satt comments on Prediction market sequence requested - Less Wrong

30 [deleted] 26 October 2012 10:59AM

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Comment author: satt 27 October 2012 01:48:38PM 5 points [-]

Yeah. I'd guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity. As of a year ago we had something like consensus on atheism (92.3% atheist & agnostic vs. 6.3% deist/pantheist/theist) but a more even split on politics, a proxy for economic opinions (32.3% libertarian, 27.1% socialist & communist, 34.5% liberal, and 2.8% conservative).

Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments, while repeatedly bickering about theism and wondering why theism was relatively mindkilling.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 October 2012 08:39:29PM 2 points [-]

Yeah. I'd guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity.

This is because of selection effects more than anything else.

Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments

I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.

Comment author: satt 28 October 2012 11:42:10AM 3 points [-]

I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.

I'm describing what could happen on a counterfactual LW, not what should happen.

I don't intend to decide whether an issue's solved on the basis of whether people I hang out with agree with me. But I recognize that I'm human (as are you), with the accompanying cognitive biases, and the reference class forecast isn't a sunny one.