[extropy-chat] Re: Formulating a bet

[Robin Hanson]

At 10:32 AM 3/24/2005, Brett Paatsch wrote:
>>What if I were to define "cryonics can work" as something like, a
>>person frozen with today's technology is successfully revived within,
>>say, 100 years, with substantially identical memories and personality.
>
>In a real money version of idea futures I'd be interested in taking you
>up on your bet but I'd have the following issues with it which I wonder
>if we can address together (also with Robin if he is interested).
>
>1) 100 years is too long for me to have to wait to get a financial return
>on investment. ...
>2) Robin said "I'd want to be clear if uploading counts as revival, but
>otherwise, sure I'd accept many third party judgements."
>... I would have a problem with [judges] being required to pre-accept
>that uploading is possible. ...
>3) ... There is not a lot of distance between 0 in 100 and 1 in 100
>for a payoff to be achieved by either party. ...

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.  Perhaps you can be clever, but if the 
correlation won't happen for 100 years, then you just have to wait that long.

With combinatorial markets there is less of a problem of a "small distance" 
at the extremes.  You can "reuse" your bets to bet on other topics via 
conjunctions of this topic and those other topics.

If you and someone else are using words in different ways, you could bet on 
the "right" way to use those words.  But I'd rather bet on the concepts, so 
I'd rather try to clarify meaning ambiguities up front.  And as there are 
some hard topics, such as the morality of abortion, where it is not clear 
there will ever be a strong correlation between the truth and a judge's 
decision, I'd rather try to disentangle other questions from those hard 
topics, to give those other topics the best chance to be resolved clearly 
and early.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323