[extropy-chat] Re: Formulating a bet

[Brett Paatsch]

Robin Hanson wrote:

> On 3/26/2005, Brett Paatsch wrote:
>>>>You can bet on anything you can get judges to decide, which is
>>>>pretty much anything.  The question is how well that judge
>>>>decision correlates with the real dispute you are having.
>>>seems to me equivalent of setting up a bet with a panel of judges
>>>who might be Muslims or lunatics or might not, testing the assertion
>>>that men who die faithful obtain the services of 72 virgins, .....
>>
>>Do you think that there are issues involved that are outside the
>>domains of science, logic and language?  If so I'd like to know
>>what you think those are? ...  the question "can cryonics work?" is not
>>at all a stupid one. ... why they would think that it would
>>be excessively difficult to find judges that could consider logical
>>arguments from advocates on both sides of the case fairly.  ...

> If people were fair, reasonable, logical, and rational no matter what
> the topic or incentive context, well then they would just agree all the
> time about most everything, and bets would be few and of little use.

Perhaps. Perhaps people still run into limitations such as how many
items they can hold in there heads at once. Then bets can serve as
insurance and hedging tools. 

> The whole reason that betting markets are interesting is that
> people are not usually reasonable, and so the incentives of a bet
> can make them more reasonable.  But if people are usually
> unreasonable we can't just give them random topics and expect
> them to judge fairly.  We have to be selective and pick topics
> and contexts where even unreasonable people would find it hard
> to judge very unfairly.

Yet we have legal systems that handle this sort of stuff. Judges judge 
law and rule on the admissability of evidence etc, and juries judge 
facts. This despite that most people are unreasonable some of 
the time. We take the issues that matter to us to the courts (because
we have no choice) not just the issues that we think the courts are
not  too dumb to avoid stuffing up.  

> Before a horse race, it is easy to deceive yourself about which is the
> better horse.  Pick .. random judges then, and they might easily make
> biased judgments that favor themselves (like favoring the horse from
> their state or with a name they like.)  After the race it is much harder
> to deceive yourself about who won the race.  So, we can give people
> incentives to be honest before the race by having them bet on what 
> judges will say afterward about who won the race.

Robin, I do follow what you are saying, but I can't help but notice that
in your choices about what you respond to you are moving us further
away from a specific bet about cryonics and more towards general
stuff about betting.  I haven't closed down any avenues towards 
us formulating a specific bet on cryonics, I've been willing to look
at ways to accommodate your concerns, but the open questions I 
ask you you've so far ignored.

I asked for instance if you would "care to define any terms in Hal's 
bet as you like and then assign a probability and we'll see if our
 disagreement is in an area other than identity?" and

"How do you read "substantially" identical memories and personality
for instance?"

If you'd answered *those* questions we would have been able to 
move closer to a shared understanding about what we agree and
don't agree on and we might have been able to move closer to 
formulating a bet. 

Similarly if you'd asked a question of me I could have answered it. 

You seem to be moving us away from rather than towards a 
specific bet on cryonics.  That is your right, but is it intentional?

Do you want to avoid such a bet? That is the impression that
I am getting. 

It seems to me that often when people disagree on stuff and end
up 'agreeing to disagree' it may be that one or the other of them
has unilaterally decided to back away from the subject matter
that is under dispute.  Is that happening here?

Regards,
Brett Paatsch