Betting Thread

Amandango20 Oct 2020 2:17 UTC
33 points
2 comments1 min readLW link

At Ought, we’ve started making bets on our continuous predictions. We’ve found it a fun way to hold ourselves accountable and to combat overconfidence.

Here’s a thread for people to share continuous beliefs they’re willing to bet on, and make bets on other people’s beliefs. You can use Elicit to automatically generate a fair bet with positive expected value based on each person’s beliefs (this post explains more about how we generate the bet).

Make a bet

To share a belief you’re willing to bet on:

  1. Go to elicit.org, type in your question, and make a distribution of your beliefs

  2. Take a snapshot

  3. Post the snapshot URL and a screenshot image in a comment on this thread

To bet on someone else’s belief:

  1. Click on their snapshot URL. Click on the title to get a blank distribution

  2. Make your own distribution and take a snapshot

  3. Import your snapshot into theirs by pasting your snapshot URL into the ‘Show more’ dropdown on their snapshot

  4. Go to the Interpret tab to see the bet

Example Bet

Here is a bet we proposed between 538 and The Economist on Biden’s electoral college votes:

If the result is between 290.5 and 398.1, 538 pays The Economist $35.98. Otherwise, The Economist pays 538 $64.02.

Amandango20 Oct 2020 2:17 UTC
33 points
2 comments1 min readLW link