[tivert]

You need to come up for air. You seem to be stuck so deep in that weird subculture's "logic" that you're having trouble imagining someone who isn't.

I don't gamble, and even if I did I certainly wouldn't take a bet for a large sum of money with some internet rando playing a rhetorical game.

[why_only_15]

If you are making a prediction about the world, why not gamble on it? It shows to others that you have an actual stake as opposed to blathering.

[tivert]

Come up for air. I'm not part of that subculture and I feel no need indulge it or to prove myself to members of it by participating in its rituals.

[ifyoubuildit]

As someone who doesn't know what subculture you're talking about, parent's argument sounds reasonable to me. There's even an old saying that everyone has probably heard - "Why don't you put your money where your mouth is." Is that some kind of fringe thing now?

[tivert]

> As someone who doesn't know what subculture you're talking about...

Bets like the one discussed here are a rhetorical tic of the "rationalist" community.

> ...parent's argument sounds reasonable to me.

Kinda sorta. It's just a weird ritual of theirs to demonstrate commitment, and they often have a really hard time understanding that their weird rituals and mores are not universal and they can't reasonably go around expecting random people on the internet to follow them. Challenging someone to a bet like this comes off exactly as a challenge to prove your commitment by putting a bucket on your head and banging it with a stick for an hour, just because that's some weird thing the challenger's friends do among themselves.

[comp_throw7]

This is an argument about social perception. Once you get over the fact that some community on the internet does this thing, and you think that community is weird (and therefore the thing itself is also weird), you may observe that all human actions are implicit bets on various beliefs. Explicitly wagering money is just a special case of making certain narrow beliefs much more legible.

I agree that in practice, it's pretty likely that the author of the piece refuses to bet at least in part because betting substantial sums of money on outcomes that are non-central subjects of wagers (i.e. not an explicit game of chance, sports, politics, etc) is socially unusual. But I also think that if he was very confident he'd be happy to take the money.

[ifyoubuildit]

You're using the word weird a lot, but I don't see what's so weird about the concept of "put your money where your mouth is" (or "put up or shutup", or "wanna bet?", or other variations on the theme).

The bucket on head example certainly is weird. I just don't see how that's related. The logic I'm seeing is 1) the "rationalist" community does x, 2) I don't like the rationalist community, 3) so x is stupid. Is there more to it?

[tivert]

> You're using the word weird a lot, but I don't see what's so weird about the concept of "put your money where your mouth is" (or "put up or shutup", or "wanna bet?", or other variations on the theme).

Let me explain it to you slowly and clearly: neither challenging people to bets nor banging a bucket on your head are things typically asked of people to prove their commitment to a statement, hence it's weird to ask someone to do them. They might common in some weird subculture, but it is additionally weird to go up to someone outside of that subculture and make weird subcultural demands.

Also the examples you gave are literally rude, for the most part, and don't actually mean what you seem to think they mean (if you want a source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/put%20up%20or%20s...).

> The logic I'm seeing is 1) the "rationalist" community does x, 2) I don't like the rationalist community, 3) so x is stupid. Is there more to it?

You see wrong.