as long as they can get a win. And just saying “I won’t prey on any technicalities” isn’t enough without being able to read your mind and know what you consider a technicality.
Betting has social overhead. This is the “explain to your parents/wife/children why you bet this money” scenario.
Some people value money differently than I do. Some people just have glitchy HumanOS 1.0 which leads them to spend money irrationally. Some people are just overconfident. If I bet against such a person I may
win money inbe an overall winner after X years, but until the X years are up, I’ll have essentially lost the argument, because my opponent was willing to spend money—there must be some substance behind his argument or he wouldn’t do that, right?As others have pointed out, it’s a bad idea to trust random people on the Internet to pay me money in X years. “I have a reputation” is not enough when real money is involved. And I don’t have access to the sophisticated information used by financial services in the real world to determine how likely someone is to be able to pay money in the future based on past performance. And it’s not unknown for a trusted person to run away with money. (That wasn’t even the incident I was thinking of, but I couldn’t find that one.)(Edit: does not apply, since you’d be the one paying the money)To get over the Chesterton’s Fence bar, you’re going to need more than just “well, it’s been studied and people do it for irrational reasons”. Social customs evolve as memes, and something that people don’t do for reason X may nevertheless have persisted because it is, for reason X, beneficial.
At any rate, I haven’t seen your studies and I’m not going to trust that you’ve described them properly without some links.
Even if I did get links and read the studies, we get into epistemic learned helplessness. I wouldn’t change my mind about betting just because the studies seem convincing and I can’t find any flaw in them using solely my own knowledge. I’d like to at least hear from opponents of those studies and see how convincing they are, and see how controversial the studies are. Then I’d have to check whether they might be subject to the replication crisis. And at this point, the overhead of researching betting will itself make most bets unprofitable.
Rationalists have a habit of stringing together poorly founded estimates to get more poorly founded estimates and acting based on them. I don’t agree with this practice, but concluding that I should risk money here would imply paying attention to poorly founded estimates.
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.