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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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 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.
#
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.
#
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.