Me: I agree I would have lost money on that bet. But I still feel that my overall worldview of “people will do wild and reckless things” loses fewer Bayes points than yours does. If we’d bet not just on outcomes but on questions like “will someone build a doomsday machine” or “will countries take X measure to reduce the probability of accidental nuclear war”, I would have won money off you from almost all of those. My worldview would have won most of the bets.
I don’t think this is correct. We got lots of treaties and actions to reduce stockpiles, we successfully coordinated on the NPT, SALT and SALT-II, we have the IAEA which has prevented lots of countries from going nuclear, we have a coordinated inspections regime, and we even got Libya, several former soviet republics, and South Africa to renounce their nukes!
So if we had bet every year that no such risk-reduction actions would have occurred / been agreed to that year, you’d win in many years, but not all, but you seem to think you could give me odds and still come out ahead. I think that’s wrong. Of course, all of this is retrodiction, so it’s hard to be fair about what odds we’d have agreed to, but it’s less lopsided than you seem to claim.
I don’t think this is correct. We got lots of treaties and actions to reduce stockpiles, we successfully coordinated on the NPT, SALT and SALT-II, we have the IAEA which has prevented lots of countries from going nuclear, we have a coordinated inspections regime, and we even got Libya, several former soviet republics, and South Africa to renounce their nukes!
So if we had bet every year that no such risk-reduction actions would have occurred / been agreed to that year, you’d win in many years, but not all, but you seem to think you could give me odds and still come out ahead. I think that’s wrong. Of course, all of this is retrodiction, so it’s hard to be fair about what odds we’d have agreed to, but it’s less lopsided than you seem to claim.