Sorry, risk aversion.
Also, the usual situation of "if I think the main proposition is unlikely, bad outcomes will be dominated by cases where I miss loopholes in the bet or otherwise lose the bet for reasons unrelated to the truth of the proposition".
Sure, I hear you there. Is there a way I could reword or clarify that would assuage that concern?
No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there's always going to be residual uncertainty that can't be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.
That's true in any scenario, though. For all of life really. The ratio of likelihood of loopholes costing you money versus losing the best costing you money doesn't matter, as long as their absolute values are both low. And shoring up ambiguous language in the bet is how you make the former low.
As someone who took the bet last time, I feel like I have a little standing to ask you: Why?
Like, a year ago there were various things in the news that raised both the saliency of UFOs and the probability of weird explanations for them (conditional on certain models of the world). There was even a former intelligence officer testifying to congress that they had heard from a guy that the USG had alien bodies stashed away.
Since then we have heard exactly bupkis, as well predicted by the "He probably exaggerated, eyewitness testimony lol" hypothesis, and less well predicted by the "Aliens are visiting our planet a lot" hypothesis. More importantly, UFOs/UAP aren't being talked about nearly as much. So I'm surprised you're offering a bet now both from an evidential and statistical perspective.
Sure, there's as always a steady trickle of videos showing something mysterious moving around, but with a similarly steady trickle of mundane explanations. Is there something in particular that's changed your mind recently?
I also partook in some betting last time, but I'd like to do more. I've done more research on this over the last year and built more conviction that this is the right play, that's really all that's changed. Would you be down to bet again?
Probably? But I'll feel bad if I don't try to talk you out of this first.
Yep, these are good points. Appreciate you engaging in such good faith. Would still like to bet if you're down.
Ok, I'm agreeing in principle to make the same bet as with RatsWrongAboutUAP.
("I commit to paying up if I agree there's a >0.4 probability something non-mundane happened in a UFO/UAP case, or if there's overwhelming consensus to that effect and my probability is >0.1.")
It's been a little while since this has come up, but I'm hoping there's still interest. I'm offering the best odds yet (50:1).
I'd like to offer another bet similar to Yudkowsky's bet with RatsWrongAboutUAP. Here would be the rules:
Summary: I'll send you ~$1000 now. You send me $50,000 if UFOs are shown to be non-prosaic in the next 5 years.