how's that an x-risk?

Is it just me, or are the betting rules on Bets of Bitcoin, er, incomprehensible? It takes the worst form of betting - parimutuel betting in horse racing - in common use in America, and adds a bunch of arbitrary time based rules to adjust how bitcoins are spread among the winners. In order to actually make a bet there, I would have to estimate:

1. The probability of an event occurring.
2. An expectation of the amount of betting to occur on the other side of the bet.
3. An expectation of the amount of betting to come into my side of the bet until the period when the bet closes.
4. The actual time distribution of bets on my side for both existing bet sums (this information is not disclosed), and forthcoming bet sums.

I'm fairly certain this is the worst betting scheme I've ever seen, and I'm somewhat suspicious of it given the general sketchiness of the bitcoin community (partially offset by the revealed incompetence of the bitcoin community). One notable casualty of this system is the ability to convert their betting information into informational probability estimates of the event occurring.

Don't forget the threat of high-atmospheric detonations creating electromagnetic pulses big enough to destroy every un-shielded microchip in Europe, a.k.a., every microchip in Europe. Even a rogue state can manage that.

1: Obviously I would PREFER 1.0, but if it appears likely that it will never happen, I'd be okay with 0.900. I won't be a clever motherfucker anymore, but I'll still be a motherfucker. As long as I have the capacity to love and be loved, I'll find a way to be happy. It might not be the way I use now, but I have confidence I'll find one.

2: Anyone who has themselves frozen without considering this angle is being very silly; ideally we just look in their will. If they didn't specify conditions for their revivification, we should revive them whenever the value seems morally justifiable to the unfreezer due to improving conditions or just economic necessity.

3: I'll volunteer to be the trial for 0.500 function. Sure, it'll suck, and I'll probably die again in the near future, confused and unhappy, but whatever, yo. Science ain't easy. Plus right now I'm resigned to my eventual death regardless, so what the fuck ever.

How are the worst-case-scenario recovery tools? I.E., if you're injured, do you risk bankruptcy from medical care? How's the crime risk? Long term health risks?

Speaking as a man who is dubious enough about the "invisible hand of the free market" that I universally refer to it in sarcasm-quotes, I would be very interested in such a sequence.

The parallels with Newcomb's Paradox are obvious, and the moral is the same. If you aren't prepared to sacrifice a convenient axiom for greater utility, you're not really rational. In the case of Newcomb's Paradox, that axiom is Dominance. In this case, that axiom is True Knowledge Is Better Than False Knowledge.

In this instance, go for falsehood.

the word "liberty", the linguistic equivalent of the One Ring.

Too much liberty makes you "feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."? Come to think of it there is an element of truth to that.

The point still applies. What do you mean by “correlation” --formally or informally-- when one (or both) of the variables is constant across the population?

A discussion I had in the reddit comments on that Slate post made me invent this fake argument:

A: People who drink water inevitably end up dead. Therefore drinking water causes death.

B: No, that is correlation, not causation.

C: No, it is not correlation. To calculate correlation you divide the covariance of the two variables by the variance of each of the variables. In this case there is no variance in either variable, so you're dividing by zero, so correlation is not even defined.

I think it's an improvement to go from saying "there is obviously something wrong with A's argument" to actually being able to point out the divide-by-zero in the equation.