Is submitting multiple stories (within reason) allowed?

Why do mathematicians always build roads thru empty regions of land?

One of the field axioms is that the operations commute.

―by dkl9

There's a lot of stuff that scares me about that post.

Resolution Criteria

• Suppose your counterparty bets on 200:1 odds. Suppose the odds of a LW poll getting trolling results are >0.5%. Then your counterparty loses all of their alpha on that alone (because an incorrect result costs them 200× more than it costs you).
• "I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community to adjudicate resolution if I believe I am being stiffed." is too vague. If you don't specify exactly how you plan for the LW community to adjudicate resolution, then that's just asking for trouble. Imagine if you said "I reserve the right to the /r/cute community to adjudicate resolution of <such-and-such bet>. (Especially considering that the community is boycotting Reddit right now.)
• You didn't mention anything about "nontrivial post history". What happens if you win the bet $100k but your counterparty refuses to pay you? Do you go to court? What if they live in Nigeria?

Weird Explanations

Some of these seem poorly phrased, from the perspective of a lawyer.

• I think "astral projection" might be a legitimate altered state of consciousness, distinct from lucid dreaming.
• Personally, I would not consider the discovery of a Kardashev type II or III civilization to be an ontological shock. A shock, certainly, but not an ontological one.
• What is "magic"? The term is used by people like Daniel Ingram to describe stuff that seems…well…woo, but not quite insane. Also, anything which happens is a priori not paranormal.
• It's unclear whether the discovery of non-human homonids in the Amazon would resolve for or against you. Same goes for the discovery of a random dinosaur (non-bird) species that just happened to survive 70 million years. Neanderthal genes live among us.
• There's no central dogma for "standard atheist materialists". For example, there was a time when mainstream scientists didn't believe in lucid dreaming. I think enlightenment is in a similar state right now. It's not like the Catholic Church which has an official opinion.
• "Leftovers of an ancient civilization" technically exist, right now, all over the place. Ancient Rome. Everything from before the Bronze Age Collapse. It would be surprising to discover another one under, say, the south African jungle, but it wouldn't be an ontological shock. There are mysterious earthworks in North America that might point to something interesting too.
• "Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth" ← It's entirely plausible that dinosaurs had an agrarian civilization.
• Some other explanation I'm missing that's of a similar level of "very weird" ← Too vague.
• "Merely advanced "normal" human tech would NOT count (+2 gens stealth aircraft/drones, advanced holograms/spoofing, etc)" ← This implies that "+3 gens stealth aircraft/drones" might count.
• "Secret Manhattan style project with beyond next gen physics, that we had back in the 60's" ← We've never had next-gen physics. Physics has always been the same. Also, this wouldn't cause ontological shock to many "standard atheist materialists". I'd be surprised if the USA military had nothing surprising up it's sleeve.
• "Whatever these most perplexing ufo/uap cases represent, they are likely something beyond our current paradigm" ← Way, way too vague. Does weird atmospheric phenomena (similar to ball lightning) count? It's definitely outside the current paradigm, but it's not a contradiction of well-established physics.

I know you don't intend most of these interpretations, but many of them are reasonable interpretations of your literal words. I worry that you're playing with fire here and that you could end up in some nasty disagreements when it comes to resolve your proposed bet.

Overall, I feel like you're conflating "standard atheist materialists" with mainstream science and mainstream beliefs. They all differ slightly from each other. Some of the stuff on your list I'd bet my life against, but other bullet points are (when read literally) technically true.

That said, I really like your willingness to place wagers (especially in contradiction to the mainstream narrative) so that you actually have skin in the game. This is the way. I don't want to discourage you.

The financial terms aren't good enough to entice me. Besides that…

Pretty much all of your weird explanations are too vague. In particular "[s]ome other explanation that's of this level of 'very weird'" is voids the whole thing. It'd be fine for a blog post, but not as a prediction resolution criteria.

"I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]" is too vague too. The LW community is not a monolithic entity. I think you need to specify exactly how you plan to appeal to the LW community.

Nope. That's a separate bet. I'd happily bet against that (given good enough terms to overcome friction), but that's still originating from Earth.

Yes, I am implying that it's the only recourse allowed. Doing otherwise exposes me to asymmetric litigation risk, due to the extreme asymmetry of the bet amounts. I believe reputation is a sufficient motivator, given how much effort I've spend accumulating reputation on this website.

I respect your offer, but I'd need much better terms from you than from lc. Lc is someone I've interacted with before, and with whom I have established a level of trust.

Some thoughts:

• $50 to remember something for five years (and to assume a theoretical $10k liability) is too low a price. I value my attention higher than that.
• I think your list of hypotheses needs some nitpicking, but it's fine as a rough draft.
• If you have the right to appeal to the LW community then determination of the resolution is not up to me. You can't have it both ways, especially if you don't have an established reputation.

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.

I will accept under the following conditions:

• Make it $10 (you) vs $10k (me).
• I get sole discretion to decide what constitutes "definitively". Official statements aren't enough. I want transhuman tech, alien biological material, or something at that level. (Any one of them is sufficient. Not all are required.) Photographs and sworn testimony aren't good enough.
• The bet is valid for a three-month time horizon, after which the bet resolves in my favor.
• "Nonhuman" means aliens in the classic sense. Proper space aliens. No weaseling out with something like "human-made-machines" (including AI), "birds", "humans with neanderthal DNA", "funny-looking asteroids", etc. They have to be intelligent beings originating from another planet or or star system. Soviet spacecraft do not count. Elves don't count either, since they'd be Early in origin. A secret Indian space colony doesn't count. Moon Nazis don't count. Etcetera.
• If you win and I fail to pay up, then you have the right to publicly shame me.

Here's the short version: Suppose you think a prediction is mispriced but it's distant in the future. Instead of buying credits that pay out on resolution, you buy futures instead. You don't have to tie up capital, since payment is due on resolution instead of upfront. Your asset equals your liability. There is no beta.

Financial derivatives solve the shorttermism problem in traditional securities markets. If you use them in prediction markets, then they will (theoretically) do the exact same thing, by (theoretically) operating the exact same way. In practice, things get causal, and that's before you add leverage and derivatives.

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.

Doesn't matter. It just means that prediction markets have to be sufficiently capitalized to work. A hedge fund isn't going to throw its smartest brains at a market with only $100 of total market capitalization.