I'd consider this market properly calibrated if it were at 99.3%

@AristotelisKostelenos I'd bet at 99.93% also if I only had to pay out at resolution though

@AristotelisKostelenos Out of genuine curiosity, what’s the purpose of writing a comment like this? The whole point of this site is to find miscalibrated markets and gain mana by betting in the correct direction on them. If you’d made a bet and then posted your argument as to why, that would make more sense (to me). I’m not trying to rag on you, just curious. You’re certainly not the only one who does it and I don’t have a good mental model of why people make such comments instead of just making the bet

@Ansel counterpoint: he can do whatever the hell he wants, and mana is a pretty weak motivator. And you are kinda wrong even then, because you should bet for X and argue against X in comments to get better price.

@Ansel If you do not have enough mana to move the market, it makes sense to voice your opinion.

If this was real money and the risk of misresolution was small, then it would make sense to take a big loan and bet instead of pointing out the opportunity to others, but mana is not money. (But then there would not be this opportunity, if course)

@Irigi why not make the bet anyway even if you can’t move the market? Arguably that’s better, as there’s more upside

@Lavander maybe argue against before betting, or argue for after betting? Either way works

Of course he can do what he wants, I did ln’t mean to suggest otherwise. Just curious. So many people people use “curiosity” as a cover for reprobation it’s come to be seen that way but I promise you it’s not in this case

@Ansel I would take the bet and then comment. But it is also possibility I would see better bet elsewhere, spend all my free mana there, and then only commented here.

@Ansel Because this is going to lock the mana up until 2028-Jul-19 and that isn't worth it for an 8% guaranteed return

@Ansel Discussing the weaknesses of prediction markets in accurately predicting low probability events seems like a perfectly reasonable discussion for the manifold comment section.

@MaxMorehead agree, but was it really that though?

@Ansel Ok. So I did bet actually. Not very much, though and the reason is a serious issue with these sorts of markets. If (my opinion is that) a market is properly calibrated at 99.99% and the current rate is 99.5%, and the resolution is in 5 years, I might not be willing to lock up all my mana for such a small profit. The opportunity cost is just too big. Markets with such characteristics tend to not be very well calibrated in my experience. The comment was mostly just a joke about how I would trust Eliezer's judgement and his odds of aliens existing over those of this market, which are an order of magnitude higher, probably at least in part because of the aforementioned issue

@Ansel Lmao, apparently it was.

@AristotelisKostelenos Now there are loans, your mana will return in few months, not few years. There was some time when loans were switched off and you can see the huge gap in the market precisely because of what you write.

@AristotelisKostelenos gotcha, usually manifold highlights when someone has both bet and commented. Thanks for explaining!

I’ve seen the argument before about discount rates, but there are plenty of other examples of markets with long resolution times that don’t suffer from this nearly as much. Here’s one example:

https://manifold.markets/Ansel/is-asteroid-2024yr4-currently-on-a

@Ansel the difference between that and this is unanimous agreement by all market participants vs some dissent; when there's dissent on a long market it naturally settles further from 99/1 for KBCish reasons.

(e.g. it's economically rational for someone who believes the bet will settle YES with 99.99% probability to buy NO at 95% right now if given the opportunity, given the trend of the market to hover at 92-93 for the last few months)

@draaglom I don't think I'd describe what's happening here as a Keynesian beauty contest, exactly.

People who believe in NO directly push the price down. On a market where everyone agrees that the answer will be YES, someone will probably push the market up to 99%, because some people are not interest-rate-savvy, and the price will likely stay there, because no one will bet it back down. Here, there are people who have different ideas about probability of the outcome, and a market equilibrium arises out of credences, available capital, interest rate considerations etc.

I think what you call "KBCish reasons" is better described as market-making--profiting off of the bid/ask spread on an ongoing stream of transactions. (Is this a kind of beauty contest? eh, maybe? Whatever we call it, I think it's very secondary to the equilibrium produced by people betting on the actual outcome.)

@jcb this is all fine. The particular point I disagree with most is people saying some version of “the consensus implied probability of this market is essentially 100% YES because of discounting” and that’s clearly untrue because of the existence of other even longer dated markets priced closer to 100. I’m not saying the implied probably is 92% but it’s not 100% either. There’s an equilibrium level and it’s interesting.

@Ansel “the consensus implied probability of this market is essentially 100% YES because of discounting” I don't think people are saying that.

I think the true probability of the event here is above 99% and the fact that the market is below it stronger evidence that the consensus implied probability of the market is wrong than evidence that I should reconsider my UFO position. I think other people expressing this sentiment feel similarly.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna189646

"White House says most New Jersey drones were authorized by FAA"

@TimothyJohnson5c16 the only way this makes any sense is if the FAA is in some sort of split-brain scenario where it was simultaneously approving drones and shutting down airports for unauthorised drone activity

there's no contradiction:

"most drones were authorised, [and some unauthorised ones caused disruption at airports]"

@Ansel No, that's not the reason it doesn't make sense.

The reason it doesn't make sense is because there are now three inconsistent statements:

1. The FAA stated in December that it didn't know what the drones were.

2. Biden stated in December that the drones didn't exist.

3. Trump says the FAA approved the drones.

The one useful piece of information coming out of this is that for the first time, we have incontrovertible proof that the government is lying. There is no reasonable person who can conclude that the FAA shouldn't have known that it had approved the drones before saying they didn't know what they were.

That said, I still don't understand exactly what is going on here. On the one hand, there's no doubt that UFOs exist, that the highest level of government officials - the Secretary of State, for one - now acknowledge on camera that non-human intelligence is present, and that other parts of the government are blatantly covering it up. And there has yet to be an instance in the past two years where any government official has reversed his stance or any quality evidence from the government has been proven AI-generated or falsified. The strength of the trend towards this market being NO is strong and growing stronger.

On the other hand, the first-hand whistleblower who most recently came forward stated that food additives were making it difficult for humans to communicate with the non-human intelligence. And yet, the guy was one of the best of the best, selected to perform military operations nobody else would do, undergoing the sort of tests that many people with TS/SCI clearances don't pass, and having four other people in the same group vouching for his claims.

It's extraordinarily confusing - at some point, I want to gather all of the evidence into a long prompt and put o3-mini to work analyzing it.

@SteveSokolowski I think it's still possible that the explanation is incompetence. The FAA could have been in some kind of "split brain" state - in a large bureaucracy, that's not unusual.

And if there were people who initially authorized the drones, it wouldn't surprise me if they were reluctant to speak out and take the blame for it publicly.

A competent organization would do a full postmortem of that kind of situation. But perhaps our government isn't capable of that.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 But that still doesn't explain the situation, because they haven't addressed that the drones have been appearing over military bases in places where the FAA doesn't have jurisdiction - particularly in the UK.

It's extraordinarily confusing

You're so close!

As a rule of thumb, if a fact pattern is really very confusing, it might be a sign that you've got the wrong epistemic framework to examine the problem.

(The UFO-as-aliens skeptic position has no such challenge: if there's no "there there" you actively expect contradictory or non-cohesive statements from alleged witnesses or official sources, as there's no [single] underlying phenomenon to anchor everything to consistency)

@draaglom No, that doesn't make sense either, because there actually are UFOs that exhibit extraordinary flight characteristics. There's very strong evidence of that.

From that, one then has to question where the UFOs are coming from, and there are only four possibilities - the government, some other government, non-humans, or a splinter group of advanced humans. The first two are very unlikely given the current evidence.

Additionally, your conclusion - that it's all false - requires that Barack Obama is lying, and I do not find it reasonable to believe that he is lying.

I tried analyzing the data with GPT-4o a while ago and, when only Grusch's allegations were known, it placed the odds of a NO resolution at 75%. I will have to put all this into o1 pro and see what it estimates the odds now.