My understanding is that many betting markets have problems getting a percentage lower once it is near the 1% range. Vitalik Buterin wrote about (successfully) betting on Trump not becoming president after the 2020 election https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/02/18/election.html I've seen markets that just didn't support making any profit betting a probability further down than that.
I began reading that, and was struck by one point: he made a couple of wild guesses, after the fact, at what the actual odds of Biden's win had been.
Shouldn't we be able to /calculate/ after the fact the most-likely value for what the actual odds had been? We know what fraction of the vote each candidate got, and we have enough data from past elections to model the election with a distribution and a variance. We should then be able to compute the exact prior odds for which the posterior results were most likely. But I've never seen anyone do this for any election.
Betting odds are often calculated to be not too big so a big payout is avoided, but big enough to attract some cash. That is, they are probably taking advantage of a relatively small number of alien enthusiast without risking too much given they aren't putting any significant effort into assessing the tiny real odds, and remember that tiny odds take a lot of accessing to be accurate. In the absence of a larger and more competitive betting market, I think those odds are likely way off, not just a bit, but orders of magnitude off.
So does everyone else for illiquid things they consider to be valuable, but most enough don't. Some has to either pay for liquidity, or volume + spreads in such markets must be enough to attract it organically.
The Condon Report, published in 1968, concluded that the study of UFOs had neither contributed to scientific knowledge nor posed a threat to security. The appropriate amount of public money allocated to studying such phenomena should be zero. Any contribution greater than zero is either misguided or corrupt.
A lot of people have reported very credible spiritual experiences. Fortunately, there are already a lot of resources being spent to study the spiritual dimension … at church / synagogue, which is probably the right place. You could argue (like William James) that a more systematic approach is needed - a “science of religion”. I have concluded recently that a systematic approach would need to follow the critical historical method, rather than the scientific method, given that God is best thought of as a thinking being acting in context of time. This is what historians study, while the scientific method is designed to study repeatable patterns in nature.
What is a "spiritual dimension"? Is it something outside of the observable universe and totally unable to interact with it, or some part of the universe that we haven't discovered yet and which contains intelligent entities derived in part from the intelligence of dead humans?
I'm happy to bet my $10K against your $50 that we won't see definitive evidence that "at least one apparently incredibly-abled UFO/UAP sighting in the last century was really incredible & not from any then-current human Earth nation or power" in the next three years. My paypal is nuno.nunez@protonmail.com. Gentleman's agreement bet over complex resolution mechanism, no escrow, your successors can get the money if you die. Bet is open for the next two weeks.
The no escrow provision is particularly interesting here because there are many relatively liquid individuals that might be willing to give you odds corresponding to 0.5% (so lower than your >1%), but most prediction markets do require participants to lock in their cash, rather than having something more complex like your combinatorial markets proposal.
Also, in order for the bet to make sense, I have to offer pretty high amounts to get anything meaningful on your side and avoid transaction costs, etc. But I can't really increase that another 10-20x without not being sure if I'd be able to pay you in full if I do lose.
"won't see". If there is such evidence, we probably already saw it. So this is about the process by which we come to see it as such evidence. Seems to me that process would take FAR more than three years, if it ever happens.
Let’s talk about odds and Occam’s Razor: the study and discussion of UFOs has long been polluted by the irrational notion that it’s somehow more likely that they come from some other as yet unidentified world, and are piloted by some as yet unknown non-human entities, than the infinitely more reasonable proposition that they are the product of secret mundane technology. We aren’t allowed to think humans could keep a secret like that, but are encouraged to believe in fairies instead. The alien hypothesis is nothing more than propaganda and it has flooded the discussion since the 1940s. People should use their brains.
Are you assuming that amount of spending would be linear in the chance of aliens?
That's not, in general, sound decision-making. When preparing for a rare event, there would typically be some threshold probability, below which it's not worth spending anything. Say there are bigfoot creatures stomping around your area and there's a chance this year that they'll break into your home and commit tax fraud on your behalf, which will end up costing you $100,000 in legal fees. Suppose that bigfoots are so tough that to actually *stop* them from doing this requires a $10,000 investment in electronic security systems, Samurai swords, squirt guns, anti-tank missiles, and so on.
Now, rationally based on the expected value, if the chance of the bigfoot committing tax fraud is above 10%, then you should spend $10,000 on preparations to stop it. And if it's below 10% you should spend $0, because any amount below $10,000 is insufficient to stop the bigfoot. The amount you should spend is not linear in the chance of the bigfoot.
Same with aliens: we would expect some amount of money is *sufficient* to handle the situation, given that there are aliens, and that money below that threshold of sufficiency is basically wasted.
>we would expect some amount of money is *sufficient* to handle the situation
Why would we, give that they apparently possess tech far more advanced than ours? In that case, it looks like we're at their mercy regardless of spending.
Does anyone NOT wish for more liquid markets, as long as they're not paying for (in risk) the liquidity themselves?
Also, spending at this level is not homogeneous, and can't really be reasoned about very well without details. It matters so WHOSE money is being spent on WHAT.
Personally, I'm closer to 10^-5 than your 10^-2, but even if I thought it was more likely, I'm not sure what spending would actually help that isn't probably already secretly being done as part of other military and police surveillance spending.
There is certainly a lot of research that fits into categories that I suspect would have an inherently low probability of producing a positive outcome even if there is a high potential benefit. For example, I think AI fits into this category unless we already have regulations in place relative to its applications. Personally, I believe the only thing that AI will be used for in the next 30 years or so will be to reduce labor costs, to the detriment of millions of workers and to the benefit of only a few "entrepreneurs".
Finding an alien intelligence would be much like creating superhumanly intelligent AI: an event with as much potential hazard as benefit. It isn't clear that either has positive expected value.
Apply the same math to the asteroid detection/deflection effort? I'm more concerned with big space rocks than little alien probes. Will the latter help us out with the former?
My understanding is that many betting markets have problems getting a percentage lower once it is near the 1% range. Vitalik Buterin wrote about (successfully) betting on Trump not becoming president after the 2020 election https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/02/18/election.html I've seen markets that just didn't support making any profit betting a probability further down than that.
I began reading that, and was struck by one point: he made a couple of wild guesses, after the fact, at what the actual odds of Biden's win had been.
Shouldn't we be able to /calculate/ after the fact the most-likely value for what the actual odds had been? We know what fraction of the vote each candidate got, and we have enough data from past elections to model the election with a distribution and a variance. We should then be able to compute the exact prior odds for which the posterior results were most likely. But I've never seen anyone do this for any election.
Betting odds are often calculated to be not too big so a big payout is avoided, but big enough to attract some cash. That is, they are probably taking advantage of a relatively small number of alien enthusiast without risking too much given they aren't putting any significant effort into assessing the tiny real odds, and remember that tiny odds take a lot of accessing to be accurate. In the absence of a larger and more competitive betting market, I think those odds are likely way off, not just a bit, but orders of magnitude off.
That's why I want a more liquid market.
So does everyone else for illiquid things they consider to be valuable, but most enough don't. Some has to either pay for liquidity, or volume + spreads in such markets must be enough to attract it organically.
There are also legal barriers to such trades.
The Condon Report, published in 1968, concluded that the study of UFOs had neither contributed to scientific knowledge nor posed a threat to security. The appropriate amount of public money allocated to studying such phenomena should be zero. Any contribution greater than zero is either misguided or corrupt.
What do you think are the chances of there being a spiritual dimension?
Lower
What are the chances of there being an effective equivalent of a spiritual dimension, let's use the magic word quantum
A lot of people have reported very credible spiritual experiences. Fortunately, there are already a lot of resources being spent to study the spiritual dimension … at church / synagogue, which is probably the right place. You could argue (like William James) that a more systematic approach is needed - a “science of religion”. I have concluded recently that a systematic approach would need to follow the critical historical method, rather than the scientific method, given that God is best thought of as a thinking being acting in context of time. This is what historians study, while the scientific method is designed to study repeatable patterns in nature.
What is a "spiritual dimension"? Is it something outside of the observable universe and totally unable to interact with it, or some part of the universe that we haven't discovered yet and which contains intelligent entities derived in part from the intelligence of dead humans?
The latter
I'm happy to bet my $10K against your $50 that we won't see definitive evidence that "at least one apparently incredibly-abled UFO/UAP sighting in the last century was really incredible & not from any then-current human Earth nation or power" in the next three years. My paypal is nuno.nunez@protonmail.com. Gentleman's agreement bet over complex resolution mechanism, no escrow, your successors can get the money if you die. Bet is open for the next two weeks.
The no escrow provision is particularly interesting here because there are many relatively liquid individuals that might be willing to give you odds corresponding to 0.5% (so lower than your >1%), but most prediction markets do require participants to lock in their cash, rather than having something more complex like your combinatorial markets proposal.
Also, in order for the bet to make sense, I have to offer pretty high amounts to get anything meaningful on your side and avoid transaction costs, etc. But I can't really increase that another 10-20x without not being sure if I'd be able to pay you in full if I do lose.
"won't see". If there is such evidence, we probably already saw it. So this is about the process by which we come to see it as such evidence. Seems to me that process would take FAR more than three years, if it ever happens.
Let’s talk about odds and Occam’s Razor: the study and discussion of UFOs has long been polluted by the irrational notion that it’s somehow more likely that they come from some other as yet unidentified world, and are piloted by some as yet unknown non-human entities, than the infinitely more reasonable proposition that they are the product of secret mundane technology. We aren’t allowed to think humans could keep a secret like that, but are encouraged to believe in fairies instead. The alien hypothesis is nothing more than propaganda and it has flooded the discussion since the 1940s. People should use their brains.
Are you assuming that amount of spending would be linear in the chance of aliens?
That's not, in general, sound decision-making. When preparing for a rare event, there would typically be some threshold probability, below which it's not worth spending anything. Say there are bigfoot creatures stomping around your area and there's a chance this year that they'll break into your home and commit tax fraud on your behalf, which will end up costing you $100,000 in legal fees. Suppose that bigfoots are so tough that to actually *stop* them from doing this requires a $10,000 investment in electronic security systems, Samurai swords, squirt guns, anti-tank missiles, and so on.
Now, rationally based on the expected value, if the chance of the bigfoot committing tax fraud is above 10%, then you should spend $10,000 on preparations to stop it. And if it's below 10% you should spend $0, because any amount below $10,000 is insufficient to stop the bigfoot. The amount you should spend is not linear in the chance of the bigfoot.
Same with aliens: we would expect some amount of money is *sufficient* to handle the situation, given that there are aliens, and that money below that threshold of sufficiency is basically wasted.
>we would expect some amount of money is *sufficient* to handle the situation
Why would we, give that they apparently possess tech far more advanced than ours? In that case, it looks like we're at their mercy regardless of spending.
In that case the appropriate amount to spend would be $0 regardless of risk.
Certainly if this was the only consideration, but i think that proponents are usually driven by e.g. curiosity.
Does anyone NOT wish for more liquid markets, as long as they're not paying for (in risk) the liquidity themselves?
Also, spending at this level is not homogeneous, and can't really be reasoned about very well without details. It matters so WHOSE money is being spent on WHAT.
Personally, I'm closer to 10^-5 than your 10^-2, but even if I thought it was more likely, I'm not sure what spending would actually help that isn't probably already secretly being done as part of other military and police surveillance spending.
>Does anyone NOT wish for more liquid markets, as long as they're not paying for (in risk) the liquidity themselves?
Commies, also moralists that equate everything to gambling.
Even if we find aliens, what is the likelihood humanity will do something positive with that knowledge?
Ask that same question about all our other research.
There is certainly a lot of research that fits into categories that I suspect would have an inherently low probability of producing a positive outcome even if there is a high potential benefit. For example, I think AI fits into this category unless we already have regulations in place relative to its applications. Personally, I believe the only thing that AI will be used for in the next 30 years or so will be to reduce labor costs, to the detriment of millions of workers and to the benefit of only a few "entrepreneurs".
Finding an alien intelligence would be much like creating superhumanly intelligent AI: an event with as much potential hazard as benefit. It isn't clear that either has positive expected value.
Creating vs finding seem like very different events.
All else being equal, finding should be even more risky.
Apply the same math to the asteroid detection/deflection effort? I'm more concerned with big space rocks than little alien probes. Will the latter help us out with the former?