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.
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). ↩︎