From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 11:53:42 MDT
rhanson@gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>In my paper proposing betting markets as as the factual input to a form of
>government (http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf), I suggest that people who
>do not want to face uncomfortable truths can probably successfully avoid
>paying much attention to such markets, just as people today who want to
>believe in the virtue of politics manage to avoid seeing how the sausage
>is made. Bet in the markets the few minutes a day you are rational, and then
>go back to your blissful ignorance.
Before reading this message of yours, I had mostly completed writing this
response to an earlier message:
It seems to me that truth is needed to achieve cooperation in a wide
enough variety of circumstances that we would all better off if we could
make a binding agreement to be as close to truthful Bayesians as our
computational powers allow.
Special interest political pressures depend on voters misunderstanding
the effects of the policies they promote. Corporate salesmen cooperate
with customers if they are sufficiently commited to the truth, but harm
customers if their claims are far enough from the truth. Managers plan
better if their employees accurately forecast what they can deliver. Charities
can be of net benefit to society if their function is accurately known, and
can be wasteful otherwise.
Without simple rules concerning when we agree to be truthful (e.g.
always demand the truth except in cases that are clearly distinct from
normal interactions, such as bluffing in poker), there is little hope of
determining whether people are living up to that agreement.
But after noticing that you seem to disagree with this last sentence, I have
to admit that I'm not very certain about it. But I'm still guessing that I'm
right.
It is harder to have disgreements with stock market prices that persist
for years than it is to have persistent disgreements about how legislation
is made, because market prices allow much less room for ambiguity and less
room for selective use of evidence than descriptions of the legislative
process do.
Likewise, betting markets make cognitive dissonance expensive, so I expect
that to the extent they improve society it will be more by causing widespread
increases in truth-seeking than by enabling us to rely on specialized
expertise to perform that function.
And of course, none of this says much about whether people should place
an unusually high value on truth when the relevant recipricators probably
won't be. It only says that people who don't support the creation of more
institutions such as idea futures markets that promote truth-seeking are
failing to live up to the standards of social responsibility that we ought
to be setting.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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