I am willing to publicly bet you at 99% odds that, within the next 10 years, there will be no conclusive proof that we have been visited by craft of intelligent, nonhuman origin. I am willing to bet according to the Kelly Criterion, which means I am willing to bet a significant fraction of my total net worth.
[Edit: This gets really complicated really fast. I mean that I’m willing to publicly bet at 99% implied odds on my side, after various costs and risks are factored in. The various costs and risks far outweigh my <1% chance of losing the bet for mundane reasons. A counterparty to this bet would need confidence in a UFO existence far lower than 99% for a bet to make sense.]
What do you mean when you say you’re “willing to bet according to the Kelly Criterion”? If you’re proposing a bet with 99% odds and your actual belief that you’ll win the bet is also 99%, then the Kelly Criterion would advise against betting (since the EV of such a bet would be zero, i.e. merely neutral).
Perhaps you mean that the other person should come up with the odds, and then you’ll determine your bet amount using the Kelly criterion, assuming a 99% probability of winning for yourself.
Most bets I see are on the order of $10-$1000 which, according to the Kelly Criterion, implies negligible confidence. I’m willing to bet substantially more than that.
If we had a real prediction market with proper derivatives, low fees, high liquidity, reputable oracles, etcetera, then I’d just use the standard exchange, but we don’t. Consequently, market friction vastly outweighs actual probabilities in importance.
Perhaps you mean that the other person should come up with the odds, and then you’ll determine your bet amount using the Kelly criterion, assuming a 99% probability of winning for yourself.
Bingo. This is exactly what I mean. Thank you for clarifying. It is important to note that “probability of winning” is not the same as “probability of getting paid, and thus profiting”. It’s the latter that I care about.
But if that’s the case, he could simply mention the amount he’s willing to bet. The phrasing kinda suggested to me that he doesn’t have all the info needed to do the Kelly calculation yet.
If your offer isn’t just to lc, then I accept: My 20 usd against your 20*99=1980 usd, both sides adjusted for inflation and the time value of money using US Treasury Bills, paid either at 2033.06.06. or when you admit a conclusive proof was found. Are these terms acceptable?
That is an honorable offer (I appreciate it, really), but it has negative expected value for me due to counterparty risk, friction, variance, etcetera. (See bayesed’s comment.) I’d need substantially better odds for the expected profit to exceed the friction.
Thanks and that’s fair. I would have liked to bet mostly as a hedge to allow myself to not think about aliens in the next 10 years (I semi-regularly get roped into investigating some claims, but the UFO community’s epistemics is the worst I’ve seen and it is always an awful experience), but the bet wasn’t really positive EV for me either, so I don’t think I will bet at worse odds, but you can probably find someone on the r/UFOs subreddit if you want, some of them seem to be celebrating the new world order now.
I’m willing to bet five figures, in theory, but there’s a ton of factors that need to be accounted for like capital tie-up, counterparty risk, the value of my time, etc. So if your odds aren’t lower than 90%, then it’s probably not even worthwhile to bet. Too much friction.
My personal confidence of “no aliens” is so high it rounds to 100%. Placing a bet is basically just a loan with a weird “if aliens are real I don’t get paid back” tacked on. The real question then is “at what rate am I willing to lend $X0,000 for 10 years to a stranger? If you can guarantee that I’ll beat the stock market by 5% (conditional on no aliens) then I’m good to go, but the “guarantee” is very important. It needs to take into account things like bankruptcy on your end. I don’t think our spread is wide enough to make that feasible. It’d take a lot of paperwork.
This is why we need real, formal, legal prediction markets, with derivatives. They would solve all of these problems.
My personal confidence of “no aliens” is so high it rounds to 100%.
I would be willing to send you 100$ in advance, on a promise that you’ll pay me 100,000 if it turns out definitively that these UFOs are built by nonhumans.
I get sole discretion to decide what constitutes “definitively”. Official statements aren’t enough. I want transhuman tech, alien biological material, or something at that level. (Any one of them is sufficient. Not all are required.) Photographs and sworn testimony aren’t good enough.
The bet is valid for a three-month time horizon, after which the bet resolves in my favor.
“Nonhuman” means aliens in the classic sense. Proper space aliens. No weaseling out with something like “human-made-machines” (including AI), “birds”, “humans with neanderthal DNA”, “funny-looking asteroids”, etc. They have to be intelligent beings originating from another planet or or star system. Soviet spacecraft do not count. Elves don’t count either, since they’d be Early in origin. A secret Indian space colony doesn’t count. Moon Nazis don’t count. Etcetera.
If you win and I fail to pay up, then you have the right to publicly shame me.
I Send you $50 Immediately, You pay out $10,000 if I win
I want a 5 year time horizon.
I am betting that one of the “very weird” hypotheses turns out true. Bet resolves in my favor if within 5 years its determined that >0 UAP are explained by:
Literal aliens
Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Time travel
Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
Some other explanation that’s of this level of “very weird”
Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
I forfeit any and all potential “gotcha” cases.
Determination of resolution to be up to you.
I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
If these terms are acceptable, please provide a means for me to pay you. I would prefer a crypto address, but will make whatever work. Upon payment please post an acknowledgement of payment.
I offer the same terms to anyone else [with a nontrivial post history].
I respect your offer, but I’d need much better terms from you than from lc. Lc is someone I’ve interacted with before, and with whom I have established a level of trust.
Some thoughts:
$50 to remember something for five years (and to assume a theoretical $10k liability) is too low a price. I value my attention higher than that.
I think your list of hypotheses needs some nitpicking, but it’s fine as a rough draft.
If you have the right to appeal to the LW community then determination of the resolution is not up to me. You can’t have it both ways, especially if you don’t have an established reputation.
Fair enough. What kinds of changes would you suggest for the list? My goal is to find at least one person on LW to make a bet with me, so I welcome feedback
The financial terms aren’t good enough to entice me. Besides that…
Pretty much all of your weird explanations are too vague. In particular “[s]ome other explanation that’s of this level of ‘very weird’” is voids the whole thing. It’d be fine for a blog post, but not as a prediction resolution criteria.
“I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]” is too vague too. The LW community is not a monolithic entity. I think you need to specify exactly how you plan to appeal to the LW community.
There’s a lot of stuff that scares me about that post.
Resolution Criteria
Suppose your counterparty bets on 200:1 odds. Suppose the odds of a LW poll getting trolling results are >0.5%. Then your counterparty loses all of their alpha on that alone (because an incorrect result costs them 200× more than it costs you).
“I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community to adjudicate resolution if I believe I am being stiffed.” is too vague. If you don’t specify exactly how you plan for the LW community to adjudicate resolution, then that’s just asking for trouble. Imagine if you said “I reserve the right to the /r/cute community to adjudicate resolution of <such-and-such bet>. (Especially considering that the community is boycotting Reddit right now.)
You didn’t mention anything about “nontrivial post history”. What happens if you win the bet $100k but your counterparty refuses to pay you? Do you go to court? What if they live in Nigeria?
Weird Explanations
Some of these seem poorly phrased, from the perspective of a lawyer.
I think “astral projection” might be a legitimate altered state of consciousness, distinct from lucid dreaming.
Personally, I would not consider the discovery of a Kardashev type II or III civilization to be an ontological shock. A shock, certainly, but not an ontological one.
What is “magic”? The term is used by people like Daniel Ingram to describe stuff that seems…well…woo, but not quite insane. Also, anything which happens is a priori not paranormal.
It’s unclear whether the discovery of non-human homonids in the Amazon would resolve for or against you. Same goes for the discovery of a random dinosaur (non-bird) species that just happened to survive 70 million years. Neanderthal genes live among us.
There’s no central dogma for “standard atheist materialists”. For example, there was a time when mainstream scientists didn’t believe in lucid dreaming. I think enlightenment is in a similar state right now. It’s not like the Catholic Church which has an official opinion.
“Leftovers of an ancient civilization” technically exist, right now, all over the place. Ancient Rome. Everything from before the Bronze Age Collapse. It would be surprising to discover another one under, say, the south African jungle, but it wouldn’t be an ontological shock. There are mysterious earthworks in North America that might point to something interesting too.
“Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth” ← It’s entirely plausible that dinosaurs had an agrarian civilization.
Some other explanation I’m missing that’s of a similar level of “very weird” ← Too vague.
“Merely advanced “normal” human tech would NOT count (+2 gens stealth aircraft/drones, advanced holograms/spoofing, etc)” ← This implies that “+3 gens stealth aircraft/drones” might count.
“Secret Manhattan style project with beyond next gen physics, that we had back in the 60′s” ← We’ve never had next-gen physics. Physics has always been the same. Also, this wouldn’t cause ontological shock to many “standard atheist materialists”. I’d be surprised if the USA military had nothing surprising up it’s sleeve.
“Whatever these most perplexing ufo/uap cases represent, they are likely something beyond our current paradigm” ← Way, way too vague. Does weird atmospheric phenomena (similar to ball lightning) count? It’s definitely outside the current paradigm, but it’s not a contradiction of well-established physics.
I know you don’t intend most of these interpretations, but many of them are reasonable interpretations of your literal words. I worry that you’re playing with fire here and that you could end up in some nasty disagreements when it comes to resolve your proposed bet.
Overall, I feel like you’re conflating “standard atheist materialists” with mainstream science and mainstream beliefs. They all differ slightly from each other. Some of the stuff on your list I’d bet my life against, but other bullet points are (when read literally) technically true.
That said, I really like your willingness to place wagers (especially in contradiction to the mainstream narrative) so that you actually have skin in the game. This is the way. I don’t want to discourage you.
I know I have no post history, and thus these are just words, but I claim to be a reasonable, rational person who (tries) to operates exclusively in good faith. I’ve been a lurker of LW and LW adjacent people for a few years now. I learned about lesswrong because I stumbled across eilizers work on decision theories and then subsequently got agi-safety-pilled. I considered myself a “standard materialist atheist” my entire adult life and most of my childhood.
Most of your concerns seemed to ignore that the explanations have to ultimately trace back to explaining ufo cases or are otherwise very pedantic. Yes ancient civ’s have ruins, yes dinosaurs might have been agrarian, but do either of those address uap cases today? I only win the bet if my counterparty thinks so (or LW does).
I tried in good faith to try and cut at the seems of the two world models (all prosaic, not all prosaic) as best I could. I gave multiple lexical tests to make clear what kinds of things I have in mind.
I have no intention of getting into nasty disagreements over resolution. But I agree it would be good to have the adjudication method be explicit, though I’m not sure how best to do that. In a world in which I win the bet, I figured I would be making a big post anyways laying out a bit more about me and some of this stuff. If prominent voices contest my win then I would stand down from collecting. I expect a world in which I win is also a world in which LW is pretty unanimous that I won.
You’re right, I forgot to mention the nontrivial post history in my post, an oversight on my part. That said I was only ever going to engage with people with established reputations because obviously. I reserved the right to choose who to bet with.
the resolution criteria of a bet should not rely heavily on reasonableness of participants unless the bet is very small such that both parties can tolerate misresolution. the manifold folks can tell you all about how it goes when you get this wrong, there are many seemingly obvious questions that have been derailed by technicalities, and it was not the author’s reasonableness most centrally at play. (edit: in fact, the author’s reasonableness is why the author had to say “wait… uh… according to those criteria this pretty clearly went x way, which I didn’t expect and so the resolution criteria were wrong”)
Thank you for the offer. I think your offer is reasonable. The problem is that $10 is too low a price for “something I have to remember for a year”. In theory, this could be fixed by increasing the wager amount, but $100k is above my risk limit for a bet (even something as simple as “the sun will rise tomorrow”).
I think we’ve both established a market spread…which is kind of the point of this exercise. You get skin-in-the-game points for maxing out the market’s available liquidity at a 0.1% price point.
There’s a few other details I though of since my last comment (“mirror life” doesn’t count, “shadow biosphere” don’t count, and that I can exit the bet pre-resolution by paying repaying your initial payment pro-rated if I experience financial hardship (but not in response to evidence in your favor), and the condition that repayment depends solely on my honor and is not legally-enforcible[1]), but I don’t think they’re central to the problem of $10 is too high a price for one year of friction, even on a near-certain outcome.
The reason for this comes from the asymmetry of $10 vs $10k. It results in bad incentives. This condition would not be necessary if the numbers were closer (say, $3k vs $7k).
Serious question: would something originating adjacently from a separate Everett branch count?
(sillier-though-hopefully-not-counterproductive question: since your final statement especially would, I think, often seem to go without saying, its “needless” inclusion actually strikes me as probably-not-but-still-hypothetically-maybe worrisome—surely you’re not intending to imply that’s the only recourse allowed for being denied one’s winning lottery ticket? [or perhaps my own asking is needless since someone deciding to be a jerk and not wanting to pay could simply use such agreed-upon discretion to “fairly” declare themselves the winner anyways, in which case: sorry for the derail!])
Nope. That’s a separate bet. I’d happily bet against that (given good enough terms to overcome friction), but that’s still originating from Earth.
Yes, I am implying that it’s the only recourse allowed. Doing otherwise exposes me to asymmetric litigation risk, due to the extreme asymmetry of the bet amounts. I believe reputation is a sufficient motivator, given how much effort I’ve spend accumulating reputation on this website.
I feel like secret intelligent nonhuman AI models are an interesting source, and indeed were part of my own probability estimate for how nonhuman origin vehicle allegations could possibly be accurate, but I’m not the one betting; deciding one way or another seems worthwhile.
(… presumably an AI builder that was itself created by nonhumans definitely counts.)
Here’s an example case where the AI probably wouldn’t count: (Historical) For a good time there existed a bunch of AI systems that contributed substantially to materials development, then just kind of got shelved for a while as the businesses struggled. (Speculative fiction case) Some scientist took them off the shelves for a bit, ran them for ideas, made some new materials and built toy cars with them, some of which they lost later. The source was way too obscure and ‘obsolete’ for it to come up in an assessment of current human technological capabilities, but was in fact human.
Unlikely example case where the AI might count: A shuttered materials-and-vehicle factory starts back up and independently decides to dedicate its production process to creating toy cars for a bunch of escaped lab rats, because rats like driving around in tiny cars, and someone left a newspaper article about that out somewhere a security camera that didn’t get shut off could notice it and decide this was a very compelling priority. This counts as nonhuman origin because the agency involved is nonhuman.
“Predictive market derivatives” is on my list of things I should write about. What, precisely, do you mean by shorttermism? Do you mean how placing long-term bets in prediction markets ties up capital that could otherwise be put to use? (I think I understand you, but I want to be certain first.)
Do you mean how placing long-term bets in prediction markets ties up capital that could otherwise be put to use?
Yes, so canny traders have an incentive to ignore long-term questions even though that makes the market somewhat useless. There’s an adverse selection effect where the more someone has going on the more they’ll focus on short closing dates.
(But I realize that long-term bets are still worth something to them, this doesn’t necessarily prevent them from weighing in at all. If a market consisted solely of very good forecasters, I’d expect the predictions of long-term bets to be more volatile (less liquidity) but still roughly well informed, however, it doesn’t consist solely of very good traders, and also, sometimes the skills you need to do well on small timescales are very different from the skills you need on longer timescales, so in some worlds we might not expect prediction markets to work well at all. One of the very anticapitalisms that I’ve noticed is that expertise doesn’t always generalize out of domain, while money can stray into whatever domain it wants to. Reflecting, though, subquestion: If it’s not for the expert to decide for themselves (and with the aid of consultants) where their skills generalize to, why should we think we can appoint someone else who’s better at making that decision? It seems unlikely that we could.)
Here’s the short version: Suppose you think a prediction is mispriced but it’s distant in the future. Instead of buying credits that pay out on resolution, you buy futures instead. You don’t have to tie up capital, since payment is due on resolution instead of upfront. Your asset equals your liability. There is no beta.
Financial derivatives solve the shorttermism problem in traditional securities markets. If you use them in prediction markets, then they will (theoretically) do the exact same thing, by (theoretically) operating the exact same way. In practice, thingsgetcausal, and that’s before you add leverage and derivatives.
One of the very anticapitalisms that I’ve noticed is that expertise doesn’t always generalize out of domain, while money can stray into whatever domain it wants to.
Doesn’t matter. It just means that prediction markets have to be sufficiently capitalized to work. A hedge fund isn’t going to throw its smartest brains at a market with only $100 of total market capitalization.
I am willing to publicly bet you at 99% odds that, within the next 10 years, there will be no conclusive proof that we have been visited by craft of intelligent, nonhuman origin. I am willing to bet according to the Kelly Criterion, which means I am willing to bet a significant fraction of my total net worth.
[Edit: This gets really complicated really fast. I mean that I’m willing to publicly bet at 99% implied odds on my side, after various costs and risks are factored in. The various costs and risks far outweigh my <1% chance of losing the bet for mundane reasons. A counterparty to this bet would need confidence in a UFO existence far lower than 99% for a bet to make sense.]
What do you mean when you say you’re “willing to bet according to the Kelly Criterion”? If you’re proposing a bet with 99% odds and your actual belief that you’ll win the bet is also 99%, then the Kelly Criterion would advise against betting (since the EV of such a bet would be zero, i.e. merely neutral).
Perhaps you mean that the other person should come up with the odds, and then you’ll determine your bet amount using the Kelly criterion, assuming a 99% probability of winning for yourself.
Most bets I see are on the order of $10-$1000 which, according to the Kelly Criterion, implies negligible confidence. I’m willing to bet substantially more than that.
If we had a real prediction market with proper derivatives, low fees, high liquidity, reputable oracles, etcetera, then I’d just use the standard exchange, but we don’t. Consequently, market friction vastly outweighs actual probabilities in importance.
Bingo. This is exactly what I mean. Thank you for clarifying. It is important to note that “probability of winning” is not the same as “probability of getting paid, and thus profiting”. It’s the latter that I care about.
Obviously he thinks the chances are lower than 1% that this is true, if he’s willing to bet at 99% odds.
But if that’s the case, he could simply mention the amount he’s willing to bet. The phrasing kinda suggested to me that he doesn’t have all the info needed to do the Kelly calculation yet.
Bayesed is correct. There’s a whole bunch of factors which affect whether a bet is worthwhile.
If your offer isn’t just to lc, then I accept: My 20 usd against your 20*99=1980 usd, both sides adjusted for inflation and the time value of money using US Treasury Bills, paid either at 2033.06.06. or when you admit a conclusive proof was found. Are these terms acceptable?
That is an honorable offer (I appreciate it, really), but it has negative expected value for me due to counterparty risk, friction, variance, etcetera. (See bayesed’s comment.) I’d need substantially better odds for the expected profit to exceed the friction.
Thanks and that’s fair. I would have liked to bet mostly as a hedge to allow myself to not think about aliens in the next 10 years (I semi-regularly get roped into investigating some claims, but the UFO community’s epistemics is the worst I’ve seen and it is always an awful experience), but the bet wasn’t really positive EV for me either, so I don’t think I will bet at worse odds, but you can probably find someone on the r/UFOs subreddit if you want, some of them seem to be celebrating the new world order now.
How much are you willing to bet? I’ll take you up on that up to fairly high stakes.
I agree that alien visits are fairly unlikely, but not 99% unlikely.
I’m willing to bet five figures, in theory, but there’s a ton of factors that need to be accounted for like capital tie-up, counterparty risk, the value of my time, etc. So if your odds aren’t lower than 90%, then it’s probably not even worthwhile to bet. Too much friction.
What odds are you willing to give taking friction into account?
My personal confidence of “no aliens” is so high it rounds to 100%. Placing a bet is basically just a loan with a weird “if aliens are real I don’t get paid back” tacked on. The real question then is “at what rate am I willing to lend $X0,000 for 10 years to a stranger? If you can guarantee that I’ll beat the stock market by 5% (conditional on no aliens) then I’m good to go, but the “guarantee” is very important. It needs to take into account things like bankruptcy on your end. I don’t think our spread is wide enough to make that feasible. It’d take a lot of paperwork.
This is why we need real, formal, legal prediction markets, with derivatives. They would solve all of these problems.
I would be willing to send you 100$ in advance, on a promise that you’ll pay me 100,000 if it turns out definitively that these UFOs are built by nonhumans.
I will accept under the following conditions:
Make it $10 (you) vs $10k (me).
I get sole discretion to decide what constitutes “definitively”. Official statements aren’t enough. I want transhuman tech, alien biological material, or something at that level. (Any one of them is sufficient. Not all are required.) Photographs and sworn testimony aren’t good enough.
The bet is valid for a three-month time horizon, after which the bet resolves in my favor.
“Nonhuman” means aliens in the classic sense. Proper space aliens. No weaseling out with something like “human-made-machines” (including AI), “birds”, “humans with neanderthal DNA”, “funny-looking asteroids”, etc. They have to be intelligent beings originating from another planet or or star system. Soviet spacecraft do not count. Elves don’t count either, since they’d be Early in origin. A secret Indian space colony doesn’t count. Moon Nazis don’t count. Etcetera.
If you win and I fail to pay up, then you have the right to publicly shame me.
My Offer:
I Send you $50 Immediately, You pay out $10,000 if I win
I want a 5 year time horizon.
I am betting that one of the “very weird” hypotheses turns out true. Bet resolves in my favor if within 5 years its determined that >0 UAP are explained by:
Literal aliens
Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Time travel
Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
Some other explanation that’s of this level of “very weird”
Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
I forfeit any and all potential “gotcha” cases.
Determination of resolution to be up to you.
I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
If these terms are acceptable, please provide a means for me to pay you. I would prefer a crypto address, but will make whatever work. Upon payment please post an acknowledgement of payment.
I offer the same terms to anyone else [with a nontrivial post history].
I respect your offer, but I’d need much better terms from you than from lc. Lc is someone I’ve interacted with before, and with whom I have established a level of trust.
Some thoughts:
$50 to remember something for five years (and to assume a theoretical $10k liability) is too low a price. I value my attention higher than that.
I think your list of hypotheses needs some nitpicking, but it’s fine as a rough draft.
If you have the right to appeal to the LW community then determination of the resolution is not up to me. You can’t have it both ways, especially if you don’t have an established reputation.
Fair enough. What kinds of changes would you suggest for the list? My goal is to find at least one person on LW to make a bet with me, so I welcome feedback
The financial terms aren’t good enough to entice me. Besides that…
Pretty much all of your weird explanations are too vague. In particular “[s]ome other explanation that’s of this level of ‘very weird’” is voids the whole thing. It’d be fine for a blog post, but not as a prediction resolution criteria.
“I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]” is too vague too. The LW community is not a monolithic entity. I think you need to specify exactly how you plan to appeal to the LW community.
I have created a post for my bet https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up
There’s a lot of stuff that scares me about that post.
Resolution Criteria
Suppose your counterparty bets on 200:1 odds. Suppose the odds of a LW poll getting trolling results are >0.5%. Then your counterparty loses all of their alpha on that alone (because an incorrect result costs them 200× more than it costs you).
“I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community to adjudicate resolution if I believe I am being stiffed.” is too vague. If you don’t specify exactly how you plan for the LW community to adjudicate resolution, then that’s just asking for trouble. Imagine if you said “I reserve the right to the /r/cute community to adjudicate resolution of <such-and-such bet>. (Especially considering that the community is boycotting Reddit right now.)
You didn’t mention anything about “nontrivial post history”. What happens if you win the bet $100k but your counterparty refuses to pay you? Do you go to court? What if they live in Nigeria?
Weird Explanations
Some of these seem poorly phrased, from the perspective of a lawyer.
I think “astral projection” might be a legitimate altered state of consciousness, distinct from lucid dreaming.
Personally, I would not consider the discovery of a Kardashev type II or III civilization to be an ontological shock. A shock, certainly, but not an ontological one.
What is “magic”? The term is used by people like Daniel Ingram to describe stuff that seems…well…woo, but not quite insane. Also, anything which happens is a priori not paranormal.
It’s unclear whether the discovery of non-human homonids in the Amazon would resolve for or against you. Same goes for the discovery of a random dinosaur (non-bird) species that just happened to survive 70 million years. Neanderthal genes live among us.
There’s no central dogma for “standard atheist materialists”. For example, there was a time when mainstream scientists didn’t believe in lucid dreaming. I think enlightenment is in a similar state right now. It’s not like the Catholic Church which has an official opinion.
“Leftovers of an ancient civilization” technically exist, right now, all over the place. Ancient Rome. Everything from before the Bronze Age Collapse. It would be surprising to discover another one under, say, the south African jungle, but it wouldn’t be an ontological shock. There are mysterious earthworks in North America that might point to something interesting too.
“Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth” ← It’s entirely plausible that dinosaurs had an agrarian civilization.
Some other explanation I’m missing that’s of a similar level of “very weird” ← Too vague.
“Merely advanced “normal” human tech would NOT count (+2 gens stealth aircraft/drones, advanced holograms/spoofing, etc)” ← This implies that “+3 gens stealth aircraft/drones” might count.
“Secret Manhattan style project with beyond next gen physics, that we had back in the 60′s” ← We’ve never had next-gen physics. Physics has always been the same. Also, this wouldn’t cause ontological shock to many “standard atheist materialists”. I’d be surprised if the USA military had nothing surprising up it’s sleeve.
“Whatever these most perplexing ufo/uap cases represent, they are likely something beyond our current paradigm” ← Way, way too vague. Does weird atmospheric phenomena (similar to ball lightning) count? It’s definitely outside the current paradigm, but it’s not a contradiction of well-established physics.
I know you don’t intend most of these interpretations, but many of them are reasonable interpretations of your literal words. I worry that you’re playing with fire here and that you could end up in some nasty disagreements when it comes to resolve your proposed bet.
Overall, I feel like you’re conflating “standard atheist materialists” with mainstream science and mainstream beliefs. They all differ slightly from each other. Some of the stuff on your list I’d bet my life against, but other bullet points are (when read literally) technically true.
That said, I really like your willingness to place wagers (especially in contradiction to the mainstream narrative) so that you actually have skin in the game. This is the way. I don’t want to discourage you.
I know I have no post history, and thus these are just words, but I claim to be a reasonable, rational person who (tries) to operates exclusively in good faith. I’ve been a lurker of LW and LW adjacent people for a few years now. I learned about lesswrong because I stumbled across eilizers work on decision theories and then subsequently got agi-safety-pilled. I considered myself a “standard materialist atheist” my entire adult life and most of my childhood.
Most of your concerns seemed to ignore that the explanations have to ultimately trace back to explaining ufo cases or are otherwise very pedantic. Yes ancient civ’s have ruins, yes dinosaurs might have been agrarian, but do either of those address uap cases today? I only win the bet if my counterparty thinks so (or LW does).
I tried in good faith to try and cut at the seems of the two world models (all prosaic, not all prosaic) as best I could. I gave multiple lexical tests to make clear what kinds of things I have in mind.
I have no intention of getting into nasty disagreements over resolution. But I agree it would be good to have the adjudication method be explicit, though I’m not sure how best to do that. In a world in which I win the bet, I figured I would be making a big post anyways laying out a bit more about me and some of this stuff. If prominent voices contest my win then I would stand down from collecting. I expect a world in which I win is also a world in which LW is pretty unanimous that I won.
You’re right, I forgot to mention the nontrivial post history in my post, an oversight on my part. That said I was only ever going to engage with people with established reputations because obviously. I reserved the right to choose who to bet with.
the resolution criteria of a bet should not rely heavily on reasonableness of participants unless the bet is very small such that both parties can tolerate misresolution. the manifold folks can tell you all about how it goes when you get this wrong, there are many seemingly obvious questions that have been derailed by technicalities, and it was not the author’s reasonableness most centrally at play. (edit: in fact, the author’s reasonableness is why the author had to say “wait… uh… according to those criteria this pretty clearly went x way, which I didn’t expect and so the resolution criteria were wrong”)
I will update the post tomorrow and add more detail to address the other concerns
I would much rather have a 12 month time horizon. Evidence could take a while to filter out. Other than that I’d accept.
Thank you for the offer. I think your offer is reasonable. The problem is that $10 is too low a price for “something I have to remember for a year”. In theory, this could be fixed by increasing the wager amount, but $100k is above my risk limit for a bet (even something as simple as “the sun will rise tomorrow”).
I think we’ve both established a market spread…which is kind of the point of this exercise. You get skin-in-the-game points for maxing out the market’s available liquidity at a 0.1% price point.
There’s a few other details I though of since my last comment (“mirror life” doesn’t count, “shadow biosphere” don’t count, and that I can exit the bet pre-resolution by paying repaying your initial payment pro-rated if I experience financial hardship (but not in response to evidence in your favor), and the condition that repayment depends solely on my honor and is not legally-enforcible[1]), but I don’t think they’re central to the problem of $10 is too high a price for one year of friction, even on a near-certain outcome.
The reason for this comes from the asymmetry of $10 vs $10k. It results in bad incentives. This condition would not be necessary if the numbers were closer (say, $3k vs $7k).
Serious question: would something originating adjacently from a separate Everett branch count?
(sillier-though-hopefully-not-counterproductive question: since your final statement especially would, I think, often seem to go without saying, its “needless” inclusion actually strikes me as probably-not-but-still-hypothetically-maybe worrisome—surely you’re not intending to imply that’s the only recourse allowed for being denied one’s winning lottery ticket? [or perhaps my own asking is needless since someone deciding to be a jerk and not wanting to pay could simply use such agreed-upon discretion to “fairly” declare themselves the winner anyways, in which case: sorry for the derail!])
Nope. That’s a separate bet. I’d happily bet against that (given good enough terms to overcome friction), but that’s still originating from Earth.
Yes, I am implying that it’s the only recourse allowed. Doing otherwise exposes me to asymmetric litigation risk, due to the extreme asymmetry of the bet amounts. I believe reputation is a sufficient motivator, given how much effort I’ve spend accumulating reputation on this website.
(You might want to exclude advanced/experimental AI models from that, to capture the spirit of the bet better.)
I feel like secret intelligent nonhuman AI models are an interesting source, and indeed were part of my own probability estimate for how nonhuman origin vehicle allegations could possibly be accurate, but I’m not the one betting; deciding one way or another seems worthwhile.
(… presumably an AI builder that was itself created by nonhumans definitely counts.)
Here’s an example case where the AI probably wouldn’t count: (Historical) For a good time there existed a bunch of AI systems that contributed substantially to materials development, then just kind of got shelved for a while as the businesses struggled. (Speculative fiction case) Some scientist took them off the shelves for a bit, ran them for ideas, made some new materials and built toy cars with them, some of which they lost later. The source was way too obscure and ‘obsolete’ for it to come up in an assessment of current human technological capabilities, but was in fact human.
Unlikely example case where the AI might count: A shuttered materials-and-vehicle factory starts back up and independently decides to dedicate its production process to creating toy cars for a bunch of escaped lab rats, because rats like driving around in tiny cars, and someone left a newspaper article about that out somewhere a security camera that didn’t get shut off could notice it and decide this was a very compelling priority. This counts as nonhuman origin because the agency involved is nonhuman.
Derivatives solve prediction market shorttermism? I didn’t realize that. Has that been written up anywhere?
“Predictive market derivatives” is on my list of things I should write about. What, precisely, do you mean by shorttermism? Do you mean how placing long-term bets in prediction markets ties up capital that could otherwise be put to use? (I think I understand you, but I want to be certain first.)
Financial derivatives work the same way in prediction markets as they do on existing securities markets. I already wrote a little bit about derivatives in existing securities markets, but am not sure that post fully answers your question.
Yes, so canny traders have an incentive to ignore long-term questions even though that makes the market somewhat useless. There’s an adverse selection effect where the more someone has going on the more they’ll focus on short closing dates.
(But I realize that long-term bets are still worth something to them, this doesn’t necessarily prevent them from weighing in at all. If a market consisted solely of very good forecasters, I’d expect the predictions of long-term bets to be more volatile (less liquidity) but still roughly well informed, however, it doesn’t consist solely of very good traders, and also, sometimes the skills you need to do well on small timescales are very different from the skills you need on longer timescales, so in some worlds we might not expect prediction markets to work well at all. One of the very anticapitalisms that I’ve noticed is that expertise doesn’t always generalize out of domain, while money can stray into whatever domain it wants to. Reflecting, though, subquestion: If it’s not for the expert to decide for themselves (and with the aid of consultants) where their skills generalize to, why should we think we can appoint someone else who’s better at making that decision? It seems unlikely that we could.)
Here’s the short version: Suppose you think a prediction is mispriced but it’s distant in the future. Instead of buying credits that pay out on resolution, you buy futures instead. You don’t have to tie up capital, since payment is due on resolution instead of upfront. Your asset equals your liability. There is no beta.
Financial derivatives solve the shorttermism problem in traditional securities markets. If you use them in prediction markets, then they will (theoretically) do the exact same thing, by (theoretically) operating the exact same way. In practice, things get causal, and that’s before you add leverage and derivatives.
Doesn’t matter. It just means that prediction markets have to be sufficiently capitalized to work. A hedge fund isn’t going to throw its smartest brains at a market with only $100 of total market capitalization.