Wanna bet?
2003-01-18 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
archershipshttp://hanson.gmu.edu/natureNov02.pdf
NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature
Stephen was 33 when he made his first
bet — an innocent wager with a
colleague, just a token prize and
professional pride at stake. It was not to be
his last. Stephen’s career went from strength
to strength, but he continued to place
wagers. When it comes to making a point
about science, Stephen Hawking is a compulsive
gambler.
The world’s best-known cosmologist is
not alone. The history of science is littered
with bets, from ill-fated attempts to prove
that the world is flat, to numerous wagers
over whether various sub-atomic particles
exist. A book at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center in California, for example, records
about 35 bets in high-energy physics dating
back to the 1980s, many still unresolved. And
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York
is running Genesweep, a sweepstake on the
number of genes in the human genome.
Genesweep’s winner will pocket at least
$750, and gain the satisfaction of having outguessed
a star-studded cast of biologists. But
making bets on science has a serious side. By
putting their hard-earned cash on the line,
wagers encourage scientists to think hard
about their arguments and can also attract
media attention to otherwise arcane topics.
Over the past few years, websites have sprung
up to harness these benefits. “A well-conceived
bet can frame an issue,” claims Kevin
Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired magazine, and
co-founder of the Long Bets Foundation,
which runs one such website. “If it has
enough clarity, it can move the subject on.”
But scientific wagers have a history of
stirring controversy. Take the 1980 challenge
laid down by the late economist Julian Simon
of the University of Maryland, College Park.
Annoyed by claims from environmentalists
about the scarcity of natural resources,
Simon asserted that the price of five metals
would fall by 1990, and challenged dissenters
to a wager. Winning the bet, Simon reasoned,
would show that these resources are becoming
more plentiful, not less so.
Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist at
Stanford University in California, took
Simon on. Together with John Harte and
John Holdren, physicists then both at the
University of California, Berkeley, Ehrlich
agreed to monitor the value of an imaginary
portfolio for $200 of each of the metals. If
the portfolio’s value dropped, Ehrlich, Harte
and Holdren would pay Simon the difference;
if it rose, he would pay them. The
metals’ value dropped by $576 and Ehrlich
and his colleagues duly paid up.
Although that bet was settled, the two sides
disagree on the lessons to be learned. Some
economists use the result to claim that environmental
groups exaggerate the problems
facing the planet. But Ehrlich maintains that
it merely shows that the metals chosen were
poor indicators of our exploitation of natural
resources. “I regret entering the bet,” he says.
Other scientific gamblers have emerged
victorious and yet still suffered regrets. In
1870, the British naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace, co-originator of the theory of evolution
by natural selection, took up a challenge
to prove that the Earth is not flat. John Hampden,
a dedicated flat-Earther, had staked £500
on the question — then a great deal of money.
A test, involving a stretch of the Old Bedford
Canal, north of London, was agreed on.
Wallace measured the canal’s curvature
using two markers, separated by about five
kilometres and suspended at equal heights
above the water’s surface. Viewed through a
telescope mounted at the same height some 10
km away from the farthest marker, the nearest
news feature
354 NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature
Wanna bet?
Scientific wagers have a long and colourful history. Are they just
harmless fun, or can they help to frame and clarify important
issues? Jim Giles surveys the odds.
Brief wagers on time: Stephen Hawking is keen
to bet on unanswered questions in physics.
A. PARSONS/AP; THANKS TO WILLIAM HILL BOOKMAKERS FOR SUPPLYING ODDS THE SCOTSMAN/CORBIS SYGMA
© 2002 Nature PublishingGroup
one appeared to be the higher of the two. An
independent referee agreed that this showed
the Earth’s surface to curve away from the telescope,
and Wallace received his money.
But Hampden never accepted the result,
and bombarded Wallace and his associates
with abuse. In June 1871, he wrote to the
naturalist’s wife: “If your infernal thief of a
husband is brought home some day … with
every bone in his head smashed to a pulp, you
will know the reason.” Wallace brought and
won libel suits, but Hampden was declared
bankrupt, leaving Wallace to pay costs. In the
end, his winnings were wiped out — and the
publicity attracted new members to the flat-
Earth movement.
Other wagers have produced more fruitful
debate. In 2000, Steven Austad of the University
of Idaho in Moscow bet Jay Olshansky,
a fellow researcher of ageing at the University
of Chicago, that someone alive at that time
would live to be 150, with their cognitive faculties
intact. The two established a trust fund
that they estimate will be worth $500 million
when the bet pays out to one or the other’s
heirs in 2150.
The wager has been widely discussed in the
media. “Bets can be an interesting way to popularize
science, as long as those involved make
sure that they discuss science when reporters
come calling,” says Olshansky. He and Austad
have been invited to speak in December
before the President’s Council on Bioethics in
Washington. “If our wager contributed to the
decision to have this discussion, then it was
extraordinarily productive,” Olshansky says.
Brought to book
Hawking’s bets have similarly generated
media interest — most recently, journalists
have picked up on a $100 bet made in
December 2000 with theoretical physicist
Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor. Kane asserts that the Higgs
boson, the predicted particle thought to
give other particles their mass, will be discovered
at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab
near Chicago; Hawking says it won’t.
So could such publicity, and the way in
which bets force both parties to hone their
arguments, be harnessed in an organized
way? The backers of the Long Bets Foundation
think so. The foundation, established
last year, aims to encourage people to propose
long-term, well-defined bets and to generate
discussion about the issues involved. Eleven
wagers, worth a total of $48,000, have so far
been agreed on the foundation’s website.
Other bets remain open. Bruce Damer,
president of DigitalSpace, an Internet
company in Santa Cruz, California, is looking
for someone to challenge his assertion
that “by 2024, ‘artificial’ life emerging somewhere
out of the soup of human technology
will be given a Latin taxonomic name by
biologists … and declared viable for study”.
Damer has staked $1,000, the minimum
allowed. This is kept in a trust fund and the
money generated will be paid to the winner’s
chosen charity when the bet is resolved.
Kelly believes that the rules encourage
responsible predictions. “We feel that there
should be some pain in losing,” he says.
“Normally there is no penalty for being
wrong, so people make predictions that are
not responsible.”
Other groups are trying to develop these
ideas further. In the early 1990s, Robin
Hanson, an economist now at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia, developed the
concept of ‘ideas futures’ — markets that trade
shares in ideas. Several versions of his concept,
such as the web-based Foresight Exchange,
which allows players to trade pretend-money
shares in ideas, have been implemented by
enthusiasts for market-based solutions.
You might, for example, want to assert
that an adult human will have been cloned
by 2005. You would start by ‘buying’ pairs of
coupons in the idea from the market. The
news feature
NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature 355
‘YES’ coupon pays $1 if the claim comes true;
‘NO’ coupons pay the same if it is false. Confident
that a clone will be created, you would
retain your YES coupons. Sceptics would buy
your NO coupons, believing that they would
generate a pay-off in 2005.
A problem shared
Importantly, the price at which other players
are willing to buy coupons indicates
how much faith the market has in the idea.
The human-cloning claim already exists on
the Foresight Exchange. YES coupons were
trading at 36 cents as Nature went to press,
indicating that the market believes there is a
36% chance of the claim being correct.
This evaluation may be of limited use,
however, as anyone can play the Foresight
Exchange and traders are not using real
money. But what would happen if an ideas
market were to be played by scientific experts
using their own cash? According to Tom Bell,
a lawyer at Chapman University in Orange,
California, such a market would be extremely
useful, as the price of shares in a particular
idea would provide a snapshot of how the
scientific community felt about that issue.
Consider a claim about climate change,
such as the size of the expected rise in mean
global temperature by 2100. As long as
enough scientists with relevant knowledge
played the market, the price should reflect
the latest developments in climate research.
Policy-makers could use the market as a way
of assessing current thinking, free from the
bias of industry and activist groups — both
of which tend to quote temperature changes
at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
Bell is now looking for an institution to
host the project, which he has named the
Simon Market in honour of Simon’s work.
But could scientists be persuaded to sink
their money into such a market? “If you
present it as a scientific experiment then
scientists would be eager to try it,” suggests
Bell. “Scientists also have egos and like
money as much as anyone else.” His proposal
is currently being considered by the Mercatus
Center, a public-policy, law and economics
offshoot of George Mason University.
Whether the ideas of Bell and the Long
Bets Foundation will sway public debate
or merely provide entertainment remains
unclear. But while you’re totting up the
odds, there’s still time for visitors to Cold
Spring Harbor to enter Genesweep, before
the final figure is announced next year. Our
tip: 31,789 genes. n
Jim Giles is Nature’s associate News and Features editor.
Genesweep
ç www.ensembl.org/Genesweep
Long Bets Foundation
ç www.longbets.org
Foresight Exchange
ç www.ideosphere.com
The Simon Market
ç www.simonmarket.org
Alfred Russel Wallace won his bet that the Earth is
round, but was vilified for years by his opponent.
Futures trader: Tom Bell wants to assess scientific
theories by having experts invest in ‘idea stocks’.
SPL
© 2002 Nature PublishingGroup
NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature
Stephen was 33 when he made his first
bet — an innocent wager with a
colleague, just a token prize and
professional pride at stake. It was not to be
his last. Stephen’s career went from strength
to strength, but he continued to place
wagers. When it comes to making a point
about science, Stephen Hawking is a compulsive
gambler.
The world’s best-known cosmologist is
not alone. The history of science is littered
with bets, from ill-fated attempts to prove
that the world is flat, to numerous wagers
over whether various sub-atomic particles
exist. A book at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center in California, for example, records
about 35 bets in high-energy physics dating
back to the 1980s, many still unresolved. And
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York
is running Genesweep, a sweepstake on the
number of genes in the human genome.
Genesweep’s winner will pocket at least
$750, and gain the satisfaction of having outguessed
a star-studded cast of biologists. But
making bets on science has a serious side. By
putting their hard-earned cash on the line,
wagers encourage scientists to think hard
about their arguments and can also attract
media attention to otherwise arcane topics.
Over the past few years, websites have sprung
up to harness these benefits. “A well-conceived
bet can frame an issue,” claims Kevin
Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired magazine, and
co-founder of the Long Bets Foundation,
which runs one such website. “If it has
enough clarity, it can move the subject on.”
But scientific wagers have a history of
stirring controversy. Take the 1980 challenge
laid down by the late economist Julian Simon
of the University of Maryland, College Park.
Annoyed by claims from environmentalists
about the scarcity of natural resources,
Simon asserted that the price of five metals
would fall by 1990, and challenged dissenters
to a wager. Winning the bet, Simon reasoned,
would show that these resources are becoming
more plentiful, not less so.
Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist at
Stanford University in California, took
Simon on. Together with John Harte and
John Holdren, physicists then both at the
University of California, Berkeley, Ehrlich
agreed to monitor the value of an imaginary
portfolio for $200 of each of the metals. If
the portfolio’s value dropped, Ehrlich, Harte
and Holdren would pay Simon the difference;
if it rose, he would pay them. The
metals’ value dropped by $576 and Ehrlich
and his colleagues duly paid up.
Although that bet was settled, the two sides
disagree on the lessons to be learned. Some
economists use the result to claim that environmental
groups exaggerate the problems
facing the planet. But Ehrlich maintains that
it merely shows that the metals chosen were
poor indicators of our exploitation of natural
resources. “I regret entering the bet,” he says.
Other scientific gamblers have emerged
victorious and yet still suffered regrets. In
1870, the British naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace, co-originator of the theory of evolution
by natural selection, took up a challenge
to prove that the Earth is not flat. John Hampden,
a dedicated flat-Earther, had staked £500
on the question — then a great deal of money.
A test, involving a stretch of the Old Bedford
Canal, north of London, was agreed on.
Wallace measured the canal’s curvature
using two markers, separated by about five
kilometres and suspended at equal heights
above the water’s surface. Viewed through a
telescope mounted at the same height some 10
km away from the farthest marker, the nearest
news feature
354 NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature
Wanna bet?
Scientific wagers have a long and colourful history. Are they just
harmless fun, or can they help to frame and clarify important
issues? Jim Giles surveys the odds.
Brief wagers on time: Stephen Hawking is keen
to bet on unanswered questions in physics.
A. PARSONS/AP; THANKS TO WILLIAM HILL BOOKMAKERS FOR SUPPLYING ODDS THE SCOTSMAN/CORBIS SYGMA
© 2002 Nature PublishingGroup
one appeared to be the higher of the two. An
independent referee agreed that this showed
the Earth’s surface to curve away from the telescope,
and Wallace received his money.
But Hampden never accepted the result,
and bombarded Wallace and his associates
with abuse. In June 1871, he wrote to the
naturalist’s wife: “If your infernal thief of a
husband is brought home some day … with
every bone in his head smashed to a pulp, you
will know the reason.” Wallace brought and
won libel suits, but Hampden was declared
bankrupt, leaving Wallace to pay costs. In the
end, his winnings were wiped out — and the
publicity attracted new members to the flat-
Earth movement.
Other wagers have produced more fruitful
debate. In 2000, Steven Austad of the University
of Idaho in Moscow bet Jay Olshansky,
a fellow researcher of ageing at the University
of Chicago, that someone alive at that time
would live to be 150, with their cognitive faculties
intact. The two established a trust fund
that they estimate will be worth $500 million
when the bet pays out to one or the other’s
heirs in 2150.
The wager has been widely discussed in the
media. “Bets can be an interesting way to popularize
science, as long as those involved make
sure that they discuss science when reporters
come calling,” says Olshansky. He and Austad
have been invited to speak in December
before the President’s Council on Bioethics in
Washington. “If our wager contributed to the
decision to have this discussion, then it was
extraordinarily productive,” Olshansky says.
Brought to book
Hawking’s bets have similarly generated
media interest — most recently, journalists
have picked up on a $100 bet made in
December 2000 with theoretical physicist
Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor. Kane asserts that the Higgs
boson, the predicted particle thought to
give other particles their mass, will be discovered
at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab
near Chicago; Hawking says it won’t.
So could such publicity, and the way in
which bets force both parties to hone their
arguments, be harnessed in an organized
way? The backers of the Long Bets Foundation
think so. The foundation, established
last year, aims to encourage people to propose
long-term, well-defined bets and to generate
discussion about the issues involved. Eleven
wagers, worth a total of $48,000, have so far
been agreed on the foundation’s website.
Other bets remain open. Bruce Damer,
president of DigitalSpace, an Internet
company in Santa Cruz, California, is looking
for someone to challenge his assertion
that “by 2024, ‘artificial’ life emerging somewhere
out of the soup of human technology
will be given a Latin taxonomic name by
biologists … and declared viable for study”.
Damer has staked $1,000, the minimum
allowed. This is kept in a trust fund and the
money generated will be paid to the winner’s
chosen charity when the bet is resolved.
Kelly believes that the rules encourage
responsible predictions. “We feel that there
should be some pain in losing,” he says.
“Normally there is no penalty for being
wrong, so people make predictions that are
not responsible.”
Other groups are trying to develop these
ideas further. In the early 1990s, Robin
Hanson, an economist now at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Virginia, developed the
concept of ‘ideas futures’ — markets that trade
shares in ideas. Several versions of his concept,
such as the web-based Foresight Exchange,
which allows players to trade pretend-money
shares in ideas, have been implemented by
enthusiasts for market-based solutions.
You might, for example, want to assert
that an adult human will have been cloned
by 2005. You would start by ‘buying’ pairs of
coupons in the idea from the market. The
news feature
NATURE|VOL 420 | 28 NOVEMBER 2002|www.nature.com/nature 355
‘YES’ coupon pays $1 if the claim comes true;
‘NO’ coupons pay the same if it is false. Confident
that a clone will be created, you would
retain your YES coupons. Sceptics would buy
your NO coupons, believing that they would
generate a pay-off in 2005.
A problem shared
Importantly, the price at which other players
are willing to buy coupons indicates
how much faith the market has in the idea.
The human-cloning claim already exists on
the Foresight Exchange. YES coupons were
trading at 36 cents as Nature went to press,
indicating that the market believes there is a
36% chance of the claim being correct.
This evaluation may be of limited use,
however, as anyone can play the Foresight
Exchange and traders are not using real
money. But what would happen if an ideas
market were to be played by scientific experts
using their own cash? According to Tom Bell,
a lawyer at Chapman University in Orange,
California, such a market would be extremely
useful, as the price of shares in a particular
idea would provide a snapshot of how the
scientific community felt about that issue.
Consider a claim about climate change,
such as the size of the expected rise in mean
global temperature by 2100. As long as
enough scientists with relevant knowledge
played the market, the price should reflect
the latest developments in climate research.
Policy-makers could use the market as a way
of assessing current thinking, free from the
bias of industry and activist groups — both
of which tend to quote temperature changes
at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
Bell is now looking for an institution to
host the project, which he has named the
Simon Market in honour of Simon’s work.
But could scientists be persuaded to sink
their money into such a market? “If you
present it as a scientific experiment then
scientists would be eager to try it,” suggests
Bell. “Scientists also have egos and like
money as much as anyone else.” His proposal
is currently being considered by the Mercatus
Center, a public-policy, law and economics
offshoot of George Mason University.
Whether the ideas of Bell and the Long
Bets Foundation will sway public debate
or merely provide entertainment remains
unclear. But while you’re totting up the
odds, there’s still time for visitors to Cold
Spring Harbor to enter Genesweep, before
the final figure is announced next year. Our
tip: 31,789 genes. n
Jim Giles is Nature’s associate News and Features editor.
Genesweep
ç www.ensembl.org/Genesweep
Long Bets Foundation
ç www.longbets.org
Foresight Exchange
ç www.ideosphere.com
The Simon Market
ç www.simonmarket.org
Alfred Russel Wallace won his bet that the Earth is
round, but was vilified for years by his opponent.
Futures trader: Tom Bell wants to assess scientific
theories by having experts invest in ‘idea stocks’.
SPL
© 2002 Nature PublishingGroup
no subject
Date: 2003-01-18 03:45 pm (UTC)Then again, everyone reading this article (and your journal) has probably already read about the bet in an academic, non-journalism context anyway, so it's unlikely that anyone would be getting the wrong impression. I have nothing to complain about, I guess. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-01-19 12:09 am (UTC)