I sure hope that the "drone incursions" over Langley, the UK, Washington, and the increasing number of places in the last week are non-human, and we should be hoping that they are.

If these are Russian or Chinese, the flight patterns and the implications of the US not being able to shoot down a single one are pretty dire.

I've never understood the idea of people wanting UFOs to be explained by "traditional" explanations. I don't know about anyone here, but I fear other humans much more than aliens, with the world on the brink of nuclear war.

@SteveSokolowski that's called wishful thinking. Just wanting something to be true (or not) does not change the reality of something being true (or not).

Instead you could apply some sort of reverse anthropological principle, and say the world where it's aliens has a lower chance of nuclear war and therefore mana is worth more in that world so buying no makes sense.

@Odoacre Hmmm, well if these drones are there to start a nuclear war, then I should be every bit of mana I have on NO.

I don't live in an area that is likely to be a target, and even I don't care whether I survive a nuclear war or not. That's not a world worth living in.

Ignoring nuclear war, from the reports of the objects, I would suggest that they are more likely NO than YES for this market, if one of them is recovered - even if they are man-made. I doubt that one will be recovered, though.

@SteveSokolowski By the way, I love how the @mods added the downvote button, and I think it should stay there. Please keep it.

In this market: /bitSanjay/will-bitcoin-reach-100k-in-2024

downvotes were critical in helping me determine whether my views aligned with the market's probability. I was able to buy tons of NO at 95%.

When people downvote you, it means that your views are not "priced in" already, and that's critical to earning mana.

@SteveSokolowski you make me wish I could like and dislike at the same time

Resolves Yes.

@nikki Why?

Welcome to the market where we think we’re trading on the most fundamental questions of life in the universe, but really we’re trading on whether we get to borrow fake money or not

The price suddenly close to 95% again => the loans will be back soon?

@Irigi hell yeah (maybe)

@Irigi https://manifold.markets/Peter1169/will-manifold-return-mana-loans-bef

@Irigi This really makes me doubt my usual automatic approach to Manifold market prices as an epistemological signal, a probability estimation from a well-calibrated tool. What a change in probability estimation we're experiencing, and how little it has to do with any actual epistemological update! What other market dynamics am I missing that influence market probabilities and make them less well calibrated?

@wadimiusz Correct. Market prices are not probabilities - it is more accurate to say that they can be used to estimate probabilities, but they are not unbiased estimators. This is for many reasons, one of which (discount rates) is very important here and I discuss in this prior comment

@jack Doesn't the platform's calibration (and each individual user's calibration) treat prices as probabilities? I.e. if stuff I where buy YES at 30% resolves YES in 20% of the time, then I'm overconfident, but if it resolves YES 40% of the time then i'm underconfident etc.

@wadimiusz That much is true, but that is only a first approximation and missing a ton of detail. Some notable examples:

• Discount rates: if the market price is 2% and I believe it's 1%, and it resolves in 2 years, then that's a very low ROI and it's not worthwhile for me to bet NO On the other hand, if I believe it's 3%, then that's a huge ROI and it is worthwhile for me to bet YES. When you look at this across the market, it tends to skew the price to be closer to 50% than the average prediction of the market participants.

• Risk: Market prices are adjusted for risk, they are not pure probabilities. See Risk-neutral probabilities for a description of this concept.

@jack Wait, but the standard pitch for prediction markets is something along the lines of "either the market is calibrated better than you are and already takes all information you have into account, or you can get rich (or in our case, rich in fake internet money) with no downside". That's how @ScottAlexander presented it, anyway! Does this mean I don't get to use this pitch at parties anymore? (I'm being cheeky, but it's true that I sometimes advertise prediction markets at parties, and that's how I usually go about it...)

@wadimiusz That is all basically true, but it doesn't mean the market will be exactly correct. If the market is mispriced too much, it will be profitable to correct it. But how much is too much varies a lot, and can easily be 5% or 10% or more.

Also, nothing I'm saying is specific to prediction markets. It applies to stock/bond/option/etc markets too. Prediction markets are really just another financial instrument, similar to option markets. They also are predictions on the values of various financial things, and those predictions are usually pretty accurate. If you interpret the price as literally a prediction, you won't be far off. But that isn't actually accurate and you could easily be 10% off, say.

@wadimiusz People here are biased to say this is just as accurate as real money markets but they are wrong. They are wrong no matter the topic of the market, including ones they consider themselves experts in (like AI), or ones they consider themselves the only non-biased people (like politics.)

The real money markets are better, every time. And the price here would be far closer to 100% if this were a real money market.

@DavidBolin no, there are real money UFO markets on polymarket and they show much higher discount rate effects than the mana market, because of the expectation that mana loans will come back - they all have much shorter timeframes but still price UFOs at several percent

@DavidBolin @jack is 100% correct here… the timeframe is just too long. Why would you invest your money in a bond returning <5%/year?

the bond rate applies to all real money markets.

Clearly there was not a 5% chance that John McAfee was still alive.

@SemioticRivalry I think Kalshi pays the going cash rate on invested positions now, FWIW.

@metacontrarian paying interest is very cool, but even that doesn't really fix the problem. Kalshi's market for the Presidency was hovering between 96.5c and 97.5c days after the election when it was clearly >99.9% likely, and that was only with a 2 month delay till resolution. Even right now it's only at 98.5c. I don't think there are many serious traders willing to lock up their money for 5 years even if they do get interest on it.

Resolves Yes

Deep state member identified