I have been betting this market up to around 7-8%.  I, along with others betting alongside me, often get criticized and dismissed for being 'overconfident' about the existence of a conspiracy.  Does anyone else recognize the irony in that?

To be clear, I am expressing a 7% confidence that perhaps there are people in the world that know quite a bit more than me about topics which would be ontologically shocking to me.

It appears that the side betting against me is at least 92% confident that they have all the information necessary to know that there are no groups that have information that would be ontologically shocking to them.

Can someone help me understand the technical justification for such a high confidence?  It appears it's largely based on social conformity (appeal to authority).  To my knowledge, there is no proof that exists that this is not the case.  Since there exists no such proof, a rational person should assign some > 0 probability to the possibility that they might be wrong.

Are there any 'no' bettors that are willing to share their actual confidence that they assign to themselves being wrong?

@Krantz
- World shattering stuffs are rare.
- If you condition on UFOs implying something world shattering, you get, I think, a very small fraction of the set of things that could be world shattering.
- If you condition on it being somewhat successfully hidden to the public, it is still a smaller set (because there need to be a good reason to hide it, and the capacity).

I think there are less than 1% chance, for all these reasons and some others.

But I agree I am the one being confident here, not you. So yes I see the irony of reproaching your overconfidence.

@Krantz to add to dionisos's response:

I think a 7% probability is somewhat reasonable for "there are people in the world that know quite a bit more than me about topics which would be ontologically shocking to me."

But that's not what you're betting on in this market. Here, you're betting on "there are people in the world that know things about UFOs specifically which would be ontologically shocking to me, who have successfully kept those things hidden thus far, and those things will become public knowledge within the next three years (OR: there are no such people, but humanity as a whole will learn new ontologically shocking things about UFOs in the next three years)".

Tossing out some off-the-cuff probability estimates (each conditional on the previous ones):

• "UFOs have an ontologically shocking origin" (1%)

• "people have strong evidence of UFOs' ontologically shocking origin" (10%)

• "those people have been able to contain that information" (10%)

• "those people will not be able to contain that information for three more years" (2%)

This leads to an extremely low probability for this market resolving yes as a result of a conspiracy being exposed.

Maybe you think that the next three years specifically are an unusually likely time for any such hidden knowledge to become public (e.g. because of AGI/ASI). But even turning the "will not be able to contain that information" probability to 100% gives a quite low estimate for this market resolving yes.

I'm curious what probabilities you'd give for the statements above.

@jcb also of note:

If an alien IFO arrived tomorrow, this market still resolves NO unless they prove that they were responsible for one in the past.

@jcb @dionisos

1. World shattering stuffs are rare.

I would agree, but not because there is a lack of worldview shattering discoveries to be made. It's because of a human bias to focus on topics within one's own worldview. As such, I don't see a reason to reduce my expectancy to encounter worldview shattering discoveries. I only see a reason to expect that nobody else will believe me when I encounter them. That seems to track with all the numerous sightings nobody believes.

2. If you condition on UFOs implying something world shattering, you get, I think, a very small fraction of the set of things that could be world shattering.

I'm not sure I understand this claim. Are you just saying that UFOs being known to exist without a prosaic explanation is just one of many worldshattering truths that could be known? I don't see how that would compel me to reduce the likelihood that UFOs have a non-prosaic explanation. I do see it as a good reason to believe there are probably even bigger world shattering updates beyond UFOs that I can't even imagine.

3. If you condition on it being somewhat successfully hidden to the public, it is still a smaller set (because there need to be a good reason to hide it, and the capacity).

It doesn't seem like it's being "hidden" very well. I believe the noise that exists in society's communication infrastructure coupled with the ostracization of the topic simply presents the information from either being found or believed when found (at scale). All that's really necessary to maintain the status quo worldview is for the government not to confirm it and let human nature maintain the status quo.

4. UFOs have an ontologically shocking explanation.

This either seems like it's tautologically true or it is missing the crux of the market. For example, if the Whitehouse gave a press conference tomorrow and truthfully said, "UFOs are real, we've retrieved many crashed UFOs and have been secretly studying them in underground bunkers for decades trying to replicate them but still don't have an explanation for what they are, how they work, or where they came from.", that would (1) seem to be an ontologically shocking update to the status quo worldview of most people and (2) would compel a 'no' resolution to this market.

In other words, 'no prosaic explanation' seems to be an 'ontologically shocking explanation'. The crux of the market seems to be 'has the government (or equivalent) been secretly studying UFOs that have no prosaic explanation?' (and will they officially tell us that in the next 3 years?).

5. People have strong evidence of UFOs' ontologically shocking origin.

This seems to have the same problem as 4. Perhaps a charitable paraphrase would be 'People have strong evidence that UFOs are real and have no prosaic explanation.'?

6. Those people have been able to contain that information.

Same as 3 above.

It doesn't seem like it's being "hidden" very well. I believe the noise that exists in society's communication infrastructure coupled with the ostracization of the topic simply presents the information from either being found or believed when found (at scale). All that's really necessary to maintain the status quo worldview is for the government not to confirm it and let human nature maintain the status quo.

7. Those people will not be able to contain that information for three more years.

A charitable paraphrase might be, 'The general public will not be open minded enough to sort through the noise produced in the public discourse'.

Out of all the reasons both of you have provided, the only one that feels like justification for increasing my expectancy of a 'yes' resolution is my paraphrase of 7. I think 'the general public not being able to sort through the noise produced in the public discourse' is highly likely. It's also probably why nobody is taking existential risk from AI seriously either..

I'd really like to fix that.

Anyway, thanks for the response.

@Krantz The technical justification is just that this:

It appears that the side betting against me is at least 92% confident that they have all the information necessary to know that there are no groups that have information that would be ontologically shocking to them.

Is straightforwardly false. I think that out of hundreds or thousands of possible cover-up conspiracies of roughly this size, at least one is probably true, but each individual one is almost certainly false. This conspiracy fails for the same reason as all other conspiracies: too many people would have to keep too big a secret. I'd put the chance that there's an extent coverup at maybe 0.05%, and the chance that later analysis will reveal something not yet known to anyone at maybe 0.2%.

@speck "Too many people would have to keep too big a secret."

This is the same genre of response my 70 year old mother gives me when I try to warn her about the existential risk of AI. For context, my mother is a sweet old woman that knows nothing about AI. She ran a dog bakery for 20 years. She's always voted Democrat. In general, she doesn't like it when rich people use a bunch of money to do stuff that negatively effects all the poor people. She thinks we should put less money into weapons of war and more money into the healthcare and education system. She watches the local news on cable. She is a normal person in rural Indiana. She can't stand Trump.

When I tell her that the leaders of the field are seriously trying to warn the world about an existential situation with AI and that many of the rich people (who fund the news programs she watches and own all the GPU farms and oil that will be used to grow AI) would rather she not understand this risk and therefore under report it, she thinks I've gotten wrapped up in some kind of cult. She would certainly consider someone like Eliezer to be a conspiracy whacko if she spent an hour listening to him talk about the dangers of AI.

She assumes, if the gravity of the issue I am trying to tell her about were justified, then she would see that discussed on 'her news'. She would see someone like Whoopi Goldberg or Oprah seriously afraid of the existential risk. Since she isn't seeing that, she assumes there must be some smart group of people that have things totally under control. After all, if AI was on track to end humanity, people wouldn't be able to keep that sort of thing a secret.

She is making the same false assumption all of you seem to be making. That the news works. That, if there is important information out in the world, someone with authority will go get that information and conveniently put it in front of you.

That's not how the news works.

You have to do your own research.

I'm a Democrat also. I've never voted for a Republican and I'm one of the few people in my community that makes a point to vote in primaries. I've always put most of my energy into getting my Democrat friends to support candidates like Sanders or Yang, but dispite that effort, the Democratic candidate always ends up being some cookie cutter bureaucrat. I've followed RFK Jr. for a long time. In my opinion, he best represents the ideals that the Democratic Party used to value. The way that 'the news' has chosen to report on him, is what has really opened my eyes to how much goes 'unreported'. I believe if Democrats actually listened to him (if their preferred news actually reported honestly on him) he could have gotten overwhelming support, Elon would have backed him and he would now be the Democratic President. I think he could have done a wonderful job uniting the country and would have brought transparency to a lot of issues that need it (including AI risk).

The overall point is, there's plenty of news out there about many topics. Nobody has to keep any secrets. People just have an inability to be charitable to ideas that are outside their Overton window. I'm 42 years old. In my 30s, I would have considered anyone talking about UFOs, ancient civilizations, vaccines or a litany of other fringe topics to be conspiracy theorists and wouldn't have invested any time checking their claims. I used to trust the news. I used to have the same bias as my mother.

A lot has changed in the past 3 years.

I started listening to people with an open mind.

I'm glad I did that. I'm less wrong.

I think we should consider printing a new type of money for people that are capable of decentrally proving that they can do that.

Ultimately, that's what my project is about.

If you want to try the whole open mind thing, Daniel Sheehan is the best reference I can point you to. I would highly recommend his lectures if you want to understand what hasn't been on the news.

https://manifold.markets/Krantz/what-will-i-believe-is-the-most-imp?r=S3JhbnR6

@Krantz That's a lot of words, but you're not really saying anything. "Open your mind and you'll believe all kinds of wacky things" is not the kind of argument that is going to change the minds of anyone here. Provide the evidence, provide strong arguments that are backed by sources. Don't just link drop to a 30 hour long rambling lecture series by Some Guy if you want to be taken seriously.

@Krantz I consider this a disrespectful response. I do not care about your mother or your age. My reply was quite short and straightforward - writing this many words with this tone without having read or engaged with it is unacceptable. (Incidentally, I find that I was wrong and I do care at least a bit about your mother, since I'm somewhat interested in figuring out how you were raised to behave this way.)

Some corners of the internet allow bulldozing diatribe as a mode of communication

That does not mean that bulldozing diatribes are acceptable.

I am in fact interested in the possibility of alien contact and have read the standard sources, which are unbelievably lacking. If you believe they are not, or you believe there are nonstandard sources I should see, I'm open to looking over any concrete objects of thought that you think would mark our points if disagreement. After that I would very strongly prefer that we do not cross paths again.

https://x.com/jasonwilde108/status/1929310791489954092?s=46

@Ansel I didn’t read this whole thing but this shows a lack of basic knowledge.

@JasonQ Yeah agree he's conflating two different concepts there. Doesn't mean the whole report is wrong, or mean anything at all about the report itself in fact. The report should be judged on its own merits, not on the analytical skills of a guy on the internet who got excited about it.

@Ansel my base assumption is that if a more careful analysis from people who know what they are talking about supported the wild assertions he jumps to, you’d post that rather than some confused guy. That does tell me information about the report.

@JasonQ That appears to me a very leveraged assumption. I considered posting the underlying report, however it’s huge and not presentable to the more casual viewer, and I felt slightly guilty about stripping off the original (albeit flawed) summary. So I posted what I posted. To me, the strangeness and depth of the topic prompts curiosity and a need for a better explanation. I still don’t have one, hence my NO bet at 7% probability. Everyone seems to want be very quick to want to find a reason to look away from this. I find that to be a bit self-delusional and at worst dangerous for humanity - similar to self-denial about AI risk. I’m not saying I know truth: I’m saying there’s good reason for significant doubt.

@Ansel in what way is it a “leveraged assumption”? What’s the leverage? Or do you mean it’s very commonly leveraged to reach a conclusion?

I’m saying the fact a summary which doesn’t pass cursory critical thinking is selected by a proponent of one position for broader consumption gives indirect information about each step in that chain.

Also, doubt and curiosity are good. This market isn’t “are there events which we have not yet fully understood and explained?” that’s always going to be true because we can’t travel back in time to such events and collect more evidence, it’s often the case that evidence for a particular event, be it a murder or odd radar measurements, can simply remain inconclusive forever. Rather, this market is “are there events before 2023 which will be revealed to have world-shattering origins conclusively within 3 years?” you should equally apply doubt and curiosity to potential explanations or the things you are consuming on the topic, like that summary.

@JasonQ By “leveraged assumption” I mean that your assumption is doing a lot of work in your epistemic framework. And I think it’s an example of epistemic closure in action. A similar form of epistemic closure happened when doctors ostracised Ignaz Semmelweis for claiming that invisible microscopic animals (now known as microbes) were causing “childbed fever” (puerperal fever) and urged doctors to wash their hands in chlorine before touching patients. He may not have been good at communicating his claim, nor even a particularly good doctor. There may even have been entrenched interests that wanted to keep things the way they were. But he was right in a massively life-changing way.

I think the phrase “big if true” summarizes why I continue to pay attention to this topic despite it being clearly rife with bad actors and misinformation. Crank that word “big” all the way up to 11 ,“ontologically shocking”, and even a low probability of truth demands investigation and curiosity.

Credible, well-credentialed officials flatly contradict each other on this topic. I find that unignorable. Even if it maybe is all just a psy-op and a slight waste of my time, I’m ok with that. I would rather that than potentially dismiss the biggest story in human history. I’m only at 50-50 credence that there even is anything ontologically shocking, but if there is I want to know early. And I’m only at maybe 15-20% that it comes out with the required conditions before 2030. But that’s enough to buy at 7.

Easy YES. Pete Hegseth would have yapped to his wife about it already.

Does anyone know how are loans calculated today? I bought 10k, but my daily loan did not increased. Are they now capped? Per market or globally?

I am asking here specifically, because loans have big impact on price here.

(108140)

@Irigi the loan system is very generous (with minimal "risk management"/oversight), but the maximum loan you can receive for any single market is 5% of your net worth. Your position this market is 117% of your net worth, & your current loan on this market is 88% of your net worth, so that means you can't receive further loans on this market (but you will still receive loans normally on all the other markets on the site—loans aren't intended to endlessly increase leverage for people betting on a single market).

(the per-market 5% of nw cap should be added to the UI)

there's also a cap on the total leverage per account that blocks new loans entirely, but it's extremely high and i don't think you're close to reaching it.

@Ziddletwix how do you know how big Irigi's current loan on this market is? Loans have always seemed quite opaque to me and I'd be keen to monitor my own loans more closely and keep track of which markets I can get more leverage on and which I can't

@Ziddletwix Thank you for the explanation. I was not complaining, I just want to update my knowledge on how the system works now and act accordingly. I think the cap per market is a good thing.

@Ziddletwix Btw. might be a nice feature to show user on what market they reached the loan cap. (Usually, they want to take that into account).

@Irigi agreed! It’s under explained and that’d be a good feature

@Fion you can see the loan info for each market if you click to see more under the trades tab of their profile (the info is probably generally available in the API but that’s how you check in the UI)

@Ziddletwix wait... how is it under the trades tab? I don't see that column option

@bens it’s not a column. You need to click to expand the trade itself