I don’t know if I’m moving in different circles than before or what, but it seems more people are using discussions about things that are important to me in some way as springboards to ask me to gamble.
No, I don’t want to place a bet on who wins the election.
No, I don’t want to place a bet on how bad a hurricane will be and whether it will take out New Orleans.
No, I don’t want to place a bet on how long McCain will live. This isn’t a game.
I know the first item has come up here a lot. I don’t remember seeing the other two, but I’ve run across them and their equivalent.
Has this always been the case? Have people always thought, “Gee, the outcome is unknown so I want to put a twenty on it” ?
It creeps me out. That probably makes me weird, but Dopers are weird so maybe I can find kindred spirits here.
I get this a lot as a big sports fan who has no interest in wagering on sports. I just want to enjoy the game, I don’t see why we need to bet on it.
I’m not opposed to gambling either, I play blackjack at the casinos here occasionally, or, if I don’t want something so taxing, video poker. But I don’t want to bet on the outcome of anything. It’s not because I don’t know my football/baseball/hockey etc., if anything it’s because I’ve watched so much of it and know how hard it is to predict.
I’m usually not that interested in placing bets on those things (I prefer to bet on sure things), but I think the fact that there are markets for that kind of information is really cool.
We can learn a lot from the Intrade prediction markets, simply by watching how the money follows the prevailing public opinion. Futures markets for commodities help society plan for surpluses and shortages. Futures markets about events can help us plan and figure out all kinds of things.
One of my friends is insanely competitive, and often times I’ll make an offhanded comment about the outcome of something or other and she’ll say “Wanna bet?” She really, really, really likes to win, and as such will take any opportunity to try and create a situation where she can be a winner.
I’m not normally into betting, but one of my friends is something of a blowhard. He loves to make asinine pronouncements in the voice of God: “We’ll be at war with North Korea by spring . . . Joe Biden’s going to withdraw from the campaign and join a monastery . . . The Cubs aren’t going to make the playoffs!”
A lot of times the only way to shut him up is to say, “Want to bet?”
Most of the time, he doesn’t. When he does, I win.
I trust a betting market a lot more than opinion polls during election season. ISTR the CIA trying to set up a betting market for terrorist attacks after 9/11 but backed out after public outcry. It seemed like a good idea to me.
Oooh yes. I don’t have any cites handy, but reading through different history books I get the impression that the general public is far less gambling-crazed nowadays than in previous centuries.
A fair amount of the mathematics of probability arose through attempts to determine the odds of particular wagers.
I believe so. Just the other day a thread in GQ devolved into a discussion about picnickers present at Civil War battles, and Elendil’s Heir mentioned that a great deal of money changed hands when the USS Kearsarge sank the CSS Alabama in front of an audience of French excursion boats there to watch the battle.
For that matter, I’ve noticed that those people most interested in putting up money for bets on issues do not understand how someone might not want to wager on the outcome of anything they feel is important. Or how someone might not want to wager, period.
I mean, they’ll often understand if you say you can’t afford the bet, but that’s not the same thing as not wanting to bet, at all. And so they’ll come back in a week or after pay day, or next month to ask about something else.
As someone who’s offered bets in the past (but not thus far on this election, you’ll note) I can tell you that the primary motivator for me is to stem the flow of utterly confident predictions. “There’s no way Bush can get re-elected after the mess he’s made!” OK, sez I, then you’ll love the chance to make some money, since it’s such a certainty – right?
Now, if someone says, “It’s very important to me that Bush loses, and I hope he does,” I’m not going to offer a bet. It’s the “No way!” insistance in the face of admonishments that there’s nothing certain that gets me going.
