You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (215)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.