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Mass_Driver comments on How to always have interesting conversations - Less Wrong
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A decent analysis, but it's premised on a bad assumption. I didn't bet; I issued a challenge. Notice that, unlike in a bet, if JoshuaZ failed, he would not necessarily have forfeited karma to me or anyone else. I certainly agree with you that it would be foolish to bet money against karma. I see my actions more as offering a prize for the successful completion of a task than as betting that JoshuaZ would be unable to complete the task.
Sure, but they're still unlikely to vote up a bullshit post. Maybe that gives JoshuaZ a moderate handicap, but my primary purpose was to inspire JoshuaZ to produce a useful analysis that interested me, and not to inspire the LW crowd to precisely assess the worth of that analysis. I suppose in the future I might set a slightly higher threshold -- maybe 7 or 8 karma points.
Having read JoshuaZ's previous contributions to the conversation, and having read the challenge, I was pretty much intending to vote up his response as long as it wasn't completely inane (it had already crossed the threshold when I read it, so I didn't bother).
I wonder if any of the (presumably three) people who did upvote it before it crossed the threshold had similar thought processes...?
I'm one of the people who upvoted it, and I think I had a similar thought process. I wasn't movitated by a belief that JoshuaZ would choose a charity I liked, though. I just read his post and thought his attempted definition was a good try, and (more importantly) that it was an interesting clarification that would provoke good discussion.
My analysis assumes that any challenge like that is a bet of money against some social value; if there were no utility on one side the challenge would not be taken up; if there were no utility on the other side the challenge would not be offered.
I'm sorry; I don't understand.
There is, as you say, utility on both sides of the transaction. What does that have to with whether a bet has been placed?
Is it a challenge, or a bet? I'm just saying that examining it as a bet offers some insight into the unexpectedly lopsided results.