Been waiting to come back to the steeple of the sneer for a while. Its good to be back. I just really need to sneer, this ones been building for a long time.
Now I want to gush to you guys about something thats been really bothering me for a good long while now. WHY DO RATIONALISTS LOVE WAGERS SO FUCKING MUCH!?
I mean holy shit, theres a wager for everything now, I read a wager that said that we can just ignore moral anti-realism cos 'muh decision theory', that we must always hedge our bets on evidential decision theory, new pascals wagers, entirely new decision theories, the whole body of literature on moral uncertainty, Schwitzgebels 1% skepticism and so. much. more.
I'm beginning to think its the only type of argument that they can make, because it allows them to believe obviously problematic things on the basis that they 'might' be true. I don't know how decision theory went from a useful heuristic in certain situations and economics to arguing that no matter how likely it is that utilitarianism is true you have to follow it cos math, acausal robot gods, fuckin infinite ethics, basically providing the most egregiously smug escape hatch to ignore entire swathes of philosophy etc.
It genuinely pisses me off, because they can drown their opponents in mathematical formalisms, 50 page long essays all amounting to impenetrable 'wagers' that they can always defend no matter how stupid it is because this thing 'might' be true; and they can go off create another rule (something along the lines of 'the antecedent promulgation ex ante expected pareto ex post cornucopian malthusian utility principle) that they need for the argument to go through, do some calculus declare it 'plausible' and then call it a day. Like I said, all of this is so intentionally opaque that nobody other than their small clique can understand what the fuck they are going on about, and even then there is little to no disagreement within said clique!
Anyway, this one has been coming for a while, but I hope to have struck up some common ground between me and some other people here
I think it started with Robin Hanson, one of his Big Ideas is that public policy should be decided by prediction markets instead of democratic processes. He calls this hypothetical system "futarchy" and lesswrong is one of the very few places it's taken seriously.
In the bigger picture, I think it's popular in Rationalist circles because it just fits in with their biases. Using markets to evaluate truth claims gives a plausible-sounding excuse to disregard expert opinion, and (much like their "Bayesianism") gives their personal opinions a veneer of precision and objectivity via quantification.
It's perhaps worth noting that FTX also ran prediction markets before it collapsed.
Since refusing a bet is seen as an admission of dishonesty, it's also a way to disadvantage an interlocutor with less money: