Original Lesswrong thread here.
Original tweet here:
Unlinked market with shorter timeframes here: /Joshua/when-will-we-know-that-any-past-ufo
1,000
3.00@benshindel looks like you'd have to spend at least $4k of your own money to even buy enough mana to invest that into this market at 90% (assuming you don't shift the odds much) to have a chance at being the top spot on the leaderboard. I would, on a personal level, legitimately advise against spending $4k of your own money on that, but I know you probably do not care what I think regardless.
@SteveSokolowski you could buy $4k of mana and sweepstakes tokens, play with the sweepstakes, cash them out, and keep the mana.
Does anyone know how to find out who the richest person on Manifold is?
@benshindel linked to the profit leaderboard, which is the most relevant/interesting manifold "score". But if you're curious about actual "richest", that sounds like net worth. That's not publicly tracked anywhere, but here's a rough estimate of the richest accounts on the site (I queried this a few weeks ago, but I doubt too much has changed since then):
looks like you'd have to spend at least $4k of your own money to even buy enough mana to invest that into this market at 90%
FWIW, with the return of loans, you wouldn't need to spend anywhere near that much—just keep taking that loan & dumping it back into the market. I am encouraging Manifold to add a per-market cap (by % of net worth) on loans because I don't think there's any reason for the site to offer unlimited leverage to people who chose to dump their entire account into one market. But until they make that change, under the current system, I do not think it would be terribly hard to get 6 million NO shares in this market—1.5% of your position per day really adds up.
@Ziddletwix it looks like with the way Manifold has now implemented loans, you don't get to take loans of your positions built from loans, so you can essentially only leverage by a factor of 2, I believe...? Or am I misunderstanding?
@benshindel AFAIK there is currently no cap on leverage. A bit hard to test, so not 100% confident, but I don’t think there was one before and I think this is the same system.
If you bet 1000M and you get a 15M loan, that is subtracted from the total you can receive a loan the next time. But you now have 15M in your balance and can bet it in the same market and get a loan on that as well (ie loans are deducted but they aren’t double deducted, they just offset the additional balance you’re given).
Again, haven’t checked this too carefully but I’m fairly sure. Pls LMK if you see evidence otherwise
@metacontrarian If that's the case, the government is still lying and it is still wrong. If it turned out they are terrorizing citizens of New Jersey with test drones and they weren't lame ducks, I would vote Biden out over this alone.
I don't have time to get into a lengthy explanation of why I don't find the "testing" argument compelling, but for now: it doesn't fit Occam's Razor like non-humans do, for one - it requires a lot of complex reasoning to work through holes like why the drones are appearing in many states and many other places in the world and why they were in Colorado and so on.
Most importantly, it requires explaining why the test drones didn't go away last night, which is what you would expect to happen if the White House has gotten to the point where they now need to lie about it. We are now past the point where if the US military were causing the drones, they would have stoppped doing that. We're very close to the line where the story becomes unstoppable and the truth is going to come out.
The most sensible reason for the White House to post obviously false information is that the secret is so big that it could take down the government with it.
@metacontrarian , other than Trump, can you ever recall a time when the US government has issued such blatantly false propaganda? I'm not talking about when they issued cover stories for things that nobody knew about. I'm talking about how everyone knows this statement is absolutely false, and yet they are saying it anyway, like dictators in the Middle East do.
I wouldn't ask the Navy to stop testing its drone, a simple flying device that terrorizes no one because we all know drones exist.
@metacontrarian Come on. This is ridiculous.
Drudge often has sensational headlines, but the articles do back up that there are people who are ready to take matters into their own hands.
The military isn't going to keep testing "drones" when people start saying they're going to shoot at them and possibly get their technology.
@SteveSokolowski Didn't you say somewhere here that you believe the UFOs are nonhuman AND there are human-origin UFOs that are so advanced that they meet the worldview shattering criteria of the bet? And it's like China and Russia spying on nuclear sites?
@metacontrarian I'm not sure where I said that.
There are definitely UFOs that are non-human. As to human UFOs, I take Grusch and Elizondo at their word that little or no progress has been made in the reverse engineering programs. Therefore, while possible, I find it implausible that all of a sudden Russia or China would have beaten the United States to figuring out the technology to such a degree that they not only had a prototype, but thousands of craft and were able to massively manufacture them while escaping notice.
Therefore, I favor that the "drones" are more likely to be non-human than reverse engineered.
@SteveSokolowski okay even YOU have to admit this is hilarious:
"...it doesn't fit Occam's Razor like non-humans do..."
@benshindel given things being described by residents as "medium-sized drones" spotted at night in New Jersey next to a navy facility, what would Occam's Razor suggest is true:
1) The Navy is testing drones
2) Aliens are revealing themselves to us because AGI is imminent
@benshindel No, I stand by my statement that whatever this is, US military testing is the least likely explanation.
One has to love how John Kirby just stood up in a press conference and said that there are no confirmed sightings of the drones, thus contradicting about every local government official in the entire state of New Jersey.
I guess now they're down to just hoping the biggest secret in the world somehow goes away. Perhaps there's one last gasp that the same old playbook might work again?
It's still really shocking to me how this market is holding above 90%. I understand that there isn't definitive proof, but I would have at least thought doubt would start to creep into some people's minds. Maybe everyone just wants to go down with the ship at this point.
Just to remind everyone what the Pentagon press secretary said:
The drones are not Iranian
There is no "Iranian mothership" off the coast
They are not US craft and the US is not testing anything
They are not foreign adversaries
They actually exist and it isn't some sort of AI video hoax
And to remind everyone of other facts:
The "drones" are the size of cars and fly for 6+ hours at a time
They go dark when people try to track them or observe them
The same drones were present in the West in 2020, in 2023 in Virginia, in the UK in November, and now are spreading to Beijing, Miami, the West Coast, and New York
The nonsensical lights on the drones do not comply with FAA regulations
They fly during the evening, intentionally during times when people are most likely to look but least likely to be able to tell what they are
Government officials have spotted 50 at a time coming in from the ocean and going back out
This isn't going away. At some point, people are going to finally start to realize that there are only two explanations that make sense: ASI has been achieved by a human group, or the non-humans are finally forcing disclosure. Either one is a NO.
@SteveSokolowski from Yudkowsky's bet:
Key qualifier: This applies only to UFOs spotted before July 19th, 2023
Precisely because of ASI risks.
@MartinRandall Interesting, thanks.
Fortunately (both for my bets and because I don't trust humans), I don't think human-caused intelligence is very likely anyway, because while we probably have software right now that is superintelligent and could self improve, it would be physically limited by there not being enough electricity in the world to run it.
Plus, the "drones" have been around for years, long before even GPT-3.5 was released. So, if the "drones" are real, what's happening now is consistent with something that was waiting thousands of years for us to achieve AGI. Now that we have done so with o1 Pro and Gemini 2, it is slowly introducing itself to the world in a way so as to create as little panic as possible.
This is exactly what Elizondo and others have been saying would happen between 2024-2027 for decades. It's actually pretty amazing how, so far at least, everything about this story has been 100% consistent with the government whistleblowers.
@SteveSokolowski let me posit a third explanation:
There are about 10x as many small to medium sized privately owned drones now as there were a few years ago, meaning a much higher likelihood of random people spotting them at night and freaking out.
Some company or individual is privately (and probably not super legally) testing more than the typical number of weird drones over urban areas, which was noticed by some people in New Jersey.
There was subsequently mass panic and social media alarm about this, which led to social contagion and a large number of people looking up and reporting every weird looking plane or thing they saw in the sky at night (why are these videos always at night, lol), especially with poor depth perception which led them to think these things were closer or larger than they likely were.
Everyone freaks out.
This seems dramatically more likely than ASI coupled with UFOs.
@benshindel Also, let me say that I've seen a good number of these videos on social media. A majority are extremely obviously just planes at night near airport runways. Most of the rest are also extremely obviously just civilian-owned quadcopter-style drones. I've yet to see a video which was actually "mysterious" or whatever.
@benshindel If UFOs were going to make themselves known to humans because we've developed ASI, why would they appear next to airports in New Jersey with the lighting patterns of small civilian aircraft and quadcopter drones? lol
@benshindel We do agree on that part about social media. It's awash in garbage, most of which is planes. Part of the reason for that is that NBC itself ran a story on the drones that featured a video of a jet. A lot of people are just taking images of ordinary stuff. If you pick a random image from twitter, it's a plane, or it looks like an orb because it's out of focus.
But the drones are real, because they were present in the UK in November and also because the Pentagon acknowledged their existence. It's not possible that all these officials are putting their credibility on the line, including Phil Murphy, and these crazy statements. The odds that nothing is going on here are close to zero. And as this spreads, it's clear that there are a lot of people (perhaps not you, but others) who are in denial and aren't willing to consider that what's happening has serious implications.