Comment by Terr_
4 hours ago
> I suggest that you think rationally about what you just said. Why wound anyone
That doesn't read like a good-faith response. Parent-poster brought up an archetypal scenario asserting that certain people are ignoring malice/harms because they are not personally affected, exhibiting a latent logical contradiction or double-standard.
Instead of addressing the actual point (the existence/seriousness of the harm category) you've begun nitpicking that there aren't enough irrelevant operational details about the hypothetical arsonist and hypothetical attack.
_______
"They are correct that rain is natural and normal, this isn't a big deal."
"If it was your house being flooded by neighbors' failure to control runoff flooding created by impermeable construction, you wouldn't say that, you would recognize the harm!"
"Pish tosh! I suggest you think rationally about the fact that my house is on a hill! For what possible reason would I put myself in such a situation?"
The existence and severity of the harm, as argued by OP, relies on incentives. But incentives don't exist on a vacuum, nor are they individually absolute over human behavior. Simply stating that something has a bad incentive and that'll result in evil, on its own, isn't much better than assuming spherical cows.
The reason I nitpicked on the arsonist example is to elaborate on that: the arsonist does indeed have an incentive to put fire onto someone's house due to the bet, but the bet itself increases the probability of the fire being prevented, the culprit being caught, etc., which are all disincentives that may negate the original misaligned incentive. When we escape from this particular scenario onto others, this pattern remains. If the disincentives didn't prevent said harm, there are only two causes:
- culprit is unreasonable beyond saving: this one is trivial - they are beyond saving. Banning gambling would simply cause them to commit crimes in a different way;
- the mechanisms behind the disincentives are malfunctioning or aren't enough: that warrants an investigation onto said mechanisms, not a ban on prediction markets.
Perhaps this has made it clearer that, at least from my perspective, these "irrelevant details" aren't irrelevant.