Another UFO Bet
It’s been a little while since this has come up, but I’m hoping there’s still interest. I’m offering the best odds yet (50:1).
I’d like to offer another bet similar to Yudkowsky’s bet with RatsWrongAboutUAP. Here would be the rules:
I will pay out immediately upon our agreement to the bet. The other party only needs to pay out if and when they lose the bet.
The odds I’m offering are 75:1, or 50:1 if you’re willing to provide proof of liquidity.
The time frame is 5 years from the day the bet is made
The bet will resolve in my favor if a non-prosaic origin of the existing evidence around UFOs, or of new evidence, is confirmed in this time frame. The standards would be the same that Yudkowsky agreed to.
I’ll send amounts of $100-$10,000, depending on what you’d prefer.
I am willing to make multiple bets with different people.
I’d prefer that the bet is made public (with identifying names) so there’s accountability, but this point is negotiable.
If there are any points of ambiguity, we’d fall back on the rules Yudkowsky agreed to in his similar bet.
Summary: I’ll send you ~$1000 now. You send me $50,000 if UFOs are shown to be non-prosaic in the next 5 years.
Sorry, risk aversion.
Also, the usual situation of “if I think the main proposition is unlikely, bad outcomes will be dominated by cases where I miss loopholes in the bet or otherwise lose the bet for reasons unrelated to the truth of the proposition”.
Sure, I hear you there. Is there a way I could reword or clarify that would assuage that concern?
No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there’s always going to be residual uncertainty that can’t be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.
That’s true in any scenario, though. For all of life really. The ratio of likelihood of loopholes costing you money versus losing the best costing you money doesn’t matter, as long as their absolute values are both low. And shoring up ambiguous language in the bet is how you make the former low.
As someone who took the bet last time, I feel like I have a little standing to ask you: Why?
Like, a year ago there were various things in the news that raised both the saliency of UFOs and the probability of weird explanations for them (conditional on certain models of the world). There was even a former intelligence officer testifying to congress that they had heard from a guy that the USG had alien bodies stashed away.
Since then we have heard exactly bupkis, as well predicted by the “He probably exaggerated, eyewitness testimony lol” hypothesis, and less well predicted by the “Aliens are visiting our planet a lot” hypothesis. More importantly, UFOs/UAP aren’t being talked about nearly as much. So I’m surprised you’re offering a bet now both from an evidential and statistical perspective.
Sure, there’s as always a steady trickle of videos showing something mysterious moving around, but with a similarly steady trickle of mundane explanations. Is there something in particular that’s changed your mind recently?
I also partook in some betting last time, but I’d like to do more. I’ve done more research on this over the last year and built more conviction that this is the right play, that’s really all that’s changed. Would you be down to bet again?
Probably? But I’ll feel bad if I don’t try to talk you out of this first.
It’s true that alien sightings, videos of UFOs, etc. are slowly accumulating evidence for alien visitors, even if each item has reasonable mundane excuses (e.g. ‘the mysterious shape on the infrared footage was probably just a distant plane or missile’ or ‘the eyewitness probably lost track of time but has doubled-down on being confident they didn’t’). However, all the time that passes without yet-stronger evidence for aliens is evidence against alien visitors.
You could imagine aliens landing in the middle of the Superbowl, or sending us each a messenger drone, or the US government sending alien biological material to 50 different labs composed of hundreds of individual researchers, who hold seminars on what they’re doing that you can watch on youtube. Every year nothing like this happens puts additional restrictions on alien-visitor hypotheses, which I think outweigh the slow trickle of evidence from very-hard-to-verify encounters. Relative to our informational state in the year 2000, alien visitors actually seem less likely to me.
Imagine someone making a 5-year bet on whether we’d have publicly-replicable evidence of alien visitors, every 5 years since the 1947 Roswell news story. Like, really imagine losing this bet 15 times in a row. Even conditional on the aliens being out there, clearly there’s a pretty good process keeping the truth from getting out, and you should be getting more and more confident that this process won’t break down in the next 5 years.
Even if we’re in a simulation, there is no particular reason for the simulators to be behind UAP.
Like, suppose you’re running an ancestor simulation of Earth. Maybe you’re a historian interested in researching our response to perturbations to the timeline that you think really could have happened, or maybe you’re trying to recreate a specific person to pull out of the simulation, or you’re self-inserting to have lots of great sex, or self-inserting along with several of your friends to play some sort of decades-long game. Probably you have much better things to do with this simulation than inserting some hard-to-verify floating orbs into the atmosphere.
There is a ‘UFO entertainment industry’ that is creating an adverse information environment for us.
E.g. Skinwalker Ranch is a place where some people have seen spooky stuff. But it’s also a way to sell books and TV shows and get millions-of-dollars government grants, each of which involves quite a few people whose livelihood now depends not only on the spookiness of this one place, but more generally on how spooky claims are treated by the public and the US government.
There’s an analogy here to the NASA Artemis program, which involves a big web of contractors whose livelihoods depended on the space shuttle program. These contractors, and politicians working with them, and government managers who like being in charge of larger programs, all benefit from what we might call an “adverse information environment” regarding how valuable certain space programs are, how well they’ll work, and how much they’ll cost.
Yep, these are good points. Appreciate you engaging in such good faith. Would still like to bet if you’re down.
Ok, I’m agreeing in principle to make the same bet as with RatsWrongAboutUAP.
(“I commit to paying up if I agree there’s a >0.4 probability something non-mundane happened in a UFO/UAP case, or if there’s overwhelming consensus to that effect and my probability is >0.1.”)
Charlie and I have made the bet. I sent $1000 on 11/18/24 against his $50,000. Happy betting!
The bet is indeed on. See you back here in 2029 :)