This could be 2-3 people, IIRC, but if it’s the person I’m thinking of, I had one interesting interaction where I actually figured out his grift. One day he did his usual thing of challenging me to bet a large sum of money on something he thought would never happen. Somehow I had the presence of mind to say “Sure, let’s go 1/7 odds on it.” And he replied “I’m even-money certain, not 1/7 certain”.
Now you can see the game. By raising bet challenges in contentious debates, he exploits the other party’s emotionally amped state. They’ve bought into the simplistic schoolyard-bet even-money standoff, thinking of their honor and not the numbers, so there’s a strong tendency to either take bad odds, or back away from a prediction that has some merit at less than 50%.
Coming back round to the point, I feel like giving odds are the real measure of commitment to the point. Anything else is “put up or shut up”, and this frame advantages people who have more disposable income, and a mind to press a shyster’s angle. So without a sort of bookmaking and odds-laying mechanism, I wouldn’t want to see betting as a routine feature of debates. Maybe there are online social spaces that would benefit from it, but I can’t really see it improving the environment around here.
For one thing, if the writer doesn’t cheat, then writing imposes an equal cost on everyone, so it neutralizes the wealth factor. (Although I suppose some people have more time to waste.)
Dollars come with the downside of having different value to different people. To some, $100 is a triviality. To others, a loss means skipping meals. That difference makes it hard to come to any agreement about what “put your money where your mouth is” means.
Denominating in time instead of dollars removes this effect, at least. And words are a crude approximation of time.
Some Nordic countries impose fines for speeding, etc. based on a percentage of income rather than an absolute number. That’s another way of achieving the same goal. But imposing hours of community service would work as well.
The point is that a bet that results in public shaming and forced labor is just as toxic and distracting as one based on money, if not more so. It’s still just as bad and it’s a damn good thing that’s not allowed here.
And that’s betting working exactly as designed. The other party was making extreme claims, but when actually pressed into a bet, they backed off. Even without the bet actually happening, everyone could see that there was a gap between what they believed vs. what they said they believed.
It’s toxic to have people make statements that are much stronger than the actual level of belief. And yet that is what happens today in every remotely contentious thread. The threat of a bet–even if it doesn’t actually happen (because the parties can’t agree to odds, etc.)–helps keep that in check.
That’s complete nonsense. There is no such thing as “the threat of a bet”. It’s a toothless gesture devoid of value. It’s no more than a way to insult someone.
HMS_Irruncible gave an explicit example above where a person, despite apparently having a very high degree of confidence in their claim, wouldn’t agree to a 7:1 bet, and backed off to even odds.
It’s obvious that people make these kinds of claims all the time. There is a gap between the expressed level of confidence vs. what they’d put to stake.
Just the process of forcing people to lay odds on a thing, or heck, even just nailing down the claim that’s being made to something concrete, is a benefit.
I suppose one could achieve the same result given willing honest counterparties by asking the question in the form of odds, rather than just outcome. But it doesn’t have to be a bet. e.g.
So, @Dr.Strangelove, you sure sound confident with your claim that trump will be the R nominee in 2024. I disagree, but that’s not important now. Where do you place his odds? Surely not merely 50/50 given your evident confidence, but what are they in your view? 60/40, 75/25, 95/5, or a total absolute 100/0 shoo-in? The rest of us want to know what you think.
etc. If the goal is to discover their assessment of the odds, ask them their assessment of the odds. Which will “force” them to noodle on that and respond, or “force” them to shut up, or “force” them to weasel.
Agreed. An actual bet still requires some honesty on the part of the participants. If we are assuming a certain baseline level of honesty–and we should–then just getting people to phrase their claims in the form of a bet gets you almost all the way there. But my impression is that even this type of hypothetical bet is still frowned upon by the mods.
Odds plus the concrete claim. For something like “Trump will be the R nominee”, it’s obvious that 2024 is meant. But not all claims are so obvious. For instance, in the Cybertruck thread, we had competing claims of “Cybertruck will be fairly successful” vs. “Cybertruck will be a flop”. Not concrete enough to evaluate. “Cybertruck will deliver at least 100,000 units in calendar year 2025” is, though.
Different people value different things in threads. Personally, I consider strong but low-context predictions to be fairly worthless. They have much more value when paired with odds and a concrete version of the claim. Otherwise, you just have people talking past each other.
But a wager, no matter the stakes, is nothing but a hijack. The mods have done a great job of keeping those to a minimum.
And unless you take it to PMs, all you’re doing is bogging down a conversation with a side conversation that not everyone is interested in having.
It’s not just about the people making or proposing the wager; I’d say the majority of the participants in a thread have no interest in a contest to see who is more right.
A worthless claim is already a hijack by that standard. If someone is going on and on about how Trump is definitely going to win the R nomination, they should either put a number to their degree of confidence, or never have made the claim in the first place. Either one would be preferable than littering threads with predictions that can never be called out later.
You have to take the other posters into consideration; you’re focusing on the two people involved in the wager, without thinking about all the scrolling that everyone who doesn’t give a shit about the bet has to do.
The only way that it’s acceptable is if it goes to PM instantly. That way no one else has to skip past the dick-waving contest that a wager is.