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
Betting was/is big in crypto too. Back when I was actively mocking Bitcoin angry coiners used to show up all the time saying “if you think BTC will fail, why don’t you short it??”. And one of the first “apps” for BTC was SatoshiDice, a “provably fair” dice-betting game, that was so popular one of the core developers released a client censoring its transactions (mostly because he’s a very nutty tradcath who hates gambling, but still).
Ben McKenzie, the actor who co-wrote the crypto critic book “Easy Money”, spent a couple of years saying “CRYPTO IS TERRIBLE GARBAGE IT’S AWFUL DON’T TOUCH IT” and then shorted Coinbase stock. Crypto is fucking outraged lol
That’s amusing. But at least he could use real-world mechanisms for shorting, i.e. the stock market. Shorting BTC directly would mean engaging in play markets that would either scam you or not have the liquidity to pay out the debt. But by playing that game you’d validate the system.
Coiners into gambling? Next you’ll tell me there are betting enthusiasts sitting at Vegas slot machines!