Most people say that death markets about war are distasteful, and should not be open to amateurs to bet, while some people say deaths are not a special kind of statistic and there shouldn't be such aversion about death markets about war.
What do you think?
Note that this is different from death markets on individuals (Will Jimmy Carter die? is not included in this poll), it's about things like total death tolls in wars. (How many people will die in the Israel-Hamas war?)
It's like surgery: gross, not to be shared widely, but in the end important to do unemotionally.
or delivering bad news. nobody wants to tell someone their emotional, sympathetic plan just won't work and actually hurts people. but someone's gotta do it.
I don't vote in all death markets, though - just ones which take the proper attitude that we don't like it, it's hard and somewhat wrong to ignore ones own feelings of empathy for victims, but in the interest of accuracy and making better decisions to help people, in the end, it's worth bearing. Just like surgery - surgeons shouldn't "enjoy" cutting people but really be doing it to help.
Why do I feel justified in saying this? Because the claim that such markets are bad makes no sense
Imagine the claim "A malaria cure will be invented*
This is an extremely important claim. Voting NO is saying "100m people will die in horrible pain"
Yet, this claim doesn't trigger those "ghoulish" feelings. Why not? It's because the "distasteful" feeling you have for normal death markets is not that rational. It's not actually about death markets - it's about "not showing emotion/care when talking about a near-term risk to vulnerable people". If the people are already doomed, or are far away, somehow emotionally it's okay, even though logically it's no better!
So I still think we should
phrase death markets in terms of care, hope that things will work out well,
and not advertise them so widely
but still do them, for the same reason we do surgery, because we know that logically it's worth overcoming this distaste in order to gain knowledge and let people with power have a higher chance of knowing the actual risks of a course of action
@Ernie Well maybe on some other platform where funders will not be pushing the project to becoming a dating portal.
Manifold is a game. Do we need to play about it?