And betting has zero to do with that.
I don’t need to show off how little $100 means to me, like some posters. And ultimately betting shows absolutely nothing unless you do it in high numbers. Nothing meaningful can be determined by some internet bigshot dumping some skrilla on SCOTUS decision X.
Loss aversion isn’t the same as risk aversion. A rational risk averse investor won’t care too much about a $1 bet or any other bet whose outcome is uncorrelated with the value of their portfolio and a slim fraction of the same. So they will bet.
A loss averse person won’t bet, because the psychic penalty of losing a dollar is far greater than the benefits (monetary and psychic) they receive from winning. Loss aversion is thought to be exploitable by rational players or those familiar with framing.
Loss aversion - Wikipedia (2nd paragraph is misleading, IMO)
Risk aversion - Wikipedia
(Oh, and I admit my memory of this stuff is more than a little fuzzy.)
If you believe strongly that X will occur, and I say the opposite, then you should be willing to give me (say) 4:1 odds. I win, you give me a dollar. I lose, I give you a quarter. Oh you don’t feel that strongly say? Well, we can discuss odds then, but if you are angling at 50:50, then methinks you’re really not that confident.
Personally, I feel uncomfortable betting large sums outside of an intrade context. And small sums aren’t worth bothering with online. But I have betted small sums IRL and drawn up contracts for the same. It’s a growth opportunity: focused minds benefit both players.
Bricker:
I have engaged you in four wagers of a political nature, each for the sum of $100. I have won three of those wagers. What should I conclude from these outcomes?
For the record, I have found Bricker to be impeccably honest in our wagers, and would not hesitate to engage in another, should the opportunity arise.
True… when we are talking about how the prospect of loss affects the valuation of prospective gains, we’ve crossed over properly into the subject of risk aversion. I conflated the terminology a bit.
(1) I was honestly confident about the outcome I predicted.
(2) I was wrong.
(You’re not counting the one wager, I hope, where the problem was imprecise wording on my part? I honored it but that particular wager wasn’t me being wrong, so much as me failing to accurately define terms…)
But yes: Fear Itself and I disagree on many things, but his opinions and predictions strike me as being quite honestly held, and not subject to revision if financial loss were a consequence of being wrong…illustrating my point. No bullshitter, he.
I would like to test your hypothesis from the OP:
Now, our wagers provide a very small sample size which probably isn’t conclusive. But you have made a large number of wagers here, and your record could be revealing. How many wagers have you engaged in, and how many have you won?
One of the benefits of wagering is it forces you to operationalize your underlying beliefs. Another is learning that your understanding of the issue isn’t as accurate or precise that you thought it was. Admittedly lawyers may be familiar with this tendency, but laymen often are not.
So again, betting is a useful exercise.
Could be. Or not. Scoring probabilistic forecasts is a field unto itself and last fall nobody with solid familiarity with this sub-discipline materialized on this board.
But consider the coin flip. Say there’s an hypothesis that it’s a two headed coin. If you get 4 heads in a row, there’s a greater than 6% odds that this would occur purely due to chance with a two headed coin. 6%>5%, one typical threshold. And in Bricker’s case, we might be discussing debates between 20% subjective probabilities and, say, 75% subjective probabilities. It might take more that a handful of bets to fairly measure the validity of person’s worldview. Or not: I haven’t thought through this, though I know that some in the world have.
I’d like to say that we could use his bets to evaluate Bricker’s underlying paradigmantic view of the world, but I’m not convinced there’s sufficient data. To me though, it’s the process of betting --from negotiation to payoff-- that is helpful. For one thing losing a bet can force you to think more carefully about probability and uncertainty. Or on occasion enter madness, but one would hope that tendency can be overcome.
Unfortunately, *should *isn’t something you get to decide on.
Betting on a complex situation where you don’t have knowledge of the variables because you’re confident, is a stupid thing to do.
My mind is focused enough to see that compulsive betting is stupid and self-destructive.
Betting me about a fact that I know is one thing. Betting on (for instance) an election when a third of the country is utterly misinformed and delusional, is another. Bet if you like, but I’d say it’s an example of stealth-bragging (like Romney did) or just empty bravado.
Greed and the thrill of gambling are also emotions. The person sitting at a slot machine pulling the handle over and over isn’t doing so out of cold blooded rationality.
Or they just hate betting for any reason, like me. Or they don’t trust the person to pay. Or they despise the person and don’t want to risk doing anything that would give them money. Or they’re one of the people who considers gambling immoral. Or they’re a recovering gambling addict who doesn’t want to get sucked in again. Or all sorts of other reasons.
For one thing, in my case I hate gambling for any reason and haven’t gambled real money* in my entire life. It would never even occur to me to take your bet no matter how certain I was of winning, because I don’t take bets. Ever.
*The closest I’ve come is gambling minigames in video games and at least there I can same scum until I win. Nor is is real money.
Sort of. If you prefer, I have good reason to doubt your display of certainty under the above circumstances.
Yes! And if you grasp the complexity of the situation and your lack of knowledge of the same, then your display of confidence is blather.
Who said anything about compulsive? These bets typically take a while to negotiate.
Turning down a bet is perfectly reasonable. Honorable, even. Making strong claims is reasonable. But when the stakes are sufficiently low insisting on both at the same time indicates that you are all hot air.
Let’s not forget that the betting exercise can clarify. Last year I said to Bricker something like, “You seem pretty confident, Brick. How about giving me 3:1 odds?” He replied, “I am 50:50 confident. I am not 3:1 confident”. That’s an entirely reasonable response. Another might be: "I think it’s 75% likely. But I’m loss averse, to a point, so I’ll turn down 50:50. How about you give me odds? In that case, I could note that 75% isn’t all that confident really – it’s just probable.
Again. Clarifying.
Sure.
That’s an odd principle. Sure, gambling addiction is a real issue. But when the stakes are low, the gratification of payoff is postponed and the negotiation extended, this seems to me to be something other than slots.
And “Certainty” of winning can be an emotion or it can be an operational position. A low stakes wager can distinguish between the two.
Incidentally, I’m personally opposed to gambling in a casino, because it feels like a ripoff to me. I’ve never done so, but I’ve on occasion walked past numerous tables and machines to take advantage of discounted food. And while I haven’t ruled out betting with a fellow poster online, I doubt whether a bet would be offered that I consider sensible, given the bother of payment, etc. I guess I could imagine doing something at longbets.com (for charity). But by way of full disclosure, I have played poker with friends.
As a matter of etiquette and opinion, I think the claimer is permitted one round of clarification. We can all make wild claims in a moment of exuberance and it should be permissible to recast them into something more thoughtful when asked. And if you’re serious about this sort of bet, lengthy multiple round negotiations aid the fight against ignorance. I’ll again plug longbets.com , where the public justification for the bet is a big part of the process. That gives you a basis to revisit the original reasoning.
Not going to answer for BigT, but I will note that your personal contribution to the OP consisted of FOUR, not TWENTY sentences (plus whatever snipping you did to bring your quoted material down to fair-use standards). I’ll further note that the sentences BigT “focuses” on were the most salient of the four. (see below)
The OP:
I initially had the thought to ask “what exactly is the debate? Is it discuss the implications of the study’s conclusions, or is it discuss how the study dovetails with Bricker’s experience in SDMB debates”?
To be fair to Bricker, you should in some way account for the number of honest offers to wager he’s made.
Counting the record of actual wagers is misleading because poor predictions are more likely to be wagered against.
If I were to offer even money bets that
I bet I’d get takers on the third, and I’d almost certainly lose. But my record for correct predictions would probably still be 2/3. Obviously, those first two predictions were facile, so including them at equal value is also misleading. Just goes to show that it’s hard to actually calculate this in the real world.
In Nate Silver’s example of the rational Bayesian world, every claim is probabilistic in nature, and is open for a bet (and every player is happy to make that bet).
Apologies for two posts in a row, but they’re on different sub-threads and I didn’t want to glom them all together.
As I said above: Accurate predictions have value.
Advance knowledge of the outcome of a horse race is pretty frivolous. The outcome of the race has no impact on the rest of the world outside the narrow confines of the horseracing world and the betting markets on it.
Advance knowledge of who will be the President, or how the Court will decide is not frivolous. The outcome has real and potentially major impacts on the world. We can’t see the future. But we can see, in retrospect, who has successfully predicted similar events in the past, and who is certain enough of their current prediction to wager on it.
That’s useful.
As best as I can tell, I’ve made 14 bets here and won nine.
I’ve OFFERED many more which have been declined.