Epistemic status: Big if true/I am clearly an idiot for even posting this.
Some apparently real journalists have been approached by (& approached) several intelligence officials, some tasked specifically with investigating UFOs, who claim that the DoD has had evidence of alien intervention for a while in the form of partial & mostly-whole fragments of alien aircraft. A followup article where the publication outlines how the editors verified this persons' and others' claims and affiliations is here, and a part 2 is expected tomorrow.
For some reason - very possibly because it's complete nonsense, or because they haven't had time to independently verify - the story has only been picked up by NYMag so far. The consensus among the people I've been reviewing this article with, is that it's either a complete hoax (i.e., the entire thing nearly top to bottom is some deliberate deception) or there's a non-negligible (>5%) chance aliens are here. I would love for someone who has a good understanding of the material to give an explanation (including possibly on priors, just thinking clearly about the content of the article) of why my friend group should discount this out of hand.
Thus far I have been unconvinced by most stories of why we should to-the-point-of-not-caring-about-UFO-sightings-expect Aliens have to be big and obvious and tile the universe with fun, as opposed to operating some sort of noninterventionist monitored lightcone.
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.)