At 2:07 PM 4/24/96, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

At 11:45 PM 4/23/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

...

And so the back-and-forth continues...taking up even more list space arguing, waffling, finessing, rebutting, disputing, and on an on.

Exactly as several of us have predicted.

True, but one should note that it is Jim Bell that is weaseling, and that Unicorn is not weaseling.

It doesn't matter too much who's mainly to blame--the result is the same. And game-theory-wise, there is little incentive to quickly push the wager to a well-defined final state. These "bets" are largely tail-feather displays, anyway, so the posturing and weaseling serves the purpose of one or more of the parties. Which is precisely why these bets take up so much list bandwidth. On the Extropians list, during the last few months I was on it, a huge fraction of the list traffic was devoted to such arguments (along with "pending court cases" involving one party filing charges against another, searches for mediators, countersuits, judgments, arguments about punishments, and on and on). Frankly, I thought that Black Unicorn claimed to have seen the error of his ways (in terms of debating with Bell) and was going to stop? --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."