Lurker, Rationalist.
RatsWrongAboutUAP
Karma: 404
Willing to bet on this at 200:1?
My Offer:
I Send you $X Immediately, You pay out $200*X if I win
I want a 5 year time horizon.
I am betting that one of the “very weird” hypotheses turns out true. Bet resolves in my favor if within 5 years its determined that >0 UAP are explained by:
Literal aliens
Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Time travel
Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
Some other explanation that’s of this level of “very weird”
Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
I forfeit any and all potential “gotcha” cases.
Determination of resolution to be up to you.
I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
Please let me know what your maximum payout you swear to be good for would be, and Ill send you 1/200th that today, up to a maximum of 5K.
If these terms are acceptable, please provide a means for me to pay you. I would prefer a crypto address, but will make whatever work. Upon payment please post an acknowledgement of payment.
I offer the same terms to anyone else [with a nontrivial post history].
Willing to bet on this at 200:1? (This is what I have been offering others)
My Offer:
I Send you $X Immediately, You pay out $200*X if I win
I want a 5 year time horizon.
I am betting that one of the “very weird” hypotheses turns out true. Bet resolves in my favor if within 5 years its determined that >0 UAP are explained by:
Literal aliens
Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Time travel
Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
Some other explanation that’s of this level of “very weird”
Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
I forfeit any and all potential “gotcha” cases.
Determination of resolution to be up to you.
I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
Please let me know what your maximum payout you swear to be good for would be, and Ill send you 1/200th that today, up to a maximum of 5K.
If these terms are acceptable, please provide a means for me to pay you. I would prefer a crypto address, but will make whatever work. Upon payment please post an acknowledgement of payment.
I offer the same terms to anyone else [with a nontrivial post history].
For instance, if some form of undiscovered bat or sea creature is actually good at flying and that explains the images, does that count as “very weird”? That is, it’s not an animal that can design technologies, but it is the cause of a bunch of the UFO reportings.
If a skeptic/debunker would feel smug and vindicated about any given explanation, then that explanation would NOT resolve in my favor. Weird animal (As mentioned, barring that they aren’t secretly on par with humans), is prosaic and would NOT resolve in my favor.
Also “psychic phenomenon” seems kind of ill-defined. Derren Brown can do hypnosis and seances that have strong effects on people, there’s a lot of suggestibility in people, if a bunch of UFO sighting were due to someone doing similar things but even better and naturally, does that count as psychic phenomena?
Merely advanced “mentalist” type stuff would NOT count. This class is more pointing at “true” psychic phenomena. ie, something more like ESP, remote viewing, astral projection, etc.
Regarding the hypotheses, I’d probably want to determine now some set of LW posters to resolve it if we disagree. My first guess is that Oliver Habryka, Alyssa Vance, and Vaniver could be good, where if any of them think the bet resolves in your favor then it does.
I lurk, but not closely enough to know what handles would be good for this bet. Ill accept this list, and also throw in Scott Alexander and Eliezer.
I assume you mean the central example, some indisputably organic entities arriving from another star system on something indisputably like a “spacecraft”
Extraterrestrial in origin, biological or otherwise (their autonomous probes, for instance).
Hmm, I don’t even know how to identify something like that.
Example of what resolution in my favor might look like: In 5 years time we are looking back and saying “Damn, I cant believe some ufos were actually demons this whole time. Wild”
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.
Fair enough. What kinds of changes would you suggest for the list? My goal is to find at least one person on LW to make a bet with me, so I welcome feedback
UFO Betting: Put Up or Shut Up
I have created a post here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up
I have created a post for this bet https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up
I have created a post for my bet https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up
I have created a post for this bet https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up
I know I have no post history, and thus these are just words, but I claim to be a reasonable, rational person who (tries) to operates exclusively in good faith. I’ve been a lurker of LW and LW adjacent people for a few years now. I learned about lesswrong because I stumbled across eilizers work on decision theories and then subsequently got agi-safety-pilled. I considered myself a “standard materialist atheist” my entire adult life and most of my childhood.
Most of your concerns seemed to ignore that the explanations have to ultimately trace back to explaining ufo cases or are otherwise very pedantic. Yes ancient civ’s have ruins, yes dinosaurs might have been agrarian, but do either of those address uap cases today? I only win the bet if my counterparty thinks so (or LW does).
I tried in good faith to try and cut at the seems of the two world models (all prosaic, not all prosaic) as best I could. I gave multiple lexical tests to make clear what kinds of things I have in mind.
I have no intention of getting into nasty disagreements over resolution. But I agree it would be good to have the adjudication method be explicit, though I’m not sure how best to do that. In a world in which I win the bet, I figured I would be making a big post anyways laying out a bit more about me and some of this stuff. If prominent voices contest my win then I would stand down from collecting. I expect a world in which I win is also a world in which LW is pretty unanimous that I won.
You’re right, I forgot to mention the nontrivial post history in my post, an oversight on my part. That said I was only ever going to engage with people with established reputations because obviously. I reserved the right to choose who to bet with.
Enticing offer. Barring better odds and max payout offer that would eat up my budget, I would like I go forward with this. I will wait to see what offers come in first.
I will update the post tomorrow and add more detail to address the other concerns
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!).
This is the best offer so far! I would love to enter into this bet with you.
I would be perfectly happy with either of those methods of resolution in the event there’s a disagreement. In that event I would be happy for you to more or less entirely dictate the specifics of that process. I commit to operating in good faith with you, and I obviously take as a given that you will do the same.
If you have any other concerns please let me know. Otherwise please provide (either publicly or privately) a means for me to pay you. We can then both confirm here that we have begun our bet.
Let us move forward!
I commit to operating in good faith with you, and I obviously take as a given that you will do the same. If you have any other concerns please let me know. Otherwise please provide (either publicly or privately) a means for me to pay you. We can then both confirm here that we have begun our bet.
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.
If/when it comes out that ufos are legitimately weird, I would be very surprised to see anything other than utter bewilderment from most of LW, I don’t expect clear resolution in my favor to be an issue.
I’m afraid you are going to lose this bet. So long as people come can up with a bitcoin/eth address or a paypal account, there will be no issues.
My Offer:
I Send you $50 Immediately, You pay out $10,000 if I win
I want a 5 year time horizon.
I am betting that one of the “very weird” hypotheses turns out true. Bet resolves in my favor if within 5 years its determined that >0 UAP are explained by:
Literal aliens
Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Time travel
Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
Some other explanation that’s of this level of “very weird”
Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
I forfeit any and all potential “gotcha” cases.
Determination of resolution to be up to you.
I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
If these terms are acceptable, please provide a means for me to pay you. I would prefer a crypto address, but will make whatever work. Upon payment please post an acknowledgement of payment.
I offer the same terms to anyone else [with a nontrivial post history].