I'd like to start giving people the option of commenting on shorter Cold Takes pieces (which I don't cross-post here or provide audio for). I'm going to use this post for that: I will generally leave a comment for each piece, and people can leave their comments as replies to that.
Very cool, thanks!
I don't have a great answer to your question. I think the easier and more normalized it gets to make bets like this, the more of them there will be - that's about what I've got.
In practice I find some of the hardest parts of making bets like this are (a) noticing when a disagreement is of the right form such that it's likely to be tractable to turn it into a bet; (b) hashing out all the details of how the bet will be resolved and trying to make them closely match the original conceptual disagreement. (b) is usually so much work that it doesn't end up being worth it for the direct rewards (financial and otherwise), so some sort of norm that this is a virtuous thing to do could be important (but also, if there were a way to make (b) easier, that would be amazing).