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Normal_Anomaly comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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Nicely put.
This seems to me a special case of the "bar bet" rule: if someone offers to bet me $20 that they can demonstrate something, I should confidently expect to lose the bet, no matter how low my priors are on expecting the thing itself. (That said, in many contexts I should take the bet anyway.)
I realize that this is off topic, but why?
It has to do with the social exchange of "bar bets" (I don't actually hang out at bars, but that's the trope; similar things happen in a lot of contexts). If I'm among friends (that is, it's an iterated arrangement) and I flatly refuse to participate just on the grounds that there has to be a catch somewhere, without being able to articulate a good theory for what the catch is, I lose status that may well be worth more to me than the bet was.
Also, if someone says to you "I'll bet you $20 I can <whatever>", what they're really saying is "I'm going to do <whatever>, and it'll be super interesting and fun for all involved, especially if you put in $20 so as to add an element of risk to the proceedings".
The expectation is that some other night, you can bet them $20 about some interesting thing you can do.
Agreed. I think we're kind of saying the same thing here, though your explanation is a lot more accessible. (I really should know better than to try to talk about social patterns when my head has been recently repatterned by software requirements specification.)