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
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 for a bet to be paid at any time after their death would cost more than your counterparty would get out of the deal. Trying to arrange a perpetual trust that could always pay is not only grossly impractical, but actually illegal in a lot of places. Even informally asking people to hold money is really unreliable very far out. And an amount of money that could be meaningful to future people could end up tied up forever anyway, which is weird. Even trying to be sure to have the necessary money until death could be an issue.
I'm not really motivated to play, but as an example I'm statistically likely to die in under 25 years barring some very major life extension progress. I'm old for this forum, but everybody has an expiration date, including you yourself. Locating your heirs to pay them could be hard.
Deciding the bet can get hard, too. A recognizable Less Wrong community as such probably will not last even 25 years. Nor will Metaculus or whatever else. A trustee is not going to have the same judgement as the person who originally took your bet.
That's all on top of the more "tractable" long-term risks that you can at least value in somehow... like collapse of whatever currency the bet is denominated in, AI-or-whatever completely remaking the economy and rendering money obsolete, the Rapture, etc, etc.
... but at the same time, it doesn't seem like there's any particular reason to expect definitive information to show up within any adequately short time.
On edit: I bet somebody's gonna suggest a block chain. Those don't necessarily have infinite lives, either, and the oracle that has to tell the chain to pay out could disappear at any time. And money is still tied up indefinitely, which is the real problem with perpetuities.