I can't give you an exhaustive list of the problems I have with betting, but some reasons:
Properly phrasing a bet is difficult, like writing a computer program that runs perfectly the first time, or phrasing a wish to a genie. I'm no good at avoiding loopholes, and there's no shortage of rationalists who'd exploit them as long as they can get a win. And just saying "I won't prey on any technicalities" isn't enough without being able to read your mind and know what you consider a technicality.
Betting has social overhead. This is the "explain to your parents/wife/children why you bet this money" scenario.
Some people value money differently than I do. Some people just have glitchy HumanOS 1.0 which leads them to spend money irrationally. Some people are just overconfident. If I bet against such a person I may win money in X years, but until the X years are up, I'll have essentially lost the argument, because my opponent was willing to spend money--there must be some substance behind his argument or he wouldn't do that, right?
As others have pointed out, it's a bad idea to trust random people on the Internet to pay me money in X years. "I have a reputation" is not enough when real money is involved. And I don't have access to the sophisticated information used by financial services in the real world to determine how likely someone is to be able to pay money in the future based on past performance. And it's not unknown for a trusted person to run away with money. (That wasn't even the incident I was thinking of, but I couldn't find that one.)
To get over the Chesterton's Fence bar, you're going to need more than just "well, it's been studied and people do it for irrational reasons". Social customs evolve as memes, and something that people don't do for reason X may nevertheless have persisted because it is, for reason X, beneficial.
At any rate, I haven't seen your studies and I'm not going to trust that you've described them properly without some links.
Even if I did get links and read the studies, we get into epistemic learned helplessness. I wouldn't change my mind about betting just because the studies seem convincing and I can't find any flaw in them using solely my own knowledge. I'd like to at least hear from opponents of those studies and see how convincing they are, and see how controversial the studies are. Then I'd have to check whether they might be subject to the replication crisis. And at this point, the overhead of researching betting will itself make most bets unprofitable.
Rationalists have a habit of stringing together poorly founded estimates to get more poorly founded estimates and acting based on them. I don't agree with this practice, but concluding that I should spend money here would imply paying attention to poorly founded estimates.
It is my opinion that for the LessWrong community in aggregate, something has gone horribly horribly wrong.
At a minimum, LWers should have 1) observed that normies don't bet like this and 2) applied Chesterton's Fence.
It's often hard to give an exhaustive, bulletproof, explanation of why normies act in some way that does, in fact, make sense as a way to act. Rationalists have a habit of saying "well, I don't see a rational reason for X, so I can just discard X". That's what Chesterton's Fence is about avoiding.
Many people can work as well remotely.
This is vacuously true because of the underspecified word "many". Otherwise, I don't see how it's meaningfully true. Programmers can work well remotely, but most employed people are not programmers.
The whole idea conflates refusal to accept the bet for reasons that apply to bets in general, with refusing to accept the bet because you're not really confident that UFOs are mundane.
I think but am not at all confident that you think the unhelpful munchkinry is so prevalent and multiple rejections are sufficiently common as to make this technique useless.
Pretty much.
If "true rejection" allows multiple reasons for rejection, not just one, and isn't used as a gotcha, I have no real problem with it, but the difficulty of genie-proofing it and the ease of using it as a gotcha make it not work very well in practice.
This is also one reason I oppose bets.
I have some direct experience with
if the potential customer says, “It seems good, but you don’t have feature X,” that may not be the true rejection. Fixing it may, or may not, change anything.
But that sounds like the multiple reason case. If the customer has multiple reasons why he doesn't like the product, and he's only stated the biggest one, the customer may be unsatisfied after you fix it. Claiming "the customer didn't state his true rejection" assumes that a true rejection can't consist of multiple reasons. And even if the customer did phrase his rejection in some way that implies that it's the only reason, I don't think "failed to state all his reasons" is meaningfully like "didn't give his true rejection".
There’s an unhelpful kind of munchkinry that looks for poor phrasing in pre-stated rejections like a devil in a fantasy novel or a highly motivated and perhaps unscrupulous lawyer, making suggestions that technically satisfy my rejections but obviously aren’t what I meant.
I think the original true rejection post is one of these. "Why should I believe him when he doesn't have a PhD" probably means that the PhD is one of multiple conditions, not that it's the sole reason for rejection. But Eliezer's original post treats it as if it's a gotcha.
Also, remember the Hidden Complexity of Wishes. Phrasing your rejection in such a way that nobody can abuse a misphrasing is really hard, even with feedback, and a lot like trying to phrase a wish properly. (And ironically, in this context, Eliezer asked me my background in computer science which essentially is asking what degree I have. I wonder if that was his true rejection.)
It's an illustrative example. Even if you don't believe that therapy can cure depression specifically, it's supposed to be able to cure things like it.
The problem is your comparison of theraputic interventions to sending someone a cute video. The cute video is there to cure a short term, minor, issue. The therapy is there to cure a long term major, issue. These are different.
If it’s important for users to know, then it just seems bizarre to go about ensuring that they know it in this extremely reactive way,
It's important for users to know when it comes up. It doesn't come up much except with you.
I don't think sending them such a video counts as therapy, even if you're literally doing it to make someone feel better., because it's short term and minor, and you've probably tried a lot of short term, minor interventions in your life, enough to get an idea of what might work. And if you're wrong, the consequences would be minor.
If someone had depression and you claimed you could cure the depression long term by sending them a cute video, I would indeed say you don't have enough evidence.
If you're asking how I would distinguish "horribly, horribly, wrong" from "just somewhat horribly wrong" or plain "wrong", my answer would be that there's no real distinction and I just used that particular turn of phrase because that's the phrase that evand used.
Sure, but "bets that make me uncomfortable" is "all rationalist bets".
I disagree.