TLDR: Betting is a tax on bullshit. Utopia has strong betting norms and prediction markets.
Prerequisites: None, though I recommend Scott Alexander’s Prediction Market FAQ
One of the most important insights that comes from understanding our place as evolved animals is appreciating the way in which our minds were shaped for a particular set of environments that were encountered regularly by our ancestors. Each of us comes pre-programmed with natural inclinations on how to do well… in those environments.
And one of the great tragedies of our world is that it no longer matches an ancestral environment, so we find ourselves with lost, broken intuitions. The atomization of hyper-specialized urban existence means nearly every industrial society is undergoing an epidemic of loneliness — exacerbated by the quarantining, distancing, and isolation imposed by our new plague. Our stomachs scream for ice cream even as we die from chronic obesity. We hunker down in front of our screens, angry at and afraid of people on the other side of the world who will never know who we are. The list goes on.
One major disconnect between our ancestral intuitions and the world we find ourselves in is how we relate to belief, truth, and opinion. Our forebears lived their entire lives in tight-knit groups where, on the whole, each year was just like the last. Strangers were just that: strange.
I’m not really talking about what it was like for early humans, here. Almost all of our prewired intuitions are shaped by instincts laid down millions of years ago, before the advent of fire or even spoken language. There’s a major way in which even ancient humans were having to grapple with living in a world different from the one their ancestors evolved in.
For example, when we see or hear something we automatically believe it. The whole notion that someone could be lying is something we have to learn, rather than something we’re naturally prepared for. We also don’t have a good intuition for the distinction between believing something and it being true — hence the desire to hide our heads from bad news and talk ourselves into believing comforting lies. The general exploration of the ways in which we’re programmed to fail at knowing what’s true forms the field of Heuristics and Biases, of which many good words have been written.
While some might dream of combatting the mismatch between our intuitions and the world we find ourselves in by returning to a world that is more like that of our ancestors, I must admit that I can’t quite see that as a flourishing future. Yes, it would be good if some things were more like the savannah — we ought to prioritize community and time-in-nature more, for instance. But when it comes to our intuitions about truth, I think the only good way is forward.
What we need are ways of living that reliably nudge us towards being unbiased, clear-headed reasoners. We need ways of collectively making sense of the world that scale up, even in the presence of fools and sociopaths. And so far, I claim, mainstream society has found two methods for doing this.
Prestige
The first method is prestige, a form of social status that tracks something like how skilled and knowledgeable a person is. Prestige is the dynamic underlying both arguments from authority and consensus. By recognizing expertise and promoting it to common-knowledge, we can delegate difficult decision making to those who know what they’re talking about.
Or at least, we could if such people reliably did know what they were talking about. But the sad truth is that even if some people have more knowledge than average, they’re still confused apes, for the most part. And sometimes prestige hierarchies can generate a kind of toxic-legitimacy, where people in a field who are simply better at sounding confident come to be seen as experts because nobody knows how to truly measure their skill or find someone better.
Certain fields of academia are like this. I’ll avoid mentioning specifics to try and keep things civil, but it’s easy to find examples in history of fields that turned out to be pseudoscientific mush, once people actually figured out what was going on. Perhaps the best example of prestige dynamics gone off-the-rails, however, is punditry.
Whether in sports, politics, or business, there seem to be a host of “expert” voices on every topic, all putting forth opinions, many of which are bombastic and opposed to one-another. This lack-of-consensus might scare some people off, and (correctly) inform them that having beliefs in these domains is hard, but the norm seems more to be that people form bubbles around who sounds most convincing and engage in a kind of opinion-war with with other side.
Alas, the average pundit is often worse than chance. Because of how prestige accumulates, the most prominent speakers are those who are charismatic and bold, offering unjustified confidence in exciting and clever forecasts.
Science
Ideally, we have a process that works better than simple bickering and punditry: the scientific method. In practice many scientists fall prey to the same kind of untethered prestige dynamics that afflict most of the modern world, but ideally science is supposed to transcend that.
In the (ideal) scientific process, hypotheses are given weight not based on how articulate or exciting they are, but based on their simplicity/elegance, their ability to explain the existing data, and most importantly: their ability to correctly predict new observations. Einstein’s theories of relativity were not only beautiful and principled, but they were able to explain the anomalous procession of Mercury’s orbit, and then later predict phenomena like gravitational lensing and time dilation.
It made no difference whether Einstein was an established professor (nope!) or just a promising thinker with no advanced degrees (yep!) — it was the way his ideas were grounded in precise detail and experimental evidence that made him famous.
More precisely, the scientific method champions ideas over people. We believe relativity is true not because Einstein is high status, but because we have tested his beliefs directly and they have proven themselves through predicting reality.
And yet, science is slow and difficult — beyond the reach of most people on a practical level. Detailed mathematical formulae for predicting the actions of great powers, the stock market, or even the success of sports teams is nearly impossible. Despite the great progress of science over the centuries, more tools are needed if we hope to fight back against the waves of confusion and misinformation that we face today.
Utopian Opinions
I claim that there is a simple tool that cuts through most of the noise, when it comes to differing opinions of the world: betting.
In Utopia, the phrase “I believe ___” is the same as “I bet that ___”. And indeed, this is not mere talk. Whenever a listener openly disagrees with a claim, it is considered the honorable thing for them to challenge the original speaker to put their money where their mouth is. Once a challenge is made, it is considered honorable to either make the bet, or to openly sacrifice prestige and say “You’re probably right, and I yield to your belief. I’m sorry for my unjustified claim.”
Bets have the wonderful property of rewarding whoever was right, and punishing people for bullshitting. I engage in betting regularly, and nothing quite makes people soften their words and reduce confidence than the understanding that their wallets might take the hit.
An example interaction that showcases Utopian betting might be as follows. Alice and Bob are taking a walk together and get mildly lost. Alice sees a landmark and says “Aha! I know where we are now. I bet the house is over that way.” Bob wrinkles up his face and says “Challenge. That’s not where the house is.” Alice says “1:1 via JudgeCo says the house is most easily reached by walking in a direction that’s in a wedge like this [makes hand gesture of a wedge] from where we’re standing now?” Bob nods in agreement. Then, later, when it turns out Bob is wrong, and the house is in the direction that Alice indicated, he sends her some money as a way of recognizing that she was right.
What’s with the “1:1 via JudgeCo”? Well, betting culture can even punish people who are overconfident, even if everyone present agrees on the direction. In Utopia it is considered a normal thing to do in polite company to ask someone how confident they are in a boldly-made claim. Rather than some vague description like “there’s a real possibility” (which means something entirely different to different people), speakers say something like “more than 3:1” which translates into a greater than 75% probability that what they’re saying is true. Those present can then challenge the person making the claim at 3-to-1 odds, winning three times as much money in the case that the speaker was wrong than vice-versa.
And the “JudgeCo”? In Utopia betting is so common that professionals exist to do a combination of settling disputes and tracking reputation. When a bet is made, it’s good practice for one or both of the betters to register it in writing with the judge. Once a bet resolves, the judge makes sure money changes hands and that the win and loss are publicly registered (though the details of the bet are often kept private). If a bet goes awry and the participants disagree on the outcome, the judge settles the bet (possibly by nullifying it) and can optionally publicly mark bettors that are judged to have been unreasonable.
But how much money actually changes hands? Well, when setting up a betting account with their favorite judging service, a person deposits some amount of money, typically according to the Kelly criterion for the best bet they think they’ll make in the next month. When two people bet, the quantity of money at stake is then taken from that pool such that nobody can (from the perspective of their betting budget) go into debt. Notably, a pool can be as small as a person likes, and it is common for poor people to have relatively trivial quantities of money set aside for betting. The point is less about the quantity of money, and more about the use of money to track truth. Only when a rich person bets in small amounts is it considered dishonorable not to put up a larger wager.
If someone admits wrongness upon being challenged, the challenger has the right to have the other person register with a judge that the challenger has general prestige. If someone refuses to admit wrongness or to accept a bet, it is generally seen as dishonorable, and everyone present is expected to give them a black mark with their judge.
In addition to personal bets, Utopia also invests heavily in large-scale prediction markets, where questions of interest are bet on by people all across the world. These prediction markets, much like those in real life, regularly outperform pundits and most experts.
Prediction markets serve as the backbone of the Utopian media landscape. Whenever a pundit or journalist weighs in on a topic, they are expected to cite the relevant markets. Pundits are expected to have large, public bets in every area they specialize in, and investigative journalists are expected to make much of their money off prediction markets.
The general attitude of settling disagreements through bets has an effect of both discouraging people from making unsubstantiated claims and encouraging true experts to speak up. As a result, Utopia is better grounded in fact, tracks who tends to know what they’re talking about, and thus has more overall consensus.
P.S. Those in my community regularly make bets (both offline and on prediction markets) and attempt to live up to utopian ideals about truth-tracking. Alas, I have no public source of reputation, but I claim to win about half the bets I make. In these essays I encourage criticism, but if you want to make some money on the side, I encourage you to challenge me to bet on any fact that’s in dispute.