https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/12/age-of-disclosure-ufo-documentary

So it looks like the film got rave reviews. Every review (except one) basically said that there is almost no question that the stuff is true.

That said, a lot of the people in the film also said they were trying to "protect classified information" and "national security."

The US government has shown itself to be capable now of nothing but enormous wealth destruction and consigning millions into poverty - both here and around the world. In terms of overall scale, the United States right now might be the most incompetent organization in world history. It will continue to destroy people's lives with tariffs and deportations until eventually unemployment rises so high and the stock market falls so low that $5 trillion in debt is required in a new round of bailouts. It's not even like a functioning dictatorship that tries to amass wealth - Elon Musk lost 6.66% of his entire net worth just today alone.

Thus, while I have zero doubt now that non-human intelligence exists, I also have zero confidence in the United States government to organize an investigation into this topic (or any other), and I also do not believe that @Joshua will resolve to NO unless there is some official policy change by the United States.

I'm going to watch for a week or two to see if this film gets picked up by a major motion picture studio for imminent release. If not, then I'm going to unload my NO position in this market.

@SteveSokolowski You may be over-updating on the absence of negatively valanced critical reviews. I checked to see if I could watch the film and it isn't available online, although I did find a decent critical review already: https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/the-age-of-disclosure-review-sxsw-alien-documentary-1235100024/

Sadly it's not really trying to engage with the substance of the evidence or do a thorough analysis, but at any rate, there's an example of a reasonable sounding non-convinced viewer. It wasn't hard to find, and I assume if the film ends up widely available/talked about, you'd see a much more varied/critical reception.

@DavidHiggs From what I have read about the film, it focuses entirely on the government's knowledge of non-human intelligence and the director intentionally cut or didn't film parts about other aspects of the phenomenon, like the implausibility of the consistency of abduction stories. I can understand his rationale for that, because while I do think that most people tell the truth about their experiences, accidentally including even one person who is lying would destroy the film even if 99% turns out to be correct.

Whatever the case, your argument doesn't change my attitude here towards this market. I don't think the United States government will remain a functioning organization capable of performing research or scientific investigations for much longer, if it even is at this point.

I believe that even if pieces of a craft appear somehow, some scientist will perform an analysis of the materials, the analysis will show that the materials are unknown (because what else could it show), and say there is "no evidence" of extraterrestrial origin. Images of a government facility in the AI era are no longer proof of anything. And the government will never give tours to the general public of a facility where these things are stored.

Most importantly, with the tariffs and firings/rehirings, the government has lost its credibility and nobody, including me, believes anything official the government puts out including stating that NHI exists. I wouldn't even believe a statement saying that tariffs are off the table.

So basically, there isn't a way that @Joshua will ever believe that this can be true, because the government can't be trusted. It's not about the truth. It's time to get out at breakeven (95%) and call it a day.

@SteveSokolowski As a bit of an aside: you keep mentioning @Joshua as if this question depends on his judgement, but the question resolves based on the publicly reported outcome of the bet between Eliezer Yudkowsky and RatsWrongAboutUAP.

https://people.com/director-groundbreaking-ufo-doc-says-what-he-learned-left-him-rattled-11692704

Tomorrow is the day of truth for this topic.

The issue anymore isn't what's true, it's whether people are going to listen. If this movie doesn't gain traction, then I think this market is unlikely to resolve YES based on human findings. Yes, we could wait for Speilberg's movie, but that one is a "fiction based on reality" and isn't a documentary.

Should The Age of Disclosure fail to move the needle, then I think that we probably only get to NO when a superintelligence infers it with using a different path of reasoning that convinces more people. I do think we get superintelligence before the market resolves, but again, humans would have to actually believe the output from the prompt.

@SteveSokolowski

https://manifold.markets/Joshua/will-eliezer-yudkowsky-win-his-1500#vo46jua2swm

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.

@jcb "market-making--profiting off of the bid/ask spread on an ongoing stream of transactions" I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you explain what you think is happening that is keeping the implied probability lower than it should be?

@AristotelisKostelenos What I think is happening: fundamentally, the market represents some aggregation of participants' betting decisions, which are influenced by but not the same as participant's beliefs about the true probability. As your described above yourself, opportunity cost is another major influence on betting decisions, which tends to discourage betting towards the extremes of 0% or 100%, where the return on investment is low.

So: people make bets. Some equilibrium arises. That's what I think is happening that is keeping the implied probability lower than very many people's (indeed a substantial majority) estimate of the probability. (I'm intentionally sidestepping your actual question about what the probability "should be" because that seems like a difficult and somewhat philosophical question.)