Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

In politics, I find gambling is the best way to resolve disputes among friends stemming from cognitive bias. Put a bit of money on various results and someone will be right and someone will be wrong.

View on HN

I've heard it said that wagering on real life events (presidential election outcome, climate change, etc) is "a tax on bullshit."

Not sure if this is the original source, but at least the first where I saw this calim:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/a-b...

And another view:

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.fi/2013/05/bets-do-not-necess...

Prediction markets work ... up to the point that skewing the message of the prediction market itself is an incentive and a party has sufficient resources to do that.

Information is used both to understand and to influence. It's a three-edged sword.

Interesting; can you expand on that?

Sure. For instance, I had a buddy that was sure Bernie would win the NY democratic primary since Bernie had such huge rallies and people were excited. I trusted the polls. We both made small bets on PredictIt - I even bet Clinton would win by at least a 15 point margin, since that's where the polls were. I won, and he now trusts poll aggregates more.

If you'd ran a similar exercise for the 2015 UK General Election, the outcome would not have been as you desired. Famously the polls were wrong and the Conservatives won by a small majority. In fact, Sir Paddy Ashdown stated on live television that he'd "Eat his hat" if the polls were wrong, an action I think he may have probably regretted.

Yet polls work most of the time. I lost money when Bernie won Michigan in a surprise upset, but it told me to respect polling error. But I won money on the vast majority of my bets based on polling aggregate.

I think gambling like this provides incentives for people to follow up and review their predictions. Or to have their friends follow up in some cases :) Otherwise people never realize that they were wrong.

And once you know you are wrong, you can now start figuring out what you did wrong.

Heh. New meaning to "put your money where you mouth is." Perhaps a corollary.

Isn't this the old meaning of "put your money where your mouth is"? What other meaning does it have?

I was trying to think of a more clever twist on it, like "put your mind where your money is."

I always interpreted it roughly as "Do what you say/preach".

That's roughly correct, but it means that because it is saying that if you really believe something you should be willing to back up that belief with something that will cost you if you're wrong - i.e., a genuine belief that you honestly think is correct is something you should be willing to bet on because you will expect to win the bet.

People telling someone else to 'put their money where their mouth is' are essentially asking the someone else to prove the sincerity of their belief - or the person saying it has an opposing sincere belief and they would like to make some money off of a bet over who is right.

Cool, you were being quite literal.

And I love it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com