Are you confident in your current ontology? Are you convinced that ultimately all ufos are prosaic in nature?
If so, do you want some immediate free money?
I suspect that LW's are overconfident in their views on ufos/uap. As such, I'm willing to offer what I think many will find to be very appealing terms for a bet.
The Bet
Essentially, I wish to bet on the world and rationalists eventually experiencing significant ontological shock as it relates to the nature of some ufos/uap.
Offer me odds for a bet, and the maximum payout you are willing to commit to. I will pick 1+ from the pool and immediately pay out to you. In the event that I ultimately win the bet, then you will pay out back to me.
I'm looking to give out between $5k-10k, but depends on what kinds of offers I get, could be more or less.
The Terms
- I Send you $X Immediately, You pay out Odds*X if I win
- ie, You offer 200:1 odds with max payout $20,000 and I will send you $100 immediately.
- 5 year time horizon starting from the date we confirm our bet.
- You offer the odds and maximum payout, I will pick from the available offers to maximize my expected returns, subject to my financial constraints.
Resolution Criteria
Two Worlds: All-ufos-are-ultimately-prosaic, and Not-all-ufos-are-ultimately-prosaic. I win the bet if we come to believe we likely live in the latter world. I win the bet if the ufo story ultimately gives us LW's a significant ontological shock. I win the bet if the ufo story ultimately causes the LW community to stop, melt, and catch fire. I've found it difficult to precisely nail down how to phrase this, so I hope its clear what kind of criteria I'm trying to get at.
Examples of things where if we come to believe at least one of them likely explain >0 ufo/uap cases, then I win the bet:
- Aliens / Extraterrestrials
- Biological
- Machines (Von Neumann probes, for instance)
- Actual magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
- This explicitly does NOT include merely advanced "mentalist" type things / show magic
- ie, things like ESP, astral projection, demons, god(s), angels, ghosts, remote viewing, fairy's (actually anomalous, not just new kind of bird), etc.
- Basically, the kinds of things that standard atheist materialists would reject as not being real.
- Time travel
- ie, future human activities (or otherwise)
- Leftovers of an ancient civilization
- Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
- Matrix Glitches / The simulators have a sense of humor
- Some other explanation I'm missing that's of a similar level of "very weird"
- Merely advanced "normal" human tech would NOT count (+2 gens stealth aircraft/drones, advanced holograms/spoofing, etc)
- What WOULD count is if the story is significantly weird enough to cause ontological shock.
- example: Secret Manhattan style project with beyond next gen physics, that we had back in the 60's
- What WOULD count is if the story is significantly weird enough to cause ontological shock.
Important Note: The bet resolve in my favor if we think that one of the "weird hypotheses" is likely (>50%) true, NOT that we are confident in which specific explanation is true. Essentially, the bet resolves in my favor if we agree with the statement: "Whatever these most perplexing ufo/uap cases represent, they are likely something beyond our current paradigm"
Further Details
- I hereby forfeit any "gotcha" cases.
- I'm not trying to be slick or capitalize on technicalities. A world in which I win is one where the community would broadly agree that I won.
- Determination of resolution in my favor is left up to you.
- I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community to adjudicate resolution if I believe I am being stiffed.
- I hereby commit to not abusing this right. I don't expect that I would ever have to invoke it, I suspect it would be very obvious if I win or not to everyone.
- I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community to adjudicate resolution if I believe I am being stiffed.
If these terms are acceptable, please make an offer and maximum payout amount. I will select from available offers as I see fit. I would prefer to pay out in bitcoin/eth but can work with you for another method.
Cheers :D
When it comes to solution criteria, it might be useful to have a Metaculus question. Metaculus questions have a good track record of being resolved in a fair matter.
I would give 200:1 odds for up to 50,000 of my own dollars.
My likelihood for one of the weird hypotheses you listed being true is higher than .5%. However my odds are much lower that we get any significant evidence of those hypotheses being true within the next 5 years and that UFOs + UAPs are caused by that weird hypothesis.
I think the issue is going to be disagreements about what the > 50% likelihood means. A lot of people are saying the current round of military and federal officials coming forward with their stories about the government keeping alien craft in secret facilities is significant evidence in favor of aliens. I would like a resolution criteria that is either public polling (>50% of people polled say that X hypothesis is true) or maybe a particular public figure taking a serious stance (Scott Alexander seriously claims that UFOs are shadow US government 4d vehicles extending into our visible space).
A proper Bayesian currently at less 0.5% credence for a proposition P should assign a less than 1 in 100 chance that their credence in P rises above 50% at any point in the future. This isn't a catch for someone who's well-calibrated.
In the example you give, the extent to which it seems likely that critical typos would happen and trigger this mechanism by accident is exactly the extent to which an observer of a strange headline should discount their trust in it! Evidence for unlikely events cannot be both strong and probable-to-appear, or the events would not be unlikely.
The thing that has me pretty confused about your confidence here is not just that there's something weird going on here, but, that you expect it to be confirmed within 5 years.
How come you're trusting essentially random internet strangers to pay up significant sum of money if they lose a bet in up to 5 years?
LW's with a reputation are a far cry from random internet strangers. I made the bet terms as such to be as frictionless and minimum downside for my counterparties as possible to try and eliminate as many concerns as possible, I do want to make bets afterall.
If I get stiffed I'd be pretty surprised, but I take that risk knowingly.
Max bet $50k, I would be totally happy to bet at 50:1 odds.
So I could get 0.5% of the committed payout right away, but would have to avoid spending the committed value for 5 years, even though the world could change significantly in a lot of non UAP-related ways in that time frame. That's not actually that attractive.
This is to publicly confirm that I have received approximately $2000 USD equivalent.
Unless you dispute what timing is appropriate for the knowledge cutoff, I will consider the knowledge cutoff for the paradigm-shattering UAP-related revelations for me to send you $100k USD to be 11:59pm, June 14, 2028 UTC time.
Glad we could make this bet!
I don't know what assumptions the OP has, but don't forget the simulation argument: If you think we are heeded for super intelligence, then the following all become more likely:
This sounds like the opening premise of a fun TV show or film.
UFO believer makes big bet with (for the sake of TV) one very rich person. Then heads out on an epic road trip in a camper van to find the alien evidence. A reporter covers the story and she starts travelling with him sending updates back to her paper. Obviously they fall for eachother.
They have various fun adventures where they keep encountering unconvincing evidence, or occasionally super-convincing evidence (UFO flys by) that they comically fail to catch on camera. Meanwhile the rich person o... (read more)
The whole idea conflates refusal to accept the bet for reasons that apply to bets in general, with refusing to accept the bet because you're not really confident that UFOs are mundane.
I can't give you an exhaustive list of the problems I have with betting, but some reasons:
-
-
-
-
... (read more)Properly phrasing a bet is difficult, like writing a computer program that runs perfectly the first time, or phrasing a wish to a genie. I'm no good at avoiding loopholes, and there's no shortage of rationalists who'd exploit them as long as they can get a win. And just saying "I won't prey on any technicalities" isn't enough without being able to read your mind and know what you consider a technicality.
Betting has social overhead. This is the "explain to your parents/wife/children why you bet this money" scenario.
Some people value money differently than I do. Some people just have glitchy HumanOS 1.0 which leads them to spend money irrationally. Some people are just overconfident. If I bet against such a person I may win money in X years, but until the X years are up, I'll have essentially lost the argument, because my opponent was willing to spend money--there must be some substance behind his argument or he wouldn't do that, right?
As others have pointed out, it's a bad idea to trust random people on the Internet to pay me money in X years. "I have a reputation" is not eno
Hesitant to bet while sick, but I'll offer max bet $20k at 25:1.
If you were offering, say, $100K at 5:1 odds, I would be very inclined to take it, despite the risk that e.g. next month's X-Day finally delivers, because that would let me set in motion things that, according to me, have their own transformative potential. But I'm not sure about the value of these smaller sums.
What if UFO are indeed really weird, but this will not shake LW belief system as it will be easily retrospectively explained: e.g. 'we always know that acausal cooperation between glitching streams in dust theory will produce Bayesian artifacts with low apriori probability but also unprovable in classical statistic sense'.
On further edit: apparently I'm a blind idiot and didn't see the clearly stated "5 year time horizon" despite actively looking for it. Sorry. I'll leave this here as a monument to my obliviousness, unless you prefer to delete it.
Without some kind of time limit, a bet doesn't seem well formed, and without a reasonably short time limit, it seems impractical.
No matter how small the chance that the bet will have to be paid, it has to be possible for it to be paid, or it's not a bet. Some entity has to have the money and be obligated to pay it out. Arranging fo... (read more)
I'm interested in my $250k against your $10k.
Do you use Manifold Markets? It already has UAP-related markets you can bet on, and you can create your own.
I will predict that no bet with significant stakes (say, over $200 from the poster) gets made. This is a stunt, and the terms (of resolution and collection) are way too loose to be useful.
update a few days later: an established (ish - 6-month history, with quite a few comments and karma. @simon.) poster has confirmed that approx $2000 payment was received. Something weird could still be discovered, but this raises my estimate of legitimacy from ~15% to ~70% (had thought as high as 85% until I realized that it's $100k agreement for simon t... (read more)
Hm, I don't feel confident enough to place huge odds on none of these things being the answer (besides, the losses may appear deceptively smaller than they are; if you think $20,000 are a lot, try "$20,000 and having to explain to your wife why you lost $20,000 in a bet, all the while aliens may be attacking Earth"). I think the thing that really peeves me is running to "aliens" as the first exotic explanation as some do. If I witnessed something really unbelievable and seemingly breaking all laws of physics, and had plenty of evidence that it's not just a... (read more)
I don't think I have enough of a post history to participate. If I did, I'd factor into my bet that there may be less impact to be had in a world with advanced aliens, at least if those aliens could subdue an earth-originated ASI. Therefor, money might be less instrumentally valuable in that world.
I am concerned for your monetary strategy (unless you're rich). Let's say you're absolutely right that LW is overconfident, and that there is actually a 10% chance of aliens rather than 0.5. So this is a good deal! 20x!
But only on the margin.
Depending on your current wealth it may only be rational to take a few hundred dollars worth of these bets for this particular bet. If you go making lots of these types of bets (low probability, high payoff, great EXpected returns) for a small fraction of your wealth each, you should expect to make money, but if you ma... (read more)
I am willing to bet 50:1 up to $20k. Would you be interested?
[EDIT] up to $20k on my side, not up $1M.
This pattern matches to anonymous person on the internet offering free money, which is typically a scam. Safer to pass, I think.
Personally this type of bet just seems like a terrible idea for the "believer" side. It's terrible because I suspect most people who do not believe that any of those things are likely to be real would also be pretty happy if many of them were. I'd be willing to give up a lot of things for real, undeniable proof that alien life has visited earth. I would never have enough credence in a claim that someone had that evidence that I'd be willing to pay, but the bet creates a win-win situation where I only have to pay after seeing the proof.
This is late but if betting is still available I think I'd take 1:60 odds.
In addition I am willing to reveal my identity (in private) and write an actual contract in the interest of creating a stronger sense of commitment and seriousness if you'd like that. I am also willing to return the exact sum at the end of the 5 years if we reach an "impasse" where you believe strong evidence has been provided that I do not recognize as such (for example, if belief in a supernatural origin for UFOs becomes common in the coming years for various reasons)
I am also very interested in your justifications for this bet. Are there any historical UFO "cases" that you find compelling?
EDIT: You can safely disregard the second paragraph of this, I misread the post initially. Still, the first applies.
In the event that you decide you're being stiffed, how will you quantify community sentiment on the issue to try and prove that the majority of the community believes in one of your categories of anomalous claims? Will you conduct a poll of some kind? Will you just say that you beg to differ?
Also, in the event that you're actually someone who has assessed that they don't want to be on LessWrong greater than 5 years from now anyway in the timeline where no substantial UFO/UAP evidence has surfaced by then, what would compel you to pay up instead of ghosting?
I said in a post to lsusr yesterday (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oY9HNicqGGihymnzk/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-craft-of-non?commentId=od73EXuSL6uKLFfeD) that I would update the post today to address his concerns, but honestly im feeling very lazy and mostly disagree that its unclear what I'm trying to do.
I will be picking some people and moving forward with the bets today. I will ensure with my counterparties that any individual concerns they have are addressed.
I am still open to betting with more people (and would love to do so!).
To be clear, to resolve the bet in your favor, it has to be the case that:
a) We have >50% credence in "ontological shock" as you define it
and
b) UFOs/UAPs identified as of June 13 2023 are meaningfully a result of such "ontological shock" right?
(To be more explicit, I want to exclude scenarios like the following thing from being scored in your favor:
1. We discover novel philosophical arguments or empirical evidence that leads LessWrongers to believe we're on balance more likely to live in a simulation than not.
2. Causally, the UFOs are a result of simula... (read more)
I'm sure that this time around, it's definitely real aliens. Or, barring that, magic or time travel.