It’s easy to write or talk about an issue without staking anything on its outcome. After all, that’s what casual forecasters do all the time. But having something in play — reputation or money or something else — can make sure that people remember their claims. This can keep us honest.
There are obviously a whole set of games that typically include betting. And there are many famous bets, from Ashley Revell gambling his life savings on one spin of the roulette wheel, John Gutfreund and John Meriwether’s proposed but then aborted $10 million bet on a single hand of liar’s poker, and even the dice bet over the sailors’ lives in Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The following three examples are a bit different. The people making these wagers are trying to drive research, prove their model of the world is correct, or use logic to guide decision-making. It’s something we might consider when we make our own wagers.
‘Oumuamua’s Wager
Purpose: drive research in a specific area. “It’s good for us.”
In 2017 a strangely shaped object moved through the solar system. It was named, ‘Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word for “scout.”
‘Oumuamua was the first observed object passing through the solar system from elsewhere. Its strange shape (possibly like a giant cigar or pancake) led to speculation that it was alien in origin, including that ‘Oumuamua may be an alien-made solar sail or space junk.
These claims came from Avi Loeb, a professor of astronomy at Harvard who calls his speculation “‘Oumuamua’s Wager.”
But most astronomers are dismissive of the alien technology theory. Related to that, Loeb outlines the difficulty of setting a new direction for research. “And in terms of risk, in science, we are supposed to put everything on the table. We cannot just avoid certain ideas because we worry about the consequences of discussing them, because there is great risk in that, too. That would be similar to telling Galileo not to speak about Earth moving around the sun and to avoid looking in his telescope because it was dangerous to the philosophy of the day…. In the context of ‘Oumuamua, I say the available evidence suggests this particular object is artificial, and the way to test this is to find more [examples] of the same and examine them. It’s as simple as that.”
Loeb claims that believing ‘Oumuamua is alien in origin would be a net good because the invigorated search for alien life or technology would drive many other parts of scientific inquiry. In doing so, we would learn much more about the universe than otherwise.
Simon-Ehrlich Wager
Purpose: back up one’s theories. “Let’s prove who’s right.”
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager grew out of the doomsday writing of Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, a 1968 book that forecast overpopulation would lead to global famines and resource shortages in the 1970s and 1980s.
Taking the other side of Ehrlich’s claims was Julian Simon, a professor of business. Simon believed that the world would not face the extreme shortages that Ehrlich forecast. The question was, how to gauge whether there was a change in resource availability?
As a solution, Simon proposed that Ehrlich chose any raw materials he wanted and a future date. Simon would win the wager if the prices of those items had decreased by that time. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten and a date 10 years in the future (September 29, 1990).
The wager’s payoff was to be the difference between the $1000 of materials and the future prices. Ehrlich lost and mailed a check to Simon for $576.07.
Personally, I like that it was actually a business professor that won this one.
But notably, Ehrlich did not include anything other than the check and seemed to be bitter about the loss.
Since Simon was willing to wager again, Ehrlich (and climatologist Stephen Schneider) proposed a new wager — a set of 15 trends, including average temperature, emissions, oceanic harvests, availability of firewood in developing nations, and more.
But Simon passed on the new proposed wagers. As he explained:
“Let me characterize their offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others says is that they don’t want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure.”
Pascal’s Wager
Purpose: attribute risk to outcomes and choose the best path. “It benefits me.”
Saying this is about personal benefit may be a bit odd since the wager weighs outcomes given the existence or absence of God.
There are only four outcomes of this wager:
- God exists, people believe in God and receive infinite reward,
- God exists, people do not believe in God and miss the infinite reward (or receive infinite punishment),
- God does not exist, people believe in God and mildly inconvenience themselves,
- God does not exist, people do not believe in God and have a finite amount of personal benefit.
Given that the outcomes include infinite reward or punishment and only minor costs, one would therefore be logical believing in God.
Pascal’s Wager has been compared to the Precautionary Principle:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
This principle states that we should work to avoid very bad outcomes even when their chance of occurring is tiny and cause and effect is not known.
Useful Wagers
What makes for a useful wager? There are a few elements.
- The wager’s outcomes can’t be easily gamed. That is, those taking sides in the Simon-Ehrlich commodities wager can’t drive prices up or down.
- Who wins is not debatable. This makes wagering on some issues problematic. A wager that is based on things becoming “better,” without a clear definition of how better is measured aren’t useful.
- Those making the wagers must ride them to the end. One can’t make a wager and then remove oneself from it. Otherwise, people could pick and choose which wagers they commit to.
- The wager helps us learn something new. We come away with a different understanding of the world after noting the wager’s results. Or, we create new knowledge needed to figure out who won the wager.
So go make wagers when it helps you train your view of the world.
Consider
- Even Loeb admits that he might not have promoted the alien idea if he didn’t have tenure plus other academic positions. But as he admits, “what’s the worst thing that can happen to me? I’ll be relieved of my administrative duties? This will bring the benefit that I’ll have more time for science.”
- Ehrlich, in spite of being wrong in his book and wager, is better known than Simon.
- Pascal’s wager does not seek to prove God’s existence, but rather to bring rationality to belief.