This seems fair. I suggested the bet quite quickly. Without having time to work through the math of the bet, I suggested something that felt on the conservative side from the point of view of my beliefs. The more I think about it, (a) the more confident I am in my beliefs and (b) the more I feel it was not as generous as I originalyl thought*. I have a personal liking for binary bets rather than proportional payoffs. As a small concession in light of the points raised, I’d be happy to offer to modify the terms retroactively to make them more favourable to Justin, offering either of the following.
(i) Doubling the odds against me to 10:1 odds (rather than 5:1) on the original claim (at least an order of magnitude lower than his fermi). So his £50 would get £500 of mine.
OR
(ii) 5:1 on at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (50x) lower than his fermi (rather than 10x).
(My intuition is that (ii) is a better deal than (i) but I haven’t worked it through)
(*i.e. at time of bet—I think the likelihood of this being a severe global pandemic is now diminishing further in my mind)
I respect that you are putting money behind your estimates and get the idea behind it, but would recommend you to reconsider if you want to do this (publicly) in this context and maybe consider removing these comments. Not only because it looks quite bad from the outside, but also because I’m not sure it’s appropriate on a forum about how to do good, especially if the virus should happen to kill a lot of people over the next year (also meaning that even more people would have lost someone to the virus). I personally found this quite morbid and I have a lot more context into EA culture than a random person reading this, e.g. I can guess that the primary motivation is not “making money” or “the feeling of winning and being right”—which would be quite inappropriate in this context -, but that might not be clear to others with less context.
(Maybe I’m also the only one having this reaction in which case it’s probably not so problematic)
edit: I can understand if people just disagree with me because you think there’s no harm done by such bets, but I’d be curious to hear from the people who down voted if in addition to that you think that comments like mine are harmful because of being bad for epistemic habits or something, so grateful to hear if someone thinks comments like these shouldn’t be made!
Pretty straightforwardly, I think having correct beliefs about situations like this is exceptionally important, and maybe the central tenet this community is oriented around. Having a culture of betting on those beliefs is one of the primary ways in which we incentivize people to have accurate beliefs in situations like this.
I think doing so publicly is a major public good, and is helping many others think more sanely about this situation. I think the PR risk that comes with this is completely dwarfed by that consideration. I would be deeply saddened to see people avoid taking these bets publicly, since I benefit a lot from both seeing people’s belief put the test this way, and I am confident many others are too.
Obviously, providing your personal perspective is fine, but I don’t think I want to see more comments like this, and as such I downvoted it. I think a forum that had many comments like this would be a forum I would not want to participate in, and I expect it to directly discourage others from contributing in ways I think are really important and productive (for example, it seems to have caused Sean below to seriously consider deleting his comments, which I would consider a major loss).
I also think that perception wise, this exchange communicates one of the primary aspects that makes me excited about this community. Seeing exchanges like the above is one of the primary reasons why I am involved in the Effective Altruism community, and is what caused me to become interested and develop trust in many of the institutions of the community in the first place. As such, I think this comments gets the broader perception angle backwards.
The comment also seems to repeatedly sneak in assumptions of broader societal judgement, without justifying doing so. The comment makes statements that extend far beyond personal perception, and indeed primarily makes claims about external perception and its relevance, which strike me as straightforwardly wrong and badly argued:
Not only because it looks quite bad from the outside
I don’t think it looks bad, and think that on the opposite, it communicates that we take our beliefs seriously and are willing to put personal stakes behind them. There will of course be some populations that will have some negative reaction to the above, but I am not particularly convinced of the relevance of their perception to our local behavior here on the forum.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate on a forum about how to do good
I am quite confused why it would be “inappropriate”. Our culture of betting is a key part of a culture that helps us identify the most effective ways to do good, and as such is highly appropriate for this forum. It seems to me you are simply asserting that it might be inappropriate, and as such are making an implicit claim about what the norms on such a forum should be, which is something I strongly disagree with.
I can guess that the primary motivation is not “making money” or “the feeling of winning and being right”—which would be quite inappropriate in this context
I don’t think these motivations would be inappropriate in this context. Those are fine motivations that we healthily leverage in large parts of the world to cause people to do good things, so of course we should leverage them here to allow us to do good things.
The whole economy relies on people being motivated to make money, and it has been a key ingredient to our ability to sustain the most prosperous period humanity has ever experienced (cf. more broadly the stock market). Of course I want people to have accurate beliefs by giving them the opportunity to make money. That is how you get them to have accurate beliefs!
Similarly the feeling of being right is probably what motivates large fractions of epidemiologists, trying to answer questions of direct relevance to this situation. Academia itself runs to a surprising degree on the satisfaction that comes from being right, and I think we should similarly not label that motivation as “inappropriate”, and instead try to build a system that leverages that motivation towards doing good things and helping people have accurate beliefs. Which is precisely what public betting does!
I emphatically object to this position (and agree with Chi’s). As best as I can tell, Chi’s comment is more accurate and better argued than this critique, and so the relative karma between the two dismays me.
I think it is fairly obvious that ‘betting on how many people are going to die’ looks ghoulish to commonsense morality. I think the articulation why this would be objectionable is only slightly less obvious: the party on the ‘worse side’ of the bet seems to be deliberately situating themselves to be rewarded as a consequence of the misery others suffer; there would also be suspicion about whether the person might try and contribute to the bad situation seeking a pay-off; and perhaps a sense one belittles the moral gravity of the situation by using it for prop betting.
Thus I’m confident if we ran some survey on confronting the ‘person on the street’ with the idea of people making this sort of bet, they would not think “wow, isn’t it great they’re willing to put their own money behind their convictions”, but something much more adverse around “holding a sweepstake on how many die”.
(I can’t find an easy instrument for this beyond than asking people/anecdata: the couple of non-EA people I’ve run this by have reacted either negatively or very negatively, and I know comments on forecasting questions which boil down to “will public figure X die before date Y” register their distaste. If there is a more objective assessment accessible, I’d offer odds at around 4:1 on the ratio of positive:negative sentiment being <1).
Of course, I think such an initial ‘commonsense’ impression would very unfair to Sean or Justin: I’m confident they engaged in this exercise only out of a sincere (and laudable) desire to try and better understand an important topic. Nonetheless (and to hold them much higher standards than my own behaviour) one may suggest it is nonetheless a lapse of practical wisdom if, whilst acting to fulfil one laudable motivation, not tempering this with other moral concerns one should also be mindful of.
One needs to weigh the ‘epistemic’ benefits of betting (including higher order terms) against the ‘tasteless’ complaint (both in moral-pluralism case of it possibly being bad, but also the more prudential case of it looking bad to third parties). If the epistemic benefits were great enough, we should reconcile ourselves to the costs of sometimes acting tastelessly (triage is distasteful too) or third parties (reasonably, if mistakenly) thinking less of us.
Yet the epistemic benefits on the table here (especially on the margin of ‘feel free to bet, save on commonsense ghoulish topics’) are extremely slim. The rate of betting in EA/rationalist land on any question is very low, so the signal you get from small-n bets are trivial. There are other options, especially for this question, which give you much more signal per unit activity—given, unlike the stock market, people are interested in the answer for-other-than pecuniary motivations: both metacalus and the John’s Hopkins platform prediction have relevant questions which are much active, and where people are offering more information.
Given the marginal benefits are so slim, they are easily outweighed by the costs Chi notes. And they are.
both metacalus and the John’s Hopkins platform prediction have relevant questions which are much active, and where people are offering more information.
I am confused. Both of these are environments in which people participate in something very similar to betting. In the first case they are competing pretty directly for internet points, and in the second they are competing for monetary prices.
Those two institutions strike me as great examples of the benefit of having a culture of betting like this, and also strike me as similarly likely to create offense in others.
We seem to agree on the value of those platforms, and both their public perception and their cultural effects seem highly analogous to the private betting case to me. You even explicitly say that you expect similar reactions to questions like the above being brought up on those platforms.
I agree with you that were there only the occasional one-off bet on the forum that was being critiqued here, the epistemic cost would be minor. But I am confident that a community that had a relationship to betting that was more analogous to how Chi’s relationship to betting appears to be, we would have never actually built the Metaculus prediction platform. That part of our culture was what enabled us to have these platforms in the first place (as I think an analysis of the history of Metaculus will readily reveal, which I think can be pretty directly traced to a lot of the historic work around prediction markets, which have generally received public critique very similar to the one you describe).
Thus I’m confident if we ran some survey on confronting the ‘person on the street’ with the idea of people making this sort of bet, they would not think “wow, isn’t it great they’re willing to put their own money behind their convictions”, but something much more adverse around “holding a sweepstake on how many die”.
I think this is almost entirely dependent on the framing of the question, so I am a bit uncertain about this. If you frame the question as something like “is it important for members of a research community to be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions?” you will get a pretty positive answer. If you frame the question as something like “is it bad for members of a research community to profit personally from the deaths and injuries of others?” you will obviously get a negative answer.
In this case, I do think that the broader public will have a broadly negative reaction to the bet above, which I never argued against. The thing I argued against was that minor negative perception in the eyes of the broader public was of particularly large relevance here on our forum.
I additionally argued that the effects of that perception were outweighed by the long-term positive reputational effects of having skin-in-the-game of even just a small amount of our beliefs, and the perception of a good chunk of a much more engaged and more highly-educated audience, which thinks of our participation in prediction-markets and our culture of betting as being one of the things that sets us apart from large parts of the rest of the world.
Both of these are environments in which people participate in something very similar to betting. In the first case they are competing pretty directly for internet points, and in the second they are competing for monetary prices.
Those two institutions strike me as great examples of the benefit of having a culture of betting like this, and also strike me as similarly likely to create offense in others.
I’m extremely confident a lot more opprobrium attaches to bets where the payoff is in money versus those where the payoff is in internet points etc. As you note, I agree certain forecasting questions (even without cash) provoke distaste: if those same questions were on a prediction market the reaction would be worse. (There’s also likely an issue the money leading to a question of ones motivation—if epi types are trying to predict a death toll and not getting money for their efforts, it seems their efforts have a laudable purpose in mind, less so if they are riding money on it).
I agree with you that were there only the occasional one-off bet on the forum that was being critiqued here, the epistemic cost would be minor. But I am confident that a community that had a relationship to betting that was more analogous to how Chi’s relationship to betting appears to be, we would have never actually built the Metaculus prediction platform.
This looks like a stretch to me. Chi can speak for themselves, but their remarks don’t seem to entail a ‘relationship to betting’ writ large, but an uneasy relationship to morbid topics in particular. Thus the policy I take them to be recommending (which I also endorse) of refraining making ‘morbid’ or ‘tasteless’ bets (but feel free to prop bet to heart’s desire on other topics) seems to have very minor epistemic costs, rather than threatening some transformation of epistemic culture which would mean people stop caring about predictions.
For similar reasons, this also seems relatively costless in terms of other perceptions: refraining from ‘morbid’ topics for betting only excludes a small minority of questions one can bet upon, leaving plenty of opportunities to signal its virtuous characteristics re. taking ideas seriously whilst avoiding those which reflect poorly upon it.
refraining from ‘morbid’ topics for betting only excludes a small minority of questions one can bet upon
This is directly counter to my experience of substantive and important EA conversation. All the topics I’m interested in are essentially morbid topics when viewed in passing by a ‘person on the street’. Here are examples of such questions:
How frequently will we have major pandemics that kill over N people?
How severe (in terms of death and major harm) will the worst pandemic in the next 10 years be?
How many lives are saved by donations to GiveWell recommended charities? If we pour 10-100 million dollars into them, will we see a corresponding decline in deaths from key diseases globally?
As AI gets more powerful, will we get warning shots across the bow that injure or kill <10,000 people with enough time for us to calibrate to the difficulty of the alignment problem, or will it be more sudden than that?
Like, sometimes I even just bet on ongoing death rates. Someone might say to me “The factory farming problem is very small of course” and I’ll reply “I will take a bet with you, if you’re so confident. You say what you think it is, I’ll say what I think it is, then we’ll use google to find out who’s right. Because I expect you’ll be wrong by at least 2 orders of magnitude.” I’m immediately proposing a bet on number of chickens being murdered per year, or some analogous number. I also would make similar bets when someone says a problem is big small e.g. “Ageing/genocide/cancer is/isn’t very important” → “I’ll take a bet on the number of people who’ve died from it in the last 10 years.”
All of your examples seem much better than the index case I am arguing against. Commonsense morality attaches much less distaste to cases where those ‘in peril’ are not crisply identified (e.g. “how many will die in some pandemic in the future” is better than “how many will die in this particular outbreak”, which is better than “will Alice, currently ill, live or die?”). It should also find bets on historical events are (essentially) fine, as whatever good or ill implicit in these has already occurred.
Of course, I agree they your examples would be construed as to some degree morbid. But my recommendation wasn’t “refrain from betting in any question where we we can show the topic is to some degree morbid” (after all, betting on GDP of a given country could be construed this way, given its large downstream impacts on welfare). It was to refrain in those cases where it appears very distasteful and for which there’s no sufficient justification. As it seems I’m not expressing this balancing consideration well, I’ll belabour it.
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Say, God forbid, one of my friend’s children has a life-limiting disease. On its face, it seems tasteless for me to compose predictions at all on questions like, “will they still be alive by Christmas?” Carefully scrutinising whether they will live or die seems to run counter to the service I should be providing as a supporter of my friends family and someone with the child’s best interests at heart. It goes without saying opening a book on a question like this seems deplorable, and offering (and confirming bets) where I take the pessimistic side despicable.
Yet other people do have good reason for trying to compose an accurate prediction on survival or prognosis. The child’s doctor may find themselves in the invidious position where they recognise they their duty to give my friend’s family the best estimate they can runs at cross purposes to other moral imperatives that apply too. The commonsense/virtue-ethicsy hope would be the doctor can strike the balance best satisfies these cross-purposes, thus otherwise callous thoughts and deeds are justified by their connection to providing important information to the family
Yet any incremental information benefit isn’t enough to justify anything of any degree of distastefulness. If the doctor opened a prediction market on a local children’s hospice, I think (even if they were solely and sincerely motivated for good purposes, such as to provide families with in-expectation better prognostication now and the future) they have gravely missed the mark.
Of the options available, ‘bringing money’ into it generally looks more ghoulish the closer the connection is between ‘something horrible happening’ and ‘payday!‘. A mere prediction platform is better (although still probably the wrong side of the line unless we have specific evidence it will give a large benefit), also paying people to make predictions on said platform (but paying for activity and aggregate accuracy rather than direct ‘bet results’) is also slightly better. “This family’s loss (of their child) will be my gain (of some money)” is the sort of grotesque counterfactual good people would strenuously avoid being party to save exceptionally good reason.
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To repeat: the it is the balance of these factors—which come in degrees—which is determines the final evaluation. So, for example, I’m not against people forecasting the ‘nCoV’ question (indeed, I do as well), but the addition of money takes it the wrong side of the line (notwithstanding the money being ridden on this for laudable motivation). Likewise I’m happy to for people to prop bet on some of your questions pretty freely, but not for the ‘nCoV’ (or some even more extreme versions) because the question is somewhat less ghoulish, etc. etc. etc.
I confess some irritation. Because I think whilst you and Oli are pressing arguments (sorry—“noticing confusion”) re. there not being a crisp quality that obtains to the objectionable ones yet not the less objectionable ones (e.g. ‘You say this question is ‘morbid’ - but look here! here are some other questions which are qualitatively morbid too, and we shouldn’t rule them all out’) you are in fact committed to some sort of balancing account.
I presume (hopefully?) you don’t think ‘child hospice sweepstakes’ would be a good idea for someone to try (even if it may improve our calibration! and it would give useful information re. paediatric prognosticiation which could be of value to the wider world! and capitalism is built on accurate price signals! etc. etc.) As you’re not biting the bullet on these reductios (nor bmg’s, nor others) you implicitly accept all the considerations about why betting is a good thing are pro tanto and can be overcome at some extreme limit of ghoulishness etc.
How to weigh these considerations is up for grabs. Yet picking each individual feature of ghoulishness in turnand showing it, alone, is not enough to warrant refraining from highly ghoulish bets (where the true case against would be composed of other factors alongside the one being shown to be individually insufficient) seems an exercise in the fallacy of division.
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I also note that all the (few) prop bets I recall in EA up until now (including one I made with you) weren’t morbid. Which suggests you wouldn’t appreciably reduce the track record of prop bets which show (as Oli sees it) admirable EA virtues of skin in the game.
I can guess that the primary motivation is not “making money” or “the feeling of winning and being right”—which would be quite inappropriate in this context
I don’t think these motivations would be inappropriate in this context. Those are fine motivations that we healthily leverage in large parts of the world to cause people to do good things, so of course we should leverage them here to allow us to do good things.
The whole economy relies on people being motivated to make money, and it has been a key ingredient to our ability to sustain the most prosperous period humanity has ever experienced (cf. more broadly the stock market). Of course I want people to have accurate beliefs by giving them the opportunity to make money. That is how you get them to have accurate beliefs!
At least from a common-sense morality perspective, this doesn’t sit right with me. I do feel that it would be wrong for two people to get together to bet about some horrible tragedy—“How many people will die in this genocide?” “Will troubled person X kill themselves this year?” etc. -- purely because they thought it’d be fun to win a bet and make some money off a friend. I definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable if a lot of people around me were doing this.
When the motives involve working to form more accurate and rigorous beliefs about ethically pressing issues, as they clearly were in this case, I think that’s a different story. I’m sympathetic to the thought that it would be bad to discourage this sort of public bet. I think it might also be possible to argue that, if the benefits of betting are great enough, then it’s worth condoning or even encouraging more ghoulishly motivated bets too. I guess I don’t really buy that, though. I don’t think that a norm specifically against public bets that are ghoulish from a common-sense morality perspective would place very important limitations on the community’s ability to form accurate beliefs or do good.
I do also think there are significant downsides, on the other hand, to having a culture that disregards common-sense feelings of discomfort like the ones Chi’s comment expressed.
[[EDIT: As a clarification, I’m not classifying the particular bet in this thread as “ghoulish.” I share the general sort of discomfort that Chi’s comment describes, while also recognizing that the bet was well-motivated and potentially helpful. I’m more generally pushing back against the thought that evident motives don’t matter much or that concerns about discomfort/disrespectfulness should never lead people to refrain from public bets.]]
I guess I don’t really buy that, though. I don’t think that a norm specifically against public bets that are ghoulish from a common-sense morality perspective would place very important limitations on the community’s ability to form accurate beliefs or do good.
Responding to this point separately: I am very confused by this statement. A large fraction of topics we are discussing within the EA community, are pretty directly about the death of thousands, often millions or billions, of other people. From biorisk (as discussed here), to global health and development, to the risk of major international conflict, a lot of topics we think about involve people forming models that will quite directly require forecasting the potential impacts of various life-or-death decisions.
I expect bets about a large number of Global Catastrophic Risks to be of great importance, and to similarly be perceived as “ghoulish” as you describe here. Maybe you are describing a distinction that is more complicated than I am currently comprehending, but I at least would expect Chi and Greg to object to bets of the type “what is the expected number of people dying in self-driving car accidents over the next decade?”, “Will there be an accident involving an AGI project that would classify as a ‘near-miss’, killing at least 10000 people or causing at least 10 billion dollars in economic damages within the next 50 years?” and “what is the likelihood of this new bednet distribution method outperforming existing methods by more than 30%, saving 30000 additional people over the next year?”.
All of these just strike me as straightforwardly important questions, that an onlooker could easily construe as “ghoulish”, and I expect would be strongly discouraged by the norms that I see being advocated for here. In the case of the last one, it is probably the key fact I would be trying to estimate when evaluating a new bednet distribution method.
Ultimately, I care a lot about modeling risks of various technologies, and understanding which technologies and interventions can more effective save people’s lives, and whenever I try to understand that, I will have to discuss and build models of how those will impact other people’s lives, often in drastic ways.
Compared to the above, the bet between Sean and Justin does not strike me as particularly ghoulish (and I expect that to be confirmed by doing some public surveys on people’s naive perception, as Greg suggested), and so I see little alternative to thinking that you are also advocating for banning bets on any of the above propositions, which leaves me confused why you think doing so would not inhibit our ability to do good.
There might also be a confusion about what the purpose and impact of bets in our community is. While the number of bets being made is relatively small, the effect of having a broader betting culture is quite major, at least in my experience of interacting with the community.
More precisely, we have a pretty concrete norm that if someone makes a prediction or a public forecast, then it is usually valid (with some exceptions) to offer a bet with equal or better odds than the forecasted probability to the person making the forecast, and expect them to take you up on the bet. If the person does not take you up on the bet, this usually comes with some loss of status and reputation, and is usually (correctly, I would argue) interpreted as evidence that the forecast was not meant sincerely, or the person is trying to avoid public accountability in some other way. From what I can tell, this is exactly what happened here.
The effects of this norm (at least as I have perceived it) are large and strongly positive. From what I can tell, it is one of the norms that ensures the consistency of the models that our public intellectuals express, and when I interact with communities that do not have this norm, I very concretely experience many people no longer using probabilities in consistent ways, and can concretely observe large numbers of negative consequences arising from the lack of this norm.
I think what’s confusing you is that people are selectively against betting based on its motivation.
In EA, people regularly talk about morbid topics, but the stated aim is to help people. In this case, the aim could be read as “having fun and making money”. It was the motivation that was a problem, not the act itself, for most people.
While my read of your post is “there is the possibility that the aim could be interpreted this way” which I regard as fair, I feel I should state that ‘fun and money’ was not my aim, and (I strongly expect not Justin’s), as I have not yet done so explicitly.
I think it’s important to be as well-calibrated as reasonably possible on events of global significance. In particular, I’ve been seeing a lot of what appear to me to be poorly calibrated, alarmist statements, claims and musings on nCOV on social media, including from EAs, GCR researchers, Harvard epidemiologists, etc. I think these poorly calibrated/examined claims can result in substantial material harms to people, in terms of stoking up unnecessary public panic, confusing accurate assessment of the situation, and creating ‘boy who cried wolf’ effects for future events. I’ve spent a lot of time on social media trying to get people to tone down their more extreme statements re: nCOV.
(edit: I do not mean this to refer to Justin’s fermi estimate, which was on the more severe end but had clearly reasoned and transparent thinking behind it; more a broad comment on concerns re: poor calibration and the practical value of being well-calibrated).
As Habryka has said, this community in particular is one that has a set of tools it (or some part of it) uses for calibration. So I drew on it in this case. The payoff for me is small (£50; and I’m planning to give it to AMF); the payoff for Justin is higher but he accepted it as an offer rather than proposing it and so I doubt money is a factor for him either.
In the general sense I think both the concern about motivation and how something appears to parts of the community is valid. I would hope that it is still possible to get the benefits of betting on GCR-relevant topics for the benefits-to-people I articulate above (and the broader benefits Habryka and others have articulated). I would suggest that achieving this balance may be a matter of clearly stating aims and motivations, and (as others have suggested) taking particular care with tone and framing, but I would welcome further guidance.
Lastly, I would like to note my gratitude for the careful and thoughtful analysis and considerations that Khorton, Greg, Habryka, Chi and others are bringing to the topic. There are clearly a range of important considerations to be balanced appropriately, and I’m grateful both for the time taken and the constructive nature of the discussion.
Following Sean here I’ll also describe my motivation for taking the bet.
After Sean suggested the bet, I felt as if I had to take him up on it for group epistemic benefit; my hand was forced. Firstly, I wanted to get people to take the nCOV seriously and to think thoroughly about it (for the present case and for modelling possible future pandemics) - from an inside view model perspective the numbers I was getting are quite worrisome. I felt that if I didn’t take him up on the bet people wouldn’t take the issue as seriously, nor take explicitly modeling things themselves as seriously either. I was trying to socially counter what sometimes feels like a learned helplessness people have with respect to analyzing things or solving problems. Also, the EA community is especially clear thinking and I think a place like the EA forum is a good medium for problem solving around things like nCOV.
Secondly, I generally think that holding people in some sense accountable for their belief statements is a good thing (up to some caveats); it improves the collective epistemic process. In general I prefer exchanging detailed models in discussion rather than vague intuitions mediated by a bet but exchanging intuitions is useful. I also generally would rather make bets about things that are less grim and wouldn’t have suggested this bet myself, but I do think that it is important that we do make predictions about things that matter and some of those things are rather grim. In grim bets though we should definitely pay attention to how something might appear to parts of the community and make more clear what the intent and motivation behind the bet is.
Third, I wished to bring more attention and support to the issue in the hope that it causes people to take sensible personal precautions and that perhaps some of them can influence how things progress. I do not entirely know who reads this and some of them may have influence, expertise, or cleverness they can contribute.
I’m so sorry Sean, I took it as obvious that your motivation was developing accurate beliefs, hopefully to help you help others, rather than fun and profit. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise!
Thanks Khorton, nothing to apologise for. I read your comment as a concern about how the motivations of a bet might be perceived from the outside (whether in the specific case or more generally); but this led me to the conclusion that actually stating my motivations rather than assuming everyone reading knows would be helpful at this stage!
I’ve spent a lot of time on social media trying to get people to tone down their more extreme statements re: nCOV.
I would be interested to learn more about your views on the current outbreak. Can you link to the statements you made on social media, or present your perspective here (or as a top-level comment or post)?
(shared in one xrisk group, for example, as “X-riskers, it would appear your time is now: “With increasing transportation we are close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens.”. My response: “We are **not** “close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens”.)
Or, responding to speculation that nCov is a deliberately developed bioweapon, or was accidentally released from a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. There isn’t evidence for either of these and I think they are unhelpful types of speculation to be made without evidence, and such speculations can spread widely. Further, some people making the latter speculation didn’t seem to be aware what a common class of virus coronaviruses are (ranging from common cold thru to SARS). Whether or not a coronavirus was being studied at the Wuhan lab, I think it would not be a major coincidence to find a lab studying a coronavirus in a major city.
A third example was clarifying that the event 201 exercise Johns Hopkins did (which involved 65 million hypothetical deaths) was a tabletop simulation , not a prediction, and therefore could not be used to extrapolate an expectation of 65 million deaths from the current outbreak.
I made various other comments as part of discussions, but more providing context or points for discussion etc as I recall as opposed to disagreeing per se, and don’t have time to dig them up.
The latter examples don’t relate to predictions of the severity of the outbreak, more so to what I perceived at the time to be misunderstandings, misinformation, and unhelpful/ungrounded speculations.
To clarify a bit, I’m not in general against people betting on morally serious issues. I think it’s possible that this particular bet is also well-justified, since there’s a chance some people reading the post and thread might actually be trying to make decisions about how to devote time/resources to the issue. Making the bet might also cause other people to feel more “on their toes” in the future, when making potentially ungrounded public predictions, if they now feel like there’s a greater chance someone might challenge them. So there are potential upsides, which could outweigh the downsides raised.
At the same time, though, I do find certain kinds of bets discomforting and expect a pretty large portion of people (esp. people without much EA exposure) to feel discomforted too. I think that the cases where I’m most likely to feel uncomfortable would be ones where:
The bet is about an ongoing, pretty concrete tragedy with non-hypothetical victims. One person “profits” if the victims become more numerous and suffer more.
The people making the bet aren’t, even pretty indirectly, in a position to influence the management of the tragedy or the dedication of resources to it. It doesn’t actually matter all that much, in other words, if one of them is over- or under-confident about some aspect of the tragedy.
The bet is made in an otherwise “casual”/”social” setting.
(Importantly) It feels like the people are pretty much just betting to have fun, embarrass the other person, or make money.
I realize these aren’t very principled criteria. It’d be a bit weird if the true theory of morality made a principled distinction between bets about “hypothetical” and “non-hypothetical” victims. Nevertheless, I do still have a pretty strong sense of moral queeziness about bets of this sort. To use an implausibly extreme case again, I’d feel like something was really going wrong if people were fruitlessly betting about stuff like “Will troubled person X kill themselves this year?”
I also think that the vast majority of public bets that people have made online are totally fine. So maybe my comments here don’t actually matter very much. I mainly just want to make the point that: (a) Feelings of common-sense moral discomfort shouldn’t be totally ignored or dismissed and (b) it’s at least sometimes the right call to refrain from public betting in light of these feelings.
At a more general level, I really do think it’s important for the community in terms of health, reputation, inclusiveness, etc., if common-sense feelings of moral and personal comfort are taken seriously. I’m definitely happy that the community has a norm of it typically being OK to publicly challenge others to bets. But I also want to make sure we have a strong norm against discouraging people from raising their own feelings of discomfort.
(I apologize if it turns out I’m disagreeing with an implicit straw-man here.)
The people making the bet aren’t, even pretty indirectly, in a position to influence the management of the tragedy or the dedication of resources to it. It doesn’t actually matter all that much, in other words, if one of them is over- or under-confident about some aspect of the tragedy.
Do you think the bet would be less objectionable if Justin was able to increase the number of deaths?
But if two people were (for example) betting on a prediction platform that’s been set up by public health officials to inform prioritization decisions, then this would make the bet better. The reason is that, in this context, it would obviously matter if their expressed credences are well-callibrated and honestly meant. To the extent that the act of making the bet helps temporarily put some observers “on their toes” when publicly expressing credences, the most likely people to be put “on their toes” (other users of the platform) are also people whose expressed credences have an impact. So there would be an especially solid pro-social case for making the bet.
I suppose this bullet point is mostly just trying to get at the idea that a bet is better if it can clearly be helpful. (I should have said “positively influence” instead of just “influence.”) If a bet creates actionable incentives to kill people, on the other hand, that’s not a good thing.
Thanks! I do want to stress that I really respect your motives in this case and your evident thoughtfulness and empathy in response to the discussion; I also think this particular bet might be overall beneficial. I also agree with your suggestion that explicitly stating intent and being especially careful with tone/framing can probably do a lot of work.
It’s maybe a bit unfortunate that I’m making this comment in a thread that began with your bet, then, since my comment isn’t really about your bet. I realize it’s probably pretty unpleasant to have an extended ethics debate somehow spring up around one of your posts.
I mainly just wanted to say that it’s OK for people to raise feelings of personal/moral discomfort and that these feelings of discomfort can at least sometimes be important enough to justify refraining from a public bet. It seemed to me like some of the reaction to Chi’s comment went too far in the opposite direction. Maybe wrongly/unfairly, it seemed to me that there was some suggestion that this sort of discomfort should basically just be ignored or that people should feel discouraged from expressing their discomfort on the EA Forum.
I expect bets about a large number of Global Catastrophic Risks to be of great importance, and to similarly be perceived as “ghoulish” as you describe here.
The US government attempted to create a prediction market to predict terrorist attacks. It was shut down basically because it was perceived as “ghoulish”.
My impression is that experts think that shutting down the market made terrorism more likely, but I’m not super well-informed.
I see this as evidence both that 1) markets are useful and 2) some people (including influential people like senators) react pretty negatively to betting on life or death issues, despite the utility.
Maybe you are describing a distinction that is more complicated than I am currently comprehending, but I at least would expect Chi and Greg to object to bets of the type “what is the expected number of people dying in self-driving car accidents over the next decade?”, “Will there be an accident involving an AGI project that would classify as a ‘near-miss’, killing at least 10000 people or causing at least 10 billion dollars in economic damages within the next 50 years?” and “what is the likelihood of this new bednet distribution method outperforming existing methods by more than 30%, saving 30000 additional people over the next year?”.
Just as an additional note, to speak directly to the examples you gave: I would personally feel very little discomfort if two people (esp. people actively making or influencing decisions about donations and funding) wanted to publicly bet on the question: “What is the likelihood of this new bednet distribution method outperforming existing methods by more than 30%, saving 30000 additional people over the next year?” I obviously don’t know, but I would guess that Chi and Greg would both feel more comfortable about that question as well. I think that some random “passerby” might still feel some amount of discomfort, but probably substantially less.
I realize that there probably aren’t very principled reasons to view one bet here as intrinsically more objectionable than others. I listed some factors that seem to contribute to my judgments in my other comment, but they’re obviously a bit of a hodgepodge. My fully reflective moral view is also that there probably isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with any category of bets. For better or worse, though, I think that certain bets will predictably be discomforting and wrong-feeling to many people (including me). Then I think this discomfort is worth weighing against the plausible social benefits of the individual bet being made. At least on rare occasions, the trade-off probably won’t be worth it.
I ultimately don’t think my view here is that different than common views on lots of other more mundane social norms. For example: I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically morally wrong about speaking ill of the dead. I recognize that a blanket prohibition on speaking ill of the dead would be a totally ridiculous and socially/epistemically harmful form of censorship. But it’s still true that, in some hard-to-summarize class of cases, criticizing someone who’s died is going to strike a lot of people as especially uncomfortable and wrong. Even without any specific speech “ban” in place, I think that it’s worth giving weight to these feelings when you decide what to say.
What this general line of thought implies about particular bets is obviously pretty unclear. Maybe the value of publicly betting is consistently high enough to, in pretty much all cases, render feelings of discomfort irrelevant. Or maybe, if the community tries to have any norms around public betting, then the expected cost of wise bets avoided due to “false positives” would just be much higher than the expected the cost of unwise bets made due to “false negatives.” I don’t believe this, but I obviously don’t know. My best guess is that it probably makes sense to strike a (messy/unprincipled/disputed) balance that’s not too dissimilar from balances we strike in other social and professional contexts.
(As an off-hand note, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve also updated in the direction of thinking that the particular bet that triggered this thread was worthwhile. I also, of course, feel a bit weird having somehow now written so much about the fine nuances of betting norms in a thread about a deadly virus.)
purely because they thought it’d be fun to win a bet and make some money off a friend.
I do think the “purely” matters a good bit here. While I would go as far as to argue that even purely financial motivations are fine (and should be leveraged for the public good when possible), I think in as much as I understand your perspective, it becomes a lot less bad if people are only partially motivated by making money (or gaining status within their community).
As a concrete example, I think large fractions of academia are motivated by wanting a sense of legacy and prestige (this includes large fractions of epidemiology, which is highly relevant to this situation). Those motivations also feel not fully great to me, and I would feel worried about an academic system that tries to purely operate on those motivations. However, I would similarly expect an academic system that does not recognize those motivations at all, bans all expressions of those sentiments, and does not build system that leverages them, to also fail quite disastrously.
I think in order to produce large-scale coordination, it is important to enable the leveraging a of a large variety of motivations, while also keeping them in check by ensuring at least a minimum level of more aligned motivations (or some other external systems that ensures partially aligned motivations still result in good outcomes).
I strongly disagree with this comment—I think that motivations matter and that betting with an appropriate respect for the people who have died is completely possible—but I am glad you stated your position explicitly. Comments like this make the Forum better.
I would similarly be curious to understand the level of downvoting of my comment offering to remove my comments in light of concerns raised and encouragement to consider doing so. This is by far the most downvoted comment I’ve ever had. This may just be an artefact of how my call for objections to removing my comments has manifested (I was anticipating posts stating an objection like Ben’s and Habryka’s, and for those to be upvoted if popular, but people may have simply expressed objection by downvoting the original offer). In that case that’s fine.
Another possible explanation is an objection to me even making the offer in the first place. My steelman for this is that even the offer of self-censorship of certain practices in certain situations could be seen as coming at a very heavy cost to group epistemics. However from an individual-posting-to-forum perspective, this feels like an uncomfortable thing to be punished for. Posting possibly-controversial posts to a public forum has some unilateralist’s curse elements to it: risk is distributed to the overall forum, and the person who posts the possibly-controversial thing is likely to be someone who deems the risk lower than others. And we are not always the best at impartially judging our own actions. So when arguments are made in good faith that an action may respond in group harm, it seems like a reasonable step to make the offer to withdraw the action, and to signal a willingness to cooperate in whatever the group (or moderators, I guess) deemed to be in the group’s interest. And I built in a time delay to allow for objections and more views to be raised, before taking action. I would anticipate a more negative response if I were calling for deletion of others’ comments, but this was my own comment.
I would also note that offering to delete one’s comments comes at a personal cost, as does acknowledging possible fault of judgement; having an avalanche of negative karma on top of it adds to the discomfort.
If there’s something else going on—e.g. a sense that I was being dishonest about following through on the offer to delete; or something else—it would be good to know. I guess there could be a negative reaction to expressing the view that Chi’s perspective is valid. In my view, a point can be valid without being action-deciding. Here there are multiple considerations which I would all see as valid (value of betting to calibrate beliefs; value of doing so in public to reinforce a norm the group sees as beneficial and promote that norm to others; value of avoiding making insensitive-seeming posts that could possibly cause reputational damage to the group). The question is one of weighting of considerations—I have my own views, but it was very helpful to get a broader set of views in order to calibrate my actions.
Ah, I definitely interpreted your comment as “leave a reply or downvote if you think that’s a bad idea”. So I downvoted it and left a reply. My guess is many others have done the same for similar reasons.
I do also think editing for tone was a bad idea (mostly because I think the norm of having to be careful around tone is a pretty straightforward tax on betting, and because it contributed to the shaming of people who do want to bet for what Chi expressed as “inappropriate“ motivations), so doing that was a concrete thing that I think was bad on a norm level.
I’m happy to remove my comments; I think Chi raises a valid point. The aim was basically calibration. I think this is quite common in EA and forecasting, but agree it could look morbid from the outside, and these are publicly searchable. (I’ve also been upbeat in my tone for friendliness/politeness towards people with different views, but this could be misread as a lack of respect for the gravity of the situation). Unless this post receives strong objections by this evening, I will delete my comments or ask moderators to delete.
I also strongly object. I think public betting is one of the most valuable aspects of our culture, and would be deeply saddened to see these comments disappear (and more broadly as an outside observer, seeing them disappear would make me deeply concerned about the epistemic health of our community, since that norm is one of the things that actually keeps members of our community accountable for their professed beliefs)
My take is that this at this stage has been resolved in favour of “editing for tone but keeping the bet posts”. I have done the editing for tone. I am happy with this outcome, I hope most others are too.
My own personal view is that I think public betting on beliefs is good—it’s why I did it (both this time and in the past) and my preference is to continue doing so. However, my take is that that the discussion highlighted that in certain circumstances around betting (such as predictions on events such as an ongoing mass fatality event) it is worth being particularly careful about tone.
I strongly object to saying we’re not allowed to bet on the most important questions—questions of life or death. That’s like deciding to take the best person off the team defending the president. Don’t handicap yourself when it matters most. This is the tool that stops us from just talking hot air and actually records which people are actually able to make correct predictions. These are some of the most important bets on the forum.
I think I strongly agree with you on the value of being open to using betting in cases like these (at least in private, probably in public). And if you mean something like “Just in case anyone were to interpret Chi a certain way, I’d like to say that I strongly object to...”, then I just fully agree with your comment.
But I think it’s worth pointing out that no one said “we’re not allowed to” do these bets—Chi’s comment was just their personal view and recommendation, and had various hedges. At most it was saying “we shouldn’t”, which feels quite different from “we’re not allowed to”.
(Compare thinking that what someone is saying is racist and they really shouldn’t have said it, vs actually taking away their platforms or preventing their speech—a much higher bar is needed for the latter.)
Personally, I don’t see the bet itself as something that shouldn’t have happened. I acknowledge that others could have the perspective Chi had, and can see why they would. But didn’t feel that way myself, and I personally think that downside is outweighed by the upside of it being good for the community’s epistemics—and this is not just for Justin and Sean, but also for people reading the comments, so that they can come to more informed views based on the views the betters’ take and how strongly they hold them. (Therefore, there’s value in it being public, I think—I also therefore would personally suggest the comments shouldn’t be deleted, but it’s up to Sean.)
But I did feel really weird reading “Pleasure doing business Justin!”. I didn’t really feel uncomfortable with the rest of the upbeat tone Sean notes, but perhaps that should’ve been toned down too. That tone isn’t necessary for the benefits of the bet—it could be civil and polite but also neutral or sombre—and could create reputational issues for EA. (Plus it’s probably just good to have more respectful/taking-things-seriously norms in cases like these, without having to always calculate the consequences of such norms.)
Also, I feel uncomfortable with someone having downvoted Chi’s comment, given that it seemed to have a quite reasonable tone and to be sharing input/a suggestion/a recommendation. It wasn’t cutting or personal or damning. It seemed to me more like explaining Chi’s view than persuading, so I think we should be somewhat wary of downvoting such things, even when we disagree, so we don’t fall into something like groupthink. (I’ve strong upvoted for reasons of balance, even though I feel unsure about Chi’s actual recommendations.)
I agree that Chi’s comment is very reasonable (and upvoted for that reason).
Personally, I think editing for tone would be a reasonable compromise, but I am glad people are starting to think more about the EA Forum as a publicly searchable space.
Re: Michael & Khorton’s points, (1) Michael fully agreed, casual figure of speech that I’ve now deleted. I apologise. (2) I’ve done some further editing for tone but would be grateful if others had further suggestions.
I also agree re: Chi’s comment—I’ve already remarked that I think the point was valid, but I would add that I found it to be respectful and considerate in how it made its point (as one of the people it was directed towards).
It’s been useful for me to reflect on. I think a combination of two things for me: one is some inherent personal discomfort/concern about causing offence by effectively saying “I think you’re wrong and I’m willing to bet you’re wrong”, which I think I unintentionally counteracted with (possibly excessive) levity. The second is how quickly the disconnect can happen from (initial discussion of very serious topic) to (checking in on forum several days later to quickly respond to some math). Both are things I will be more careful about going forward. Lastly, I may have been spending too much time around risk folk, for whom certain discussions become so standard that one forgets how they can come across.
I guess there’s an interesting argument here for making casual gambling illegal—based on this thread, it seems like “Bets are serious & somber business, not for frivolous things like horse races” could be a really high value meme to spread.
This seems fair. I suggested the bet quite quickly. Without having time to work through the math of the bet, I suggested something that felt on the conservative side from the point of view of my beliefs. The more I think about it, (a) the more confident I am in my beliefs and (b) the more I feel it was not as generous as I originalyl thought*. I have a personal liking for binary bets rather than proportional payoffs. As a small concession in light of the points raised, I’d be happy to offer to modify the terms retroactively to make them more favourable to Justin, offering either of the following.
(i) Doubling the odds against me to 10:1 odds (rather than 5:1) on the original claim (at least an order of magnitude lower than his fermi). So his £50 would get £500 of mine.
OR
(ii) 5:1 on at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (50x) lower than his fermi (rather than 10x).
(My intuition is that (ii) is a better deal than (i) but I haven’t worked it through)
(*i.e. at time of bet—I think the likelihood of this being a severe global pandemic is now diminishing further in my mind)
Sure, I’ll take the modification to option (i). Thanks Sean.
10:1 on the original (1 order of magnitude) it is.
I respect that you are putting money behind your estimates and get the idea behind it, but would recommend you to reconsider if you want to do this (publicly) in this context and maybe consider removing these comments. Not only because it looks quite bad from the outside, but also because I’m not sure it’s appropriate on a forum about how to do good, especially if the virus should happen to kill a lot of people over the next year (also meaning that even more people would have lost someone to the virus). I personally found this quite morbid and I have a lot more context into EA culture than a random person reading this, e.g. I can guess that the primary motivation is not “making money” or “the feeling of winning and being right”—which would be quite inappropriate in this context -, but that might not be clear to others with less context.
(Maybe I’m also the only one having this reaction in which case it’s probably not so problematic)
edit: I can understand if people just disagree with me because you think there’s no harm done by such bets, but I’d be curious to hear from the people who down voted if in addition to that you think that comments like mine are harmful because of being bad for epistemic habits or something, so grateful to hear if someone thinks comments like these shouldn’t be made!
I have downvoted this, here are my reasons:
Pretty straightforwardly, I think having correct beliefs about situations like this is exceptionally important, and maybe the central tenet this community is oriented around. Having a culture of betting on those beliefs is one of the primary ways in which we incentivize people to have accurate beliefs in situations like this.
I think doing so publicly is a major public good, and is helping many others think more sanely about this situation. I think the PR risk that comes with this is completely dwarfed by that consideration. I would be deeply saddened to see people avoid taking these bets publicly, since I benefit a lot from both seeing people’s belief put the test this way, and I am confident many others are too.
Obviously, providing your personal perspective is fine, but I don’t think I want to see more comments like this, and as such I downvoted it. I think a forum that had many comments like this would be a forum I would not want to participate in, and I expect it to directly discourage others from contributing in ways I think are really important and productive (for example, it seems to have caused Sean below to seriously consider deleting his comments, which I would consider a major loss).
I also think that perception wise, this exchange communicates one of the primary aspects that makes me excited about this community. Seeing exchanges like the above is one of the primary reasons why I am involved in the Effective Altruism community, and is what caused me to become interested and develop trust in many of the institutions of the community in the first place. As such, I think this comments gets the broader perception angle backwards.
The comment also seems to repeatedly sneak in assumptions of broader societal judgement, without justifying doing so. The comment makes statements that extend far beyond personal perception, and indeed primarily makes claims about external perception and its relevance, which strike me as straightforwardly wrong and badly argued:
I don’t think it looks bad, and think that on the opposite, it communicates that we take our beliefs seriously and are willing to put personal stakes behind them. There will of course be some populations that will have some negative reaction to the above, but I am not particularly convinced of the relevance of their perception to our local behavior here on the forum.
I am quite confused why it would be “inappropriate”. Our culture of betting is a key part of a culture that helps us identify the most effective ways to do good, and as such is highly appropriate for this forum. It seems to me you are simply asserting that it might be inappropriate, and as such are making an implicit claim about what the norms on such a forum should be, which is something I strongly disagree with.
I don’t think these motivations would be inappropriate in this context. Those are fine motivations that we healthily leverage in large parts of the world to cause people to do good things, so of course we should leverage them here to allow us to do good things.
The whole economy relies on people being motivated to make money, and it has been a key ingredient to our ability to sustain the most prosperous period humanity has ever experienced (cf. more broadly the stock market). Of course I want people to have accurate beliefs by giving them the opportunity to make money. That is how you get them to have accurate beliefs!
Similarly the feeling of being right is probably what motivates large fractions of epidemiologists, trying to answer questions of direct relevance to this situation. Academia itself runs to a surprising degree on the satisfaction that comes from being right, and I think we should similarly not label that motivation as “inappropriate”, and instead try to build a system that leverages that motivation towards doing good things and helping people have accurate beliefs. Which is precisely what public betting does!
I emphatically object to this position (and agree with Chi’s). As best as I can tell, Chi’s comment is more accurate and better argued than this critique, and so the relative karma between the two dismays me.
I think it is fairly obvious that ‘betting on how many people are going to die’ looks ghoulish to commonsense morality. I think the articulation why this would be objectionable is only slightly less obvious: the party on the ‘worse side’ of the bet seems to be deliberately situating themselves to be rewarded as a consequence of the misery others suffer; there would also be suspicion about whether the person might try and contribute to the bad situation seeking a pay-off; and perhaps a sense one belittles the moral gravity of the situation by using it for prop betting.
Thus I’m confident if we ran some survey on confronting the ‘person on the street’ with the idea of people making this sort of bet, they would not think “wow, isn’t it great they’re willing to put their own money behind their convictions”, but something much more adverse around “holding a sweepstake on how many die”.
(I can’t find an easy instrument for this beyond than asking people/anecdata: the couple of non-EA people I’ve run this by have reacted either negatively or very negatively, and I know comments on forecasting questions which boil down to “will public figure X die before date Y” register their distaste. If there is a more objective assessment accessible, I’d offer odds at around 4:1 on the ratio of positive:negative sentiment being <1).
Of course, I think such an initial ‘commonsense’ impression would very unfair to Sean or Justin: I’m confident they engaged in this exercise only out of a sincere (and laudable) desire to try and better understand an important topic. Nonetheless (and to hold them much higher standards than my own behaviour) one may suggest it is nonetheless a lapse of practical wisdom if, whilst acting to fulfil one laudable motivation, not tempering this with other moral concerns one should also be mindful of.
One needs to weigh the ‘epistemic’ benefits of betting (including higher order terms) against the ‘tasteless’ complaint (both in moral-pluralism case of it possibly being bad, but also the more prudential case of it looking bad to third parties). If the epistemic benefits were great enough, we should reconcile ourselves to the costs of sometimes acting tastelessly (triage is distasteful too) or third parties (reasonably, if mistakenly) thinking less of us.
Yet the epistemic benefits on the table here (especially on the margin of ‘feel free to bet, save on commonsense ghoulish topics’) are extremely slim. The rate of betting in EA/rationalist land on any question is very low, so the signal you get from small-n bets are trivial. There are other options, especially for this question, which give you much more signal per unit activity—given, unlike the stock market, people are interested in the answer for-other-than pecuniary motivations: both metacalus and the John’s Hopkins platform prediction have relevant questions which are much active, and where people are offering more information.
Given the marginal benefits are so slim, they are easily outweighed by the costs Chi notes. And they are.
I am confused. Both of these are environments in which people participate in something very similar to betting. In the first case they are competing pretty directly for internet points, and in the second they are competing for monetary prices.
Those two institutions strike me as great examples of the benefit of having a culture of betting like this, and also strike me as similarly likely to create offense in others.
We seem to agree on the value of those platforms, and both their public perception and their cultural effects seem highly analogous to the private betting case to me. You even explicitly say that you expect similar reactions to questions like the above being brought up on those platforms.
I agree with you that were there only the occasional one-off bet on the forum that was being critiqued here, the epistemic cost would be minor. But I am confident that a community that had a relationship to betting that was more analogous to how Chi’s relationship to betting appears to be, we would have never actually built the Metaculus prediction platform. That part of our culture was what enabled us to have these platforms in the first place (as I think an analysis of the history of Metaculus will readily reveal, which I think can be pretty directly traced to a lot of the historic work around prediction markets, which have generally received public critique very similar to the one you describe).
I think this is almost entirely dependent on the framing of the question, so I am a bit uncertain about this. If you frame the question as something like “is it important for members of a research community to be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions?” you will get a pretty positive answer. If you frame the question as something like “is it bad for members of a research community to profit personally from the deaths and injuries of others?” you will obviously get a negative answer.
In this case, I do think that the broader public will have a broadly negative reaction to the bet above, which I never argued against. The thing I argued against was that minor negative perception in the eyes of the broader public was of particularly large relevance here on our forum.
I additionally argued that the effects of that perception were outweighed by the long-term positive reputational effects of having skin-in-the-game of even just a small amount of our beliefs, and the perception of a good chunk of a much more engaged and more highly-educated audience, which thinks of our participation in prediction-markets and our culture of betting as being one of the things that sets us apart from large parts of the rest of the world.
I’m extremely confident a lot more opprobrium attaches to bets where the payoff is in money versus those where the payoff is in internet points etc. As you note, I agree certain forecasting questions (even without cash) provoke distaste: if those same questions were on a prediction market the reaction would be worse. (There’s also likely an issue the money leading to a question of ones motivation—if epi types are trying to predict a death toll and not getting money for their efforts, it seems their efforts have a laudable purpose in mind, less so if they are riding money on it).
This looks like a stretch to me. Chi can speak for themselves, but their remarks don’t seem to entail a ‘relationship to betting’ writ large, but an uneasy relationship to morbid topics in particular. Thus the policy I take them to be recommending (which I also endorse) of refraining making ‘morbid’ or ‘tasteless’ bets (but feel free to prop bet to heart’s desire on other topics) seems to have very minor epistemic costs, rather than threatening some transformation of epistemic culture which would mean people stop caring about predictions.
For similar reasons, this also seems relatively costless in terms of other perceptions: refraining from ‘morbid’ topics for betting only excludes a small minority of questions one can bet upon, leaving plenty of opportunities to signal its virtuous characteristics re. taking ideas seriously whilst avoiding those which reflect poorly upon it.
This is directly counter to my experience of substantive and important EA conversation. All the topics I’m interested in are essentially morbid topics when viewed in passing by a ‘person on the street’. Here are examples of such questions:
How frequently will we have major pandemics that kill over N people?
How severe (in terms of death and major harm) will the worst pandemic in the next 10 years be?
How many lives are saved by donations to GiveWell recommended charities? If we pour 10-100 million dollars into them, will we see a corresponding decline in deaths from key diseases globally?
As AI gets more powerful, will we get warning shots across the bow that injure
or kill <10,000 people with enough time for us to calibrate to the difficulty of the alignment problem, or will it be more sudden than that?
Like, sometimes I even just bet on ongoing death rates. Someone might say to me “The factory farming problem is very small of course” and I’ll reply “I will take a bet with you, if you’re so confident. You say what you think it is, I’ll say what I think it is, then we’ll use google to find out who’s right. Because I expect you’ll be wrong by at least 2 orders of magnitude.” I’m immediately proposing a bet on number of chickens being murdered per year, or some analogous number. I also would make similar bets when someone says a problem is big small e.g. “Ageing/genocide/cancer is/isn’t very important” → “I’ll take a bet on the number of people who’ve died from it in the last 10 years.”
All of your examples seem much better than the index case I am arguing against. Commonsense morality attaches much less distaste to cases where those ‘in peril’ are not crisply identified (e.g. “how many will die in some pandemic in the future” is better than “how many will die in this particular outbreak”, which is better than “will Alice, currently ill, live or die?”). It should also find bets on historical events are (essentially) fine, as whatever good or ill implicit in these has already occurred.
Of course, I agree they your examples would be construed as to some degree morbid. But my recommendation wasn’t “refrain from betting in any question where we we can show the topic is to some degree morbid” (after all, betting on GDP of a given country could be construed this way, given its large downstream impacts on welfare). It was to refrain in those cases where it appears very distasteful and for which there’s no sufficient justification. As it seems I’m not expressing this balancing consideration well, I’ll belabour it.
#
Say, God forbid, one of my friend’s children has a life-limiting disease. On its face, it seems tasteless for me to compose predictions at all on questions like, “will they still be alive by Christmas?” Carefully scrutinising whether they will live or die seems to run counter to the service I should be providing as a supporter of my friends family and someone with the child’s best interests at heart. It goes without saying opening a book on a question like this seems deplorable, and offering (and confirming bets) where I take the pessimistic side despicable.
Yet other people do have good reason for trying to compose an accurate prediction on survival or prognosis. The child’s doctor may find themselves in the invidious position where they recognise they their duty to give my friend’s family the best estimate they can runs at cross purposes to other moral imperatives that apply too. The commonsense/virtue-ethicsy hope would be the doctor can strike the balance best satisfies these cross-purposes, thus otherwise callous thoughts and deeds are justified by their connection to providing important information to the family
Yet any incremental information benefit isn’t enough to justify anything of any degree of distastefulness. If the doctor opened a prediction market on a local children’s hospice, I think (even if they were solely and sincerely motivated for good purposes, such as to provide families with in-expectation better prognostication now and the future) they have gravely missed the mark.
Of the options available, ‘bringing money’ into it generally looks more ghoulish the closer the connection is between ‘something horrible happening’ and ‘payday!‘. A mere prediction platform is better (although still probably the wrong side of the line unless we have specific evidence it will give a large benefit), also paying people to make predictions on said platform (but paying for activity and aggregate accuracy rather than direct ‘bet results’) is also slightly better. “This family’s loss (of their child) will be my gain (of some money)” is the sort of grotesque counterfactual good people would strenuously avoid being party to save exceptionally good reason.
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To repeat: the it is the balance of these factors—which come in degrees—which is determines the final evaluation. So, for example, I’m not against people forecasting the ‘nCoV’ question (indeed, I do as well), but the addition of money takes it the wrong side of the line (notwithstanding the money being ridden on this for laudable motivation). Likewise I’m happy to for people to prop bet on some of your questions pretty freely, but not for the ‘nCoV’ (or some even more extreme versions) because the question is somewhat less ghoulish, etc. etc. etc.
I confess some irritation. Because I think whilst you and Oli are pressing arguments (sorry—“noticing confusion”) re. there not being a crisp quality that obtains to the objectionable ones yet not the less objectionable ones (e.g. ‘You say this question is ‘morbid’ - but look here! here are some other questions which are qualitatively morbid too, and we shouldn’t rule them all out’) you are in fact committed to some sort of balancing account.
I presume (hopefully?) you don’t think ‘child hospice sweepstakes’ would be a good idea for someone to try (even if it may improve our calibration! and it would give useful information re. paediatric prognosticiation which could be of value to the wider world! and capitalism is built on accurate price signals! etc. etc.) As you’re not biting the bullet on these reductios (nor bmg’s, nor others) you implicitly accept all the considerations about why betting is a good thing are pro tanto and can be overcome at some extreme limit of ghoulishness etc.
How to weigh these considerations is up for grabs. Yet picking each individual feature of ghoulishness in turn and showing it, alone, is not enough to warrant refraining from highly ghoulish bets (where the true case against would be composed of other factors alongside the one being shown to be individually insufficient) seems an exercise in the fallacy of division.
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I also note that all the (few) prop bets I recall in EA up until now (including one I made with you) weren’t morbid. Which suggests you wouldn’t appreciably reduce the track record of prop bets which show (as Oli sees it) admirable EA virtues of skin in the game.
I’m tapping out of this discussion. I disagree with much of the above, but I cannot respond to it properly for now.
At least from a common-sense morality perspective, this doesn’t sit right with me. I do feel that it would be wrong for two people to get together to bet about some horrible tragedy—“How many people will die in this genocide?” “Will troubled person X kill themselves this year?” etc. -- purely because they thought it’d be fun to win a bet and make some money off a friend. I definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable if a lot of people around me were doing this.
When the motives involve working to form more accurate and rigorous beliefs about ethically pressing issues, as they clearly were in this case, I think that’s a different story. I’m sympathetic to the thought that it would be bad to discourage this sort of public bet. I think it might also be possible to argue that, if the benefits of betting are great enough, then it’s worth condoning or even encouraging more ghoulishly motivated bets too. I guess I don’t really buy that, though. I don’t think that a norm specifically against public bets that are ghoulish from a common-sense morality perspective would place very important limitations on the community’s ability to form accurate beliefs or do good.
I do also think there are significant downsides, on the other hand, to having a culture that disregards common-sense feelings of discomfort like the ones Chi’s comment expressed.
[[EDIT: As a clarification, I’m not classifying the particular bet in this thread as “ghoulish.” I share the general sort of discomfort that Chi’s comment describes, while also recognizing that the bet was well-motivated and potentially helpful. I’m more generally pushing back against the thought that evident motives don’t matter much or that concerns about discomfort/disrespectfulness should never lead people to refrain from public bets.]]
Responding to this point separately: I am very confused by this statement. A large fraction of topics we are discussing within the EA community, are pretty directly about the death of thousands, often millions or billions, of other people. From biorisk (as discussed here), to global health and development, to the risk of major international conflict, a lot of topics we think about involve people forming models that will quite directly require forecasting the potential impacts of various life-or-death decisions.
I expect bets about a large number of Global Catastrophic Risks to be of great importance, and to similarly be perceived as “ghoulish” as you describe here. Maybe you are describing a distinction that is more complicated than I am currently comprehending, but I at least would expect Chi and Greg to object to bets of the type “what is the expected number of people dying in self-driving car accidents over the next decade?”, “Will there be an accident involving an AGI project that would classify as a ‘near-miss’, killing at least 10000 people or causing at least 10 billion dollars in economic damages within the next 50 years?” and “what is the likelihood of this new bednet distribution method outperforming existing methods by more than 30%, saving 30000 additional people over the next year?”.
All of these just strike me as straightforwardly important questions, that an onlooker could easily construe as “ghoulish”, and I expect would be strongly discouraged by the norms that I see being advocated for here. In the case of the last one, it is probably the key fact I would be trying to estimate when evaluating a new bednet distribution method.
Ultimately, I care a lot about modeling risks of various technologies, and understanding which technologies and interventions can more effective save people’s lives, and whenever I try to understand that, I will have to discuss and build models of how those will impact other people’s lives, often in drastic ways.
Compared to the above, the bet between Sean and Justin does not strike me as particularly ghoulish (and I expect that to be confirmed by doing some public surveys on people’s naive perception, as Greg suggested), and so I see little alternative to thinking that you are also advocating for banning bets on any of the above propositions, which leaves me confused why you think doing so would not inhibit our ability to do good.
There might also be a confusion about what the purpose and impact of bets in our community is. While the number of bets being made is relatively small, the effect of having a broader betting culture is quite major, at least in my experience of interacting with the community.
More precisely, we have a pretty concrete norm that if someone makes a prediction or a public forecast, then it is usually valid (with some exceptions) to offer a bet with equal or better odds than the forecasted probability to the person making the forecast, and expect them to take you up on the bet. If the person does not take you up on the bet, this usually comes with some loss of status and reputation, and is usually (correctly, I would argue) interpreted as evidence that the forecast was not meant sincerely, or the person is trying to avoid public accountability in some other way. From what I can tell, this is exactly what happened here.
The effects of this norm (at least as I have perceived it) are large and strongly positive. From what I can tell, it is one of the norms that ensures the consistency of the models that our public intellectuals express, and when I interact with communities that do not have this norm, I very concretely experience many people no longer using probabilities in consistent ways, and can concretely observe large numbers of negative consequences arising from the lack of this norm.
Alex Tabarrok has written about this in his post “A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit”.
This doesn’t affect your point, but I just wanted to note that the post—including the wonderful title—was written by Alex Tabarrok.
Oops. Fixed.
I think what’s confusing you is that people are selectively against betting based on its motivation.
In EA, people regularly talk about morbid topics, but the stated aim is to help people. In this case, the aim could be read as “having fun and making money”. It was the motivation that was a problem, not the act itself, for most people.
While my read of your post is “there is the possibility that the aim could be interpreted this way” which I regard as fair, I feel I should state that ‘fun and money’ was not my aim, and (I strongly expect not Justin’s), as I have not yet done so explicitly.
I think it’s important to be as well-calibrated as reasonably possible on events of global significance. In particular, I’ve been seeing a lot of what appear to me to be poorly calibrated, alarmist statements, claims and musings on nCOV on social media, including from EAs, GCR researchers, Harvard epidemiologists, etc. I think these poorly calibrated/examined claims can result in substantial material harms to people, in terms of stoking up unnecessary public panic, confusing accurate assessment of the situation, and creating ‘boy who cried wolf’ effects for future events. I’ve spent a lot of time on social media trying to get people to tone down their more extreme statements re: nCOV.
(edit: I do not mean this to refer to Justin’s fermi estimate, which was on the more severe end but had clearly reasoned and transparent thinking behind it; more a broad comment on concerns re: poor calibration and the practical value of being well-calibrated).
As Habryka has said, this community in particular is one that has a set of tools it (or some part of it) uses for calibration. So I drew on it in this case. The payoff for me is small (£50; and I’m planning to give it to AMF); the payoff for Justin is higher but he accepted it as an offer rather than proposing it and so I doubt money is a factor for him either.
In the general sense I think both the concern about motivation and how something appears to parts of the community is valid. I would hope that it is still possible to get the benefits of betting on GCR-relevant topics for the benefits-to-people I articulate above (and the broader benefits Habryka and others have articulated). I would suggest that achieving this balance may be a matter of clearly stating aims and motivations, and (as others have suggested) taking particular care with tone and framing, but I would welcome further guidance.
Lastly, I would like to note my gratitude for the careful and thoughtful analysis and considerations that Khorton, Greg, Habryka, Chi and others are bringing to the topic. There are clearly a range of important considerations to be balanced appropriately, and I’m grateful both for the time taken and the constructive nature of the discussion.
Following Sean here I’ll also describe my motivation for taking the bet.
After Sean suggested the bet, I felt as if I had to take him up on it for group epistemic benefit; my hand was forced. Firstly, I wanted to get people to take the nCOV seriously and to think thoroughly about it (for the present case and for modelling possible future pandemics) - from an inside view model perspective the numbers I was getting are quite worrisome. I felt that if I didn’t take him up on the bet people wouldn’t take the issue as seriously, nor take explicitly modeling things themselves as seriously either. I was trying to socially counter what sometimes feels like a learned helplessness people have with respect to analyzing things or solving problems. Also, the EA community is especially clear thinking and I think a place like the EA forum is a good medium for problem solving around things like nCOV.
Secondly, I generally think that holding people in some sense accountable for their belief statements is a good thing (up to some caveats); it improves the collective epistemic process. In general I prefer exchanging detailed models in discussion rather than vague intuitions mediated by a bet but exchanging intuitions is useful. I also generally would rather make bets about things that are less grim and wouldn’t have suggested this bet myself, but I do think that it is important that we do make predictions about things that matter and some of those things are rather grim. In grim bets though we should definitely pay attention to how something might appear to parts of the community and make more clear what the intent and motivation behind the bet is.
Third, I wished to bring more attention and support to the issue in the hope that it causes people to take sensible personal precautions and that perhaps some of them can influence how things progress. I do not entirely know who reads this and some of them may have influence, expertise, or cleverness they can contribute.
I’m so sorry Sean, I took it as obvious that your motivation was developing accurate beliefs, hopefully to help you help others, rather than fun and profit. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise!
Thanks Khorton, nothing to apologise for. I read your comment as a concern about how the motivations of a bet might be perceived from the outside (whether in the specific case or more generally); but this led me to the conclusion that actually stating my motivations rather than assuming everyone reading knows would be helpful at this stage!
I would be interested to learn more about your views on the current outbreak. Can you link to the statements you made on social media, or present your perspective here (or as a top-level comment or post)?
Hi Wei,
Sorry I missed this. My strongest responses over the last while have fallen into the categories of: (1) responding to people claiming existential risk-or-approaching potential (or sharing papers by people like Taleb stating we are entering a phase where this is near-certain; e.g. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b68a4e4a2772c2a206180a1/t/5e2efaa2ff2cf27efbe8fc91/1580137123173/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Path.pdf
(shared in one xrisk group, for example, as “X-riskers, it would appear your time is now: “With increasing transportation we are close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens.”. My response: “We are **not** “close to a transition to conditions in which extinction becomes certain both because of rapid spread and because of the selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens”.)
Or, responding to speculation that nCov is a deliberately developed bioweapon, or was accidentally released from a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. There isn’t evidence for either of these and I think they are unhelpful types of speculation to be made without evidence, and such speculations can spread widely. Further, some people making the latter speculation didn’t seem to be aware what a common class of virus coronaviruses are (ranging from common cold thru to SARS). Whether or not a coronavirus was being studied at the Wuhan lab, I think it would not be a major coincidence to find a lab studying a coronavirus in a major city.
A third example was clarifying that the event 201 exercise Johns Hopkins did (which involved 65 million hypothetical deaths) was a tabletop simulation , not a prediction, and therefore could not be used to extrapolate an expectation of 65 million deaths from the current outbreak.
I made various other comments as part of discussions, but more providing context or points for discussion etc as I recall as opposed to disagreeing per se, and don’t have time to dig them up.
The latter examples don’t relate to predictions of the severity of the outbreak, more so to what I perceived at the time to be misunderstandings, misinformation, and unhelpful/ungrounded speculations.
To clarify a bit, I’m not in general against people betting on morally serious issues. I think it’s possible that this particular bet is also well-justified, since there’s a chance some people reading the post and thread might actually be trying to make decisions about how to devote time/resources to the issue. Making the bet might also cause other people to feel more “on their toes” in the future, when making potentially ungrounded public predictions, if they now feel like there’s a greater chance someone might challenge them. So there are potential upsides, which could outweigh the downsides raised.
At the same time, though, I do find certain kinds of bets discomforting and expect a pretty large portion of people (esp. people without much EA exposure) to feel discomforted too. I think that the cases where I’m most likely to feel uncomfortable would be ones where:
The bet is about an ongoing, pretty concrete tragedy with non-hypothetical victims. One person “profits” if the victims become more numerous and suffer more.
The people making the bet aren’t, even pretty indirectly, in a position to influence the management of the tragedy or the dedication of resources to it. It doesn’t actually matter all that much, in other words, if one of them is over- or under-confident about some aspect of the tragedy.
The bet is made in an otherwise “casual”/”social” setting.
(Importantly) It feels like the people are pretty much just betting to have fun, embarrass the other person, or make money.
I realize these aren’t very principled criteria. It’d be a bit weird if the true theory of morality made a principled distinction between bets about “hypothetical” and “non-hypothetical” victims. Nevertheless, I do still have a pretty strong sense of moral queeziness about bets of this sort. To use an implausibly extreme case again, I’d feel like something was really going wrong if people were fruitlessly betting about stuff like “Will troubled person X kill themselves this year?”
I also think that the vast majority of public bets that people have made online are totally fine. So maybe my comments here don’t actually matter very much. I mainly just want to make the point that: (a) Feelings of common-sense moral discomfort shouldn’t be totally ignored or dismissed and (b) it’s at least sometimes the right call to refrain from public betting in light of these feelings.
At a more general level, I really do think it’s important for the community in terms of health, reputation, inclusiveness, etc., if common-sense feelings of moral and personal comfort are taken seriously. I’m definitely happy that the community has a norm of it typically being OK to publicly challenge others to bets. But I also want to make sure we have a strong norm against discouraging people from raising their own feelings of discomfort.
(I apologize if it turns out I’m disagreeing with an implicit straw-man here.)
Do you think the bet would be less objectionable if Justin was able to increase the number of deaths?
No, I think that would be far worse.
But if two people were (for example) betting on a prediction platform that’s been set up by public health officials to inform prioritization decisions, then this would make the bet better. The reason is that, in this context, it would obviously matter if their expressed credences are well-callibrated and honestly meant. To the extent that the act of making the bet helps temporarily put some observers “on their toes” when publicly expressing credences, the most likely people to be put “on their toes” (other users of the platform) are also people whose expressed credences have an impact. So there would be an especially solid pro-social case for making the bet.
I suppose this bullet point is mostly just trying to get at the idea that a bet is better if it can clearly be helpful. (I should have said “positively influence” instead of just “influence.”) If a bet creates actionable incentives to kill people, on the other hand, that’s not a good thing.
Thanks bmg. FWIW, I provide my justification (from my personal perspective) here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g2F5BBfhTNESR5PJJ/concerning-the-recent-wuhan-coronavirus-outbreak?commentId=mWi2L4S4sRZiSehJq
Thanks! I do want to stress that I really respect your motives in this case and your evident thoughtfulness and empathy in response to the discussion; I also think this particular bet might be overall beneficial. I also agree with your suggestion that explicitly stating intent and being especially careful with tone/framing can probably do a lot of work.
It’s maybe a bit unfortunate that I’m making this comment in a thread that began with your bet, then, since my comment isn’t really about your bet. I realize it’s probably pretty unpleasant to have an extended ethics debate somehow spring up around one of your posts.
I mainly just wanted to say that it’s OK for people to raise feelings of personal/moral discomfort and that these feelings of discomfort can at least sometimes be important enough to justify refraining from a public bet. It seemed to me like some of the reaction to Chi’s comment went too far in the opposite direction. Maybe wrongly/unfairly, it seemed to me that there was some suggestion that this sort of discomfort should basically just be ignored or that people should feel discouraged from expressing their discomfort on the EA Forum.
The US government attempted to create a prediction market to predict terrorist attacks. It was shut down basically because it was perceived as “ghoulish”.
My impression is that experts think that shutting down the market made terrorism more likely, but I’m not super well-informed.
I see this as evidence both that 1) markets are useful and 2) some people (including influential people like senators) react pretty negatively to betting on life or death issues, despite the utility.
Just as an additional note, to speak directly to the examples you gave: I would personally feel very little discomfort if two people (esp. people actively making or influencing decisions about donations and funding) wanted to publicly bet on the question: “What is the likelihood of this new bednet distribution method outperforming existing methods by more than 30%, saving 30000 additional people over the next year?” I obviously don’t know, but I would guess that Chi and Greg would both feel more comfortable about that question as well. I think that some random “passerby” might still feel some amount of discomfort, but probably substantially less.
I realize that there probably aren’t very principled reasons to view one bet here as intrinsically more objectionable than others. I listed some factors that seem to contribute to my judgments in my other comment, but they’re obviously a bit of a hodgepodge. My fully reflective moral view is also that there probably isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with any category of bets. For better or worse, though, I think that certain bets will predictably be discomforting and wrong-feeling to many people (including me). Then I think this discomfort is worth weighing against the plausible social benefits of the individual bet being made. At least on rare occasions, the trade-off probably won’t be worth it.
I ultimately don’t think my view here is that different than common views on lots of other more mundane social norms. For example: I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically morally wrong about speaking ill of the dead. I recognize that a blanket prohibition on speaking ill of the dead would be a totally ridiculous and socially/epistemically harmful form of censorship. But it’s still true that, in some hard-to-summarize class of cases, criticizing someone who’s died is going to strike a lot of people as especially uncomfortable and wrong. Even without any specific speech “ban” in place, I think that it’s worth giving weight to these feelings when you decide what to say.
What this general line of thought implies about particular bets is obviously pretty unclear. Maybe the value of publicly betting is consistently high enough to, in pretty much all cases, render feelings of discomfort irrelevant. Or maybe, if the community tries to have any norms around public betting, then the expected cost of wise bets avoided due to “false positives” would just be much higher than the expected the cost of unwise bets made due to “false negatives.” I don’t believe this, but I obviously don’t know. My best guess is that it probably makes sense to strike a (messy/unprincipled/disputed) balance that’s not too dissimilar from balances we strike in other social and professional contexts.
(As an off-hand note, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve also updated in the direction of thinking that the particular bet that triggered this thread was worthwhile. I also, of course, feel a bit weird having somehow now written so much about the fine nuances of betting norms in a thread about a deadly virus.)
I do think the “purely” matters a good bit here. While I would go as far as to argue that even purely financial motivations are fine (and should be leveraged for the public good when possible), I think in as much as I understand your perspective, it becomes a lot less bad if people are only partially motivated by making money (or gaining status within their community).
As a concrete example, I think large fractions of academia are motivated by wanting a sense of legacy and prestige (this includes large fractions of epidemiology, which is highly relevant to this situation). Those motivations also feel not fully great to me, and I would feel worried about an academic system that tries to purely operate on those motivations. However, I would similarly expect an academic system that does not recognize those motivations at all, bans all expressions of those sentiments, and does not build system that leverages them, to also fail quite disastrously.
I think in order to produce large-scale coordination, it is important to enable the leveraging a of a large variety of motivations, while also keeping them in check by ensuring at least a minimum level of more aligned motivations (or some other external systems that ensures partially aligned motivations still result in good outcomes).
I strongly disagree with this comment—I think that motivations matter and that betting with an appropriate respect for the people who have died is completely possible—but I am glad you stated your position explicitly. Comments like this make the Forum better.
I would similarly be curious to understand the level of downvoting of my comment offering to remove my comments in light of concerns raised and encouragement to consider doing so. This is by far the most downvoted comment I’ve ever had. This may just be an artefact of how my call for objections to removing my comments has manifested (I was anticipating posts stating an objection like Ben’s and Habryka’s, and for those to be upvoted if popular, but people may have simply expressed objection by downvoting the original offer). In that case that’s fine.
Another possible explanation is an objection to me even making the offer in the first place. My steelman for this is that even the offer of self-censorship of certain practices in certain situations could be seen as coming at a very heavy cost to group epistemics. However from an individual-posting-to-forum perspective, this feels like an uncomfortable thing to be punished for. Posting possibly-controversial posts to a public forum has some unilateralist’s curse elements to it: risk is distributed to the overall forum, and the person who posts the possibly-controversial thing is likely to be someone who deems the risk lower than others. And we are not always the best at impartially judging our own actions. So when arguments are made in good faith that an action may respond in group harm, it seems like a reasonable step to make the offer to withdraw the action, and to signal a willingness to cooperate in whatever the group (or moderators, I guess) deemed to be in the group’s interest. And I built in a time delay to allow for objections and more views to be raised, before taking action. I would anticipate a more negative response if I were calling for deletion of others’ comments, but this was my own comment.
I would also note that offering to delete one’s comments comes at a personal cost, as does acknowledging possible fault of judgement; having an avalanche of negative karma on top of it adds to the discomfort.
If there’s something else going on—e.g. a sense that I was being dishonest about following through on the offer to delete; or something else—it would be good to know. I guess there could be a negative reaction to expressing the view that Chi’s perspective is valid. In my view, a point can be valid without being action-deciding. Here there are multiple considerations which I would all see as valid (value of betting to calibrate beliefs; value of doing so in public to reinforce a norm the group sees as beneficial and promote that norm to others; value of avoiding making insensitive-seeming posts that could possibly cause reputational damage to the group). The question is one of weighting of considerations—I have my own views, but it was very helpful to get a broader set of views in order to calibrate my actions.
Ah, I definitely interpreted your comment as “leave a reply or downvote if you think that’s a bad idea”. So I downvoted it and left a reply. My guess is many others have done the same for similar reasons.
I do also think editing for tone was a bad idea (mostly because I think the norm of having to be careful around tone is a pretty straightforward tax on betting, and because it contributed to the shaming of people who do want to bet for what Chi expressed as “inappropriate“ motivations), so doing that was a concrete thing that I think was bad on a norm level.
Thanks, good to know on both, appreciate the feedback.
(+1 to Oli’s reasoning—I have since removed my downvote on that comment.)
I’m happy to remove my comments; I think Chi raises a valid point. The aim was basically calibration. I think this is quite common in EA and forecasting, but agree it could look morbid from the outside, and these are publicly searchable. (I’ve also been upbeat in my tone for friendliness/politeness towards people with different views, but this could be misread as a lack of respect for the gravity of the situation). Unless this post receives strong objections by this evening, I will delete my comments or ask moderators to delete.
I also strongly object. I think public betting is one of the most valuable aspects of our culture, and would be deeply saddened to see these comments disappear (and more broadly as an outside observer, seeing them disappear would make me deeply concerned about the epistemic health of our community, since that norm is one of the things that actually keeps members of our community accountable for their professed beliefs)
My take is that this at this stage has been resolved in favour of “editing for tone but keeping the bet posts”. I have done the editing for tone. I am happy with this outcome, I hope most others are too.
My own personal view is that I think public betting on beliefs is good—it’s why I did it (both this time and in the past) and my preference is to continue doing so. However, my take is that that the discussion highlighted that in certain circumstances around betting (such as predictions on events such as an ongoing mass fatality event) it is worth being particularly careful about tone.
I strongly object to saying we’re not allowed to bet on the most important questions—questions of life or death. That’s like deciding to take the best person off the team defending the president. Don’t handicap yourself when it matters most. This is the tool that stops us from just talking hot air and actually records which people are actually able to make correct predictions. These are some of the most important bets on the forum.
(Kind of just a nitpick)
I think I strongly agree with you on the value of being open to using betting in cases like these (at least in private, probably in public). And if you mean something like “Just in case anyone were to interpret Chi a certain way, I’d like to say that I strongly object to...”, then I just fully agree with your comment.
But I think it’s worth pointing out that no one said “we’re not allowed to” do these bets—Chi’s comment was just their personal view and recommendation, and had various hedges. At most it was saying “we shouldn’t”, which feels quite different from “we’re not allowed to”.
(Compare thinking that what someone is saying is racist and they really shouldn’t have said it, vs actually taking away their platforms or preventing their speech—a much higher bar is needed for the latter.)
Personally, I don’t see the bet itself as something that shouldn’t have happened. I acknowledge that others could have the perspective Chi had, and can see why they would. But didn’t feel that way myself, and I personally think that downside is outweighed by the upside of it being good for the community’s epistemics—and this is not just for Justin and Sean, but also for people reading the comments, so that they can come to more informed views based on the views the betters’ take and how strongly they hold them. (Therefore, there’s value in it being public, I think—I also therefore would personally suggest the comments shouldn’t be deleted, but it’s up to Sean.)
But I did feel really weird reading “Pleasure doing business Justin!”. I didn’t really feel uncomfortable with the rest of the upbeat tone Sean notes, but perhaps that should’ve been toned down too. That tone isn’t necessary for the benefits of the bet—it could be civil and polite but also neutral or sombre—and could create reputational issues for EA. (Plus it’s probably just good to have more respectful/taking-things-seriously norms in cases like these, without having to always calculate the consequences of such norms.)
Also, I feel uncomfortable with someone having downvoted Chi’s comment, given that it seemed to have a quite reasonable tone and to be sharing input/a suggestion/a recommendation. It wasn’t cutting or personal or damning. It seemed to me more like explaining Chi’s view than persuading, so I think we should be somewhat wary of downvoting such things, even when we disagree, so we don’t fall into something like groupthink. (I’ve strong upvoted for reasons of balance, even though I feel unsure about Chi’s actual recommendations.)
I agree that Chi’s comment is very reasonable (and upvoted for that reason). Personally, I think editing for tone would be a reasonable compromise, but I am glad people are starting to think more about the EA Forum as a publicly searchable space.
Re: Michael & Khorton’s points, (1) Michael fully agreed, casual figure of speech that I’ve now deleted. I apologise. (2) I’ve done some further editing for tone but would be grateful if others had further suggestions.
I also agree re: Chi’s comment—I’ve already remarked that I think the point was valid, but I would add that I found it to be respectful and considerate in how it made its point (as one of the people it was directed towards).
It’s been useful for me to reflect on. I think a combination of two things for me: one is some inherent personal discomfort/concern about causing offence by effectively saying “I think you’re wrong and I’m willing to bet you’re wrong”, which I think I unintentionally counteracted with (possibly excessive) levity. The second is how quickly the disconnect can happen from (initial discussion of very serious topic) to (checking in on forum several days later to quickly respond to some math). Both are things I will be more careful about going forward. Lastly, I may have been spending too much time around risk folk, for whom certain discussions become so standard that one forgets how they can come across.
Fwiw, the “pleasure doing business” line was the only part of your tone that struck me as off when I read the thread.
I guess there’s an interesting argument here for making casual gambling illegal—based on this thread, it seems like “Bets are serious & somber business, not for frivolous things like horse races” could be a really high value meme to spread.