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Buffett’s million dollar bet was made on Long Bets, the accountability mechanism operated by Long Now Foundation. The intention of Long Bets is to encourage res
by bhpm 3y ago
Buffett’s million dollar bet was made on Long Bets, the accountability mechanism operated by Long Now Foundation. The intention of Long Bets is to encourage responsibility in prediction-making (by keeping a public roster of predictions), to encourage long-term thinking (by offering a opportunity to shape a long-term bet), and to sharpen the logic of forecasting (by recording the logic of predictions and bets.)
[0]https://longnow.org/ideas/the-million-dollar-long-bet/ https://longnow.org/ideas/the-million-dollar-long-bet/
- jefftk 3y agoI like the idea of Long Bets, though their fee is much higher than it looks: https://www.jefftk.com/p/long-bets-by-confidence-level https://www.jefftk.com/p/long-bets-by-confidence-level I've recently gotten into Manifold (https://manifold.markets https://manifold.markets) which I think is generally a better home for this sort of thing: you get the views of many more people, essentially weighted by how well they've previously done.
- naniwaduni 3y agoIf you're using Long Bets as your betting platform, you are presumably comfortable with both (a) the Long Now Foundation and (b) donating to charity. It's not that huge of a stretch for you to be comfortable diverting a bit under half your donation to LNF. Presumably the people making these bets should be sophisticated enough to understand this implication, though reporting on them can be ... iffy.
- jefftk 3y agoYou can be comfortable with donating to charity but also have strong opinions on which charities you want to support. The confusing bit is that it's presented as half of the income, where unless you spend some time looking at the math it's probably not obvious that for longer timescales this ends up being close half of the total.
- naniwaduni 3y agoI lean toward thinking that if it seems nonobvious, then you're clearly not in a great position to be making "long bets", no? If you're making $1MM bets with 10-year timescales, I expect you to either understand this or rightly burn a quarter of your bet value over it. It's not specialized knowledge or anything, it's practically foundational to American retirement planning.
- jessriedel 3y agoUnfortunately, LongBets lets people make predictions on the platform even if they decline all bets from people who disagree.
- bhpm 3y agoWouldn't that mean that the people who disagree can make their own prediction on the platform? I don't see a problem with this.
- jessriedel 3y agoIf two people make opposite predictions, but only one is willing to bet on theirs, they shouldn't be treated the same.
- bhpm 3y agoThey're not treated the same. One's a prediction, one is a bet.
- philshem 3y agoHere’s a link to the bet, which Buffet won https://longbets.org/362/ https://longbets.org/362/