Dear Professor Caplan, many of your bets are on things with high probability of being right, is part of that your focus on low hanging fruit where public statements are very irrational? Maintaining the reputation of uncommon wisdom? Would you consider a bet you honestly thought was 80/20 odds or so? Thank you,
Hmm well a EU country with over 10 million population (UK) did withdraw from the EU before 2020, no? Did you win because the EU dragged out the finalization of the process? Technically one could say that it never ended
Ah, yes, Bryan bet in 2008 (against some crazy ideologue who was convinced that the EU was about to fall apart) that no major European country would leave the EU by 2020 and then Brexit happened in 2016 and it looked like Bryan lost but THEN the universe, not wanting to spoil Bryan’s perfect betting record, somehow conspired to drag Brexit out for four years, finally becoming official _30 days_ after Bryan officially won the bet.
Utterly gobsmacking! But to be clear, it's not that Bryan won the Brexit bet on some dumb technicality. They operationalized the bet as a major EU member officially withdrawing by 2020-Jan-01. Bryan losing that would've been the dumb technicality since what they were operationalizing was "is the EU about to collapse?".
In other words, Bryan really was proven correct in that case.
(The one I know of that he's definitely going to lose is his climate change bet.)
It's a great example of how hard it is to pick fair resolution criteria for bets. The thing Bryan and that person disagreed about was "is the EU on the brink of collapse?" and they picked the best proxy they could and Bryan allllmost lost on a technicality. Maybe Bryan's counterparty will claim Bryan *won* on a technicality but in my view it was fair and square.
(Again, it's Bryan's climate change bet that I'm disappointed with him about. He thought climatologists were overconfident in their models and that the seeming upward temperature trend might be statistical noise. He will lose that bet fair and square and it's already so unambiguous in the graphs that he really ought to concede it. To be clear, my disappointment is not that he was wrong in his prediction but that he's expressed the belief that he was right in spirit.)
"One major member (out of a dozen) leaving the union" is a very bad proxy for that question, and choosing that proxy is a full reflex of both bettors' overconfidence.
So the disagreement was whether the EU would collapse and "first major nation withdraws by 2020" seemed like a reasonable proxy. So the real test of Bryan's counterparty's theory is whether another domino will fall at some point. It's the "at some point" that makes bets like this especially tricky to operationalize, I guess.
But so far I'd say Bryan's theory is looking better. Brexit was an anomaly, not part of a slow collapse of the EU.
Dear Professor Caplan, many of your bets are on things with high probability of being right, is part of that your focus on low hanging fruit where public statements are very irrational? Maintaining the reputation of uncommon wisdom? Would you consider a bet you honestly thought was 80/20 odds or so? Thank you,
Hmm well a EU country with over 10 million population (UK) did withdraw from the EU before 2020, no? Did you win because the EU dragged out the finalization of the process? Technically one could say that it never ended
Ah, yes, Bryan bet in 2008 (against some crazy ideologue who was convinced that the EU was about to fall apart) that no major European country would leave the EU by 2020 and then Brexit happened in 2016 and it looked like Bryan lost but THEN the universe, not wanting to spoil Bryan’s perfect betting record, somehow conspired to drag Brexit out for four years, finally becoming official _30 days_ after Bryan officially won the bet.
Utterly gobsmacking! But to be clear, it's not that Bryan won the Brexit bet on some dumb technicality. They operationalized the bet as a major EU member officially withdrawing by 2020-Jan-01. Bryan losing that would've been the dumb technicality since what they were operationalizing was "is the EU about to collapse?".
In other words, Bryan really was proven correct in that case.
(The one I know of that he's definitely going to lose is his climate change bet.)
It is still a dumb technicality :)
It's a great example of how hard it is to pick fair resolution criteria for bets. The thing Bryan and that person disagreed about was "is the EU on the brink of collapse?" and they picked the best proxy they could and Bryan allllmost lost on a technicality. Maybe Bryan's counterparty will claim Bryan *won* on a technicality but in my view it was fair and square.
(Again, it's Bryan's climate change bet that I'm disappointed with him about. He thought climatologists were overconfident in their models and that the seeming upward temperature trend might be statistical noise. He will lose that bet fair and square and it's already so unambiguous in the graphs that he really ought to concede it. To be clear, my disappointment is not that he was wrong in his prediction but that he's expressed the belief that he was right in spirit.)
"One major member (out of a dozen) leaving the union" is a very bad proxy for that question, and choosing that proxy is a full reflex of both bettors' overconfidence.
I was thinking about what might've been a better proxy and checked the original debate:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/04/euro_bet_ii_win.html
So the disagreement was whether the EU would collapse and "first major nation withdraws by 2020" seemed like a reasonable proxy. So the real test of Bryan's counterparty's theory is whether another domino will fall at some point. It's the "at some point" that makes bets like this especially tricky to operationalize, I guess.
But so far I'd say Bryan's theory is looking better. Brexit was an anomaly, not part of a slow collapse of the EU.