I've established a habit of putting my money where my mouth is to encourage myself to make more firm predictions. When I am talking with someone and we disagree, I ask if they want to bet a dollar on it. For example, I say, "Roger Ebert directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls". My wife says, "No, he wrote it.". Then I offer to bet. We look up the answer, and I give her a dollar.
This is a good habit for many reasons.
It is fun to bet. Fun to win. And (kinda) fun to lose.
It forces people to evaluate honestly. The same people that say &q
What would you do if he wrote and directed it? Neither? If there was more than one writer (which he was one of), or more than one director (of which he was one)?
1Arielgenesis
Although there is a weight in the dollar, I think there is also another reason why people take it more seriously. People adjust their believe according to what other people believe and their confidence level. Therefore, when you propose a bet, even only for a dollar, you are showing a high confidence level and this decrease their confidence level. As a result, system 2 kicks in and they will be > [forced] to evaluate honestly.
This is a crucial observation if you are trying to use this technique to improve your calibration of your own accuracy! You can't just start making bets when no one else you associate regularly is challenging you to the bets.
Several years ago, I started taking note of all of the times I disagreed with other people and looking it up, but initially, I only counted myself as having "disagreed with other people" if they said something I thought was wrong, and I attempted to correct them. Then I soon ad... (read more)
I was reading your comment, and when I thought about always betting a dollar, my brain went, "That's a good idea!"
So I asked my brain, "What memory are you accessing that makes you think that's a good idea?"
And my brain replied, "Remember that CFAR reading list you're going through? Yeah, that one."
So I went to my bookshelf, got out Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and started paging through it.
Professor Ariely had several insights that helped me understand why actually using money seemed like such a good idea:
1. Interacting within market norms makes you do a cost-benefit analysis. Professor Ariely discusses the difference between social norms and market norms in chapter 4. Social norms govern interactions that don't involve money (favors for a friend), and market norms govern interactions that do (costs and benefits). The professor did an experiment in which he had people drag circles into a square on a computer screen (judging their productivity by how many times they did this in a set period of time). He gave one group of such participants an explicitly stated "50-cent snickers bar" and the other a "five-dollar box of Godiva chocolates." As it turns out, the results were identical to a previous experiment in which the same amounts of direct cash were used. Professor Ariely concludes, "These results show that for market norms to emerge, it is sufficient to mention money." In other words, Professor Ariely's research supports your first (4.) - "A dollar feels more important than it actually is..." This is the case because as soon as money enters the picture, so do market norms.
2. Money makes us honest. In chapter 14, aptly titled "Why Dealing With Cash Makes Us More Honest," Professor Ariely explains an experiment he conducted in the MIT cafeteria. Students were given a sheet of 20 math problems to solve in five minutes. The control group was to have their solutions checked, and then were given 50 cents per correct answer. A second group was instru
I've established a habit of putting my money where my mouth is to encourage myself to make more firm predictions. When I am talking with someone and we disagree, I ask if they want to bet a dollar on it. For example, I say, "Roger Ebert directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls". My wife says, "No, he wrote it.". Then I offer to bet. We look up the answer, and I give her a dollar.
This is a good habit for many reasons.
- It is fun to bet. Fun to win. And (kinda) fun to lose.
- It forces people to evaluate honestly. The same people that say &q
... (read more)This is a crucial observation if you are trying to use this technique to improve your calibration of your own accuracy! You can't just start making bets when no one else you associate regularly is challenging you to the bets.
Several years ago, I started taking note of all of the times I disagreed with other people and looking it up, but initially, I only counted myself as having "disagreed with other people" if they said something I thought was wrong, and I attempted to correct them. Then I soon ad... (read more)