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wedrifid comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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That's remarkably confident. This doesn't really read like Newsome to me (and how would one find out with sufficient certainty to decide a bet for that much?).
Just how confident is it? It's a large figure and colloquially people tend to confuse size of bet with degree of confidence - saying a bigger number is more of a dramatic social move. But ultimately to make a bet at even odds all Mitchell needs is to be confident that if someone takes him up on the bet then he has 50% or more chance of being correct. The size of the bet only matters indirectly as an incentive for others to do more research before betting.
Mitchell's actual confidence is some unspecified figure between 0.5 and 1 and is heavily influenced by how overconfident he expects others to be.
This would only be true if money had linear utility value [1]. I, for example, would not take a $1000 bet at even odds even if I had 75% confidence of winning, because with my present financial status I just can't afford to lose $1000. But I would take such a bet of $100.
The utility of winning $1000 is not the negative of the utility of losing $1000.
[1] or, to be precise, if it were approximately linear in the range of current net assets +/- $1000
From what I have inferred about Michael's financial status the approximation seemed safe enough.
Fair enough in this case, but it's important to avoid assuming that the approximation is universally applicable.
Risk aversion and other considerations like gambler's ruin usually mean that people insist on substantial edges over just >50%. This can be ameliorated by wealth, but as far as I know, Porter is at best middle-class and not, say, a millionaire.
So your points are true and irrelevant.
We obviously use the term 'irrelevant' to mean different things.
In a case with extremely asymmetric information like this one they actually are almost the same thing, since the only payoff you can reasonably expect is the rhetorical effect of offering the bet. Offering bets the other party can refuse and the other party has effectively perfect information about can only lose money (if money is the only thing the other party cares about and they act at least vaguely rationally).