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

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

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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.