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In general, what I'm trying to bet on is the world and rationalist community experiencing some significant ontological shock. If the community stops, melts, and catches fire, I win the bet.

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"No need to invoke slippery slope fallacies, here. Let's just consider the Czechoslovakian question in of itself" - Adolf Hitler

I would much rather have a 12 month time horizon. Evidence could take a while to filter out. Other than that I'd accept.

Up a fair amount so far; largest losses have been on meme markets https://manifold.markets/DeanValentine

lc6d9-1

A large part of your evidence is that "far-right" parties, like the Sweden democrats, are growing. But ~none of the western parties you mention are running on an explicitly anti-democratic platform, which was a fairly unifying feature of the worst dictatorships throughout history. "Marine Le Pen is a fascist and will start democratic backsliding if she wins" is a pretty odd assumption to just leave unsubstantiated.

lc6d122

Disagree with this and might write up a more thorough response than the one I have in a bit, but for now, here are some manifold markets around this topic area:

https://manifold.markets/group/weird-doomsday

Incomprehensible messages are a failure mode that indicates insufficiently advanced capabilities. Ambiguity doesn't help with that message, to the current or to the successor civ.

You do not understand what I am saying. The message is not for us and so our inability to interpret the message is irrelevant. Ambiguity and in general the small amount of relevant information is an important security property that helps ensure the aliens do not convey more than they mean to.

My personal confidence of "no aliens" is so high it rounds to 100%.

I would be willing to send you 100$ in advance, on a promise that you'll pay me 100,000 if it turns out definitively that these UFOs are built by nonhumans.

The message behind the inclinations may merely be incomprehensible for us. If I were an alien civ anticipating these humans to one day become something much more intelligent, and I wanted to tell them not to harshly expand without endangering myself, one strategy to take would be to just say "I'm here" in the form of airspace trinkets with the expectation that the successor civ fills in the blanks on priors. To tell them a whole lot more about myself wouldn't be prudent until I had an idea of what their intentions were.

See the several paragraphs inside the last quotation. According to the article, they haven't actually gotten anywhere with reverse engineering these things.

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