Original Lesswrong thread here.
Original tweet here:
Unlinked market with shorter timeframes here: /Joshua/when-will-we-know-that-any-past-ufo
1,000
3.00https://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
@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:
The FAA stated in December that it didn't know what the drones were.
Biden stated in December that the drones didn't exist.
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.
The strongest evidence in my opinion that UFOs do indeed have a worldview shattering origin is the fact that despite this prediction being one of the highest volume speculations on Manifold, this question has not been sweepified.
The spirit behind prediction markets that is commonly used to bring new users into the ecosystem is that, if you have actually done your research and have a high confidence in something that opposes the market's confidence, then you can 'put your money where your mouth is' and convert that research diligence into economic prosperity.
When it comes to this issue, there is no place for a law abiding citizen of the US to engage in this mechanism.
That seems intentional. It seems a reasonable abduction to believe that the various forces trying to keep this information classified are actively preventing such a mechanism from existing (in a legal and open way) because the existence of such a mechanism would accelerate awareness and disclosure, whereas restricting wagers to play money allows for data to be collected about the dissemination of information without the exposure to financial liability.
If we examine the current wagers on Manifold (for play money that cannot buy groceries) we see that the likelihood that past sightings (prior to 2024) will be confirmed by the government to be legitimate documentations of non-human intelligence steadily increases as the deadline for resolution increases. Since the truth of whether past sightings are genuine or not should remain constant over time, it appears these are more appropriately wagers about when the government will actually admit it.
It seems that these concerns could be easily refuted by sweepifying this prediction. If that happens, I will update my priors and apologize for any claims that may have been interpreted as conspiritorial. If anyone at Manifold would like to explain why this question has not been sweepified (despite the overwhelming demand), I'd love to understand the factors I may be overlooking.
Thanks
@Krantz I think there's a much simpler issue at play here.
Post anything about this topic anywhere on the Internet, and it immediately gets downvoted, disliked, or whatever the corresponding concept is. The downvotes are not "organic" because lengthy, well-considered posts get downvoted immediately, as if software is doing it, before a human could possibly have read the post. Additionally, the posts always start up with dislikes and then they later get likes.
Whatever the government is trying to hide, it's a very cheap process for the people who stand to benefit from the secrecy to sign up for accounts at sites where accounts are free, and to disparage and downvote people who discuss the topic.
Such people also easily post poorly supported nonsense, like the "prison planet" theory, that overshadows true claims. People who don't know anything about UFOs go to sites and take everything as if it has the same level of evidence backing it. We see this in places like /r/ufos on reddit, which is dominated by a cesspool of now-potentially AI-generated videos and photographs, and comments from someone who believes that modern food additives have suppressed psychic abilities, instead of stronger evidence like first hand testimony from high-ranking officials and government documents. These same people can sign up for Manifold accounts and care nothing about their balances.
As of this year, I don't know of any other topic in history that has a worse ratio of evidence in favor compared to scientific study. If there were this much evidence for a cancer treatment, there would be 10 drug companies running parallel and duplicative trials.
@SteveSokolowski I completely agree. I've recieved pretty much nothing but responses (and I'm sure reportings) from porn bots on X ever since I've began rigorously claiming to have an alignment solution that would pivot frontier AI capabilities advancement from needing compute (energy, gpus and ultimately oil) to instead requiring human input (that we could financially reward) in order to scale.
Somebody doesn't want Eliezer to actually pay attention to what I'm trying to show him.
I think actually having a solution to aligning a decentralized computer would free up a lot of smart people's attention to pay towards other issues.
@Krantz I think you're extrapolating too much from that.
I also get lots of responses from these fake women profiles, but haven't been posting about any particular topic on X. That's just part of the way X works, and those replies usually get hidden so it's not a big deal.
@Krantz My guess would just be because it’s a derivative market on one specific user’s opinion about the nature of a phenomenon, without specifying a concrete resolution criteria that can be objectively adjudicated by a third-party.
Like, if the answer was, “Some UAP are time travelers”, but Eliezer claims not to find this “worldview-shattering” or something, it seems controversial to resolve via moderator? I’m sure there are things that are even more mundane, but that some would consider worldview-shattering, that could evoke a similar degree of controversy.
@bagelfan Thanks for bringing this to our attention! Next time just put the link in bugs, it's easier for us to keep track of that way. Cheers
I think there's more than enough evidence out there, but I'm more convinced than ever, with the advent of AI images, that nothing will break through the noise. See Trump being asked about the drones, his not answering the question, and nobody protesting about it despite them still buzzing houses in New Jersey every single night.
I think that "The Age of Disclosure" will be the last big test on this topic. We are far past the point of gathering evidence at this point.
If the film performs well, it will move the needle. If not, then I will likely exit my position in this market, because I just don't think anything is going to move public opinion to the point where this topic will be investigated.
We probably only have a few months left in the world where we can trust anything we see or hear unless we experience it first person, so I will exiting any market depending on the truth of something that people cannot experience for themselves.
@SteveSokolowski I largely agree, but don't discount the possibility that what you describe may still occur - large numbers of people experiencing something in person that moves the needle. The steady escalation of in-person reports in the past few months suggest that may be a realistic possibility
Here's a new market to see if the new revelations this month will move Manifold's position on this topic: