Place Your Bets!
"Poker!" by Viri G is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
What will happen on 20th March? If you speak to believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, they will tell you that former US President Donald Trump was the real winner of last year’s election. He will lead a violent military coup a week from now, they say, which will lead to widespread executions of establishment politicians. Even the Pope will be arrested, apparently. Sadly, their previous predictions haven’t proven very astute at all. They have previously said that the coup, which they call the Storm, would come on 4th March, 20th January (or 21st in some cases) or 3rd November 2017.
If you know anyone who is dropping hints about enormous changes next week, I would urge you to offer them odds. Be as specific as possible about the terms and conditions. For example, set a deadline and say which news sources have to confirm the news. Bayesians tend to get very excited by prediction markets, which offer us a chance to test our opinions against real-world events. Small, specific bets with people who are utterly certain of fringe views can be a fun way of creating your own prediction market. Of course, be responsible: Only bet sums that you can safely afford to lose. Gambling can be addictive, so set limits to how many bets you take on at any one time.
As moderate skeptics, we should never be too sure of our own opinions. However, betting against QAnon is another matter, given the gap between its awful track record of predictions and the cocksure certainty of its believers. A lot of them are anti-globalists, who took Trump’s “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton a little too seriously. Their worldview often appears to be a direct result of the cognitive dissonance they experience when Trump’s promises to imprison his opponents turn out to be hot air. We have already seen how many conspiracy theories, like QAnon, are based on working backwards from events to their alleged causes based on speculative guesses and weak methodology.
If you have been drawn to QAnon conspiracy theories, I would urge you to place a few modest bets with your skeptical friends. Make the bets large enough to hurt a little if you lose, but not so large that you lose your savings. If you do end up losing a few bets, treat it as a learning experience. The Sharpen Your Axe project is designed to give you the tools you need to do better in future. First of all, it is great that you are conducting amateur research about the world around you. You will have probably seen conspiracy theorists discouraging you from reading the news media. This is a warning sign that the narratives they are selling you might not stand up to much scrutiny. Instead, why not read several news sources? Clicking on the links in this blog post will give you lots of information about ideas like Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics and skepticism, which will help you come to a deeper understanding of the world around you and your own biases.
I explore the idea of putting skin in the game in further depth in Chapter 14 of Sharpen Your Axe, my free book on thinking critically about the news and current affairs. If this is the first post you see, welcome! Here are the links to Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter 11, Chapter 12 and Chapter 13.
As always, if you can take a few seconds to share this content on social media, it would be greatly appreciated. I will be back next week with some thoughts about why buying into conspiracy theories can be bad for your health. See you next Saturday!
Update (25 April 2021)
The full beta version is available here
[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.