Viliam comments on Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Elo 08 February 2016 04:47AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 09 February 2016 04:30:17PM 6 points [-]

A cautionary statement about betting on your beliefs from Tyler Cowen:

Bryan Caplan is pleased that he has won his bet with me, about whether unemployment will fall under five percent. ... The Benthamite side of me will pay Bryan gladly, as I don’t think I’ve ever had a ten dollar expenditure of mine produce such a boost in the utility of another person.

That said, I think this episode is a good example of what is wrong with betting on ideas. Betting tends to lock people into positions, gets them rooting for one outcome over another, it makes the denouement of the bet about the relative status of the people in question, and it produces a celebratory mindset in the victor. That lowers the quality of dialogue and also introspection, just as political campaigns lower the quality of various ideas — too much emphasis on the candidates and the competition.

Comment author: Viliam 09 February 2016 05:02:32PM 7 points [-]

Seems like a problem that could be solved by making more bets.

If you only make one bet, you have either 0% or 100% success rate, and neither reflects how good you actually are.

Comment author: gwern 09 February 2016 09:05:14PM *  7 points [-]

Yes. I can understand feeling locked in if you only make 1 bet every few years and it's extremely high profile, and you make it part of your identity. But I can't imagine feeling like that in any of my IEM or GJP trades (or even my PB predictions!), since I was taking positions in a number of markets and could regularly back off or take the other side when the price changed to something I disagreed with; there you are encouraged to disidentify with trades as much as possible and take an outside view where you're just making one of many calibrated predictions.

This is definitely a flaw of rare high-stakes high-transaction-cost interpersonal betting: they're good for calling 'bullshit!' but not so good for less charged broader aggregation and elicitation of views. This is something PB is good at, and a distributed prediction market might be even better at.

Comment author: Lumifer 09 February 2016 05:08:27PM 0 points [-]

Seems like a problem that could be solved by making more bets.

The problem is not finding out "how good you actually are". The problem is that making the bet locks you into a particular state of mind which involves more bias and less updating on evidence.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 09 February 2016 08:43:11PM 1 point [-]

But still if you do a lot of small betting instead of few large there you have less chance to lock yourself in a hole.

Comment author: bogus 09 February 2016 10:09:21PM 0 points [-]

The problem is that making the bet locks you into a particular state of mind which involves more bias and less updating on evidence.

It's not clear that this would be the case. Even if you're making only a few bets at a time (as opposed to participating in a liquid market), there will always be some odds at which you'll want to hedge the bet from the other side.

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