gwern 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: 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.