Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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Let me try a different approach to explaining what I mean.

Let's say you're trying to argue why we'll run out of helium in, say, 10 years.

You could say: we have 10X quantity of helium, we use 1X per year, therefore we'll run out in 10 years.

Or you could say: we use a lot of helium. We're bound to run out of helium sometime, therefore we'll run out in 10 years.

The arguments presented in this bet are of the second sort. They do not say anything about why what they're betting on should happen in 10 years or in any other timeframe.

Sure, the bet is for the end of 2020, but in order to be persuasive you actually have to make an argument for why what you predict does or does not happen in that timeframe.

No such arguments were even attempted here. That's what's so frustrating.

No such argument is possible at the time they made the bet. If such an argument is possible, there wouldn't be a bet, because the other side would have been persuaded (or very foolish).

Simply put, they guessed; it's a gut feeling.

A gut feeling is not an argument.

And whether an argument is persuasive depends on what the argument is and on the people evaluating it.

Arguments with using hard data and actual reasons for picking a certain time frame are not automatically persuasive.

Take a look at the Peak Oil arguments that were made. They had pretty hard numbers and reasons for their predictions, but plenty of people were not persuaded.

Another example is Ray Kurzweil's predictions about the singularity, which also had their reasons, statistics, etc, but plenty of people disputed them and made counterarguments.

But least you could tell why they believed their predictions would happen within that timeframe.

No such evaluation is possible with the "bioerror" predictions, however, since they didn't make arguments for why it should happen by the end of 2020, but instead just expressed their "gut feeling", as you point out.

That's absolutely worthless.

It seems to have been worth $400.

> A gut feeling is not an argument.

A gut feeling is absolutely an argument. It may not be a well-reasoned, evidence-supported, or persuasive argument but it absolutely 100% is an argument.

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