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Did you ever end up making a Part 2?
I've long ascribed to (and felt) that people are existentially isolated
There's a pair of conjoined craniopagus twins in Canada, the Hogan twins, who are conjoined at the head and have fused brains connected by a thalamic bridge. They're separate individuals who still receive some sensory awareness of what the other is feeling, and they can even communicate in their thoughts. When one was crying as a child, you could put a pacifier in the other's mouth and they would both calm down. When you cover one's eyes and show an image to the other, the blindfolded one can see it.
To the best of my knowledge, neither one of them has ever once said that anything was particularly different about how the other sensed something. Tatiana's red is still Krista's red, and so on.
The claim of existential isolation is a bit like claims from centuries ago about how it fundamentally couldn't be known whether a person blind from birth, if given the gift of sight, would be able to look at things they've only touched up until then and identify them. If you think of a clever enough situation, or if a sufficiently serendipitous medical oddity arises, seemingly intractable problems of that sort can be defeated rather anticlimactically.
Not that I have any current betting plans (we already talked previously), but what odds would you allow for someone willing to put their money in escrow? Just asking out of curiosity.
That’s understandable. Supposing I went with some form of verification, what odds would you be feeling right now?
Hey, this might be a little bit "last minute" considering the stuff tomorrow, but are you willing to do transfers with regular money instead of crypto?
Regarding a drug-based solution, I recommend Silexan. Scott Alexander wrote about this not that long ago on ACX, and anecdotally, it's been shockingly effective for anxiety issues that arose for me a year ago.
Regarding an entirely psychological, but still clinical solution? Consider starting online therapy with a psychologist/psychiatrist. This has helped me as well- not to the same extent as the Silexan, I think, but it still helped just because it was a dedicated hour per week of thinking about it and voicing those thoughts to someone. Almost every breakthrough came from me just rationally talking it out, but that was 10 times easier in therapy than on my own because I had nothing else to get distracted by or be doing during that period. That, and talking about one's problems to another party has been proven to improve problem-solving effectiveness as compared to thinking them through internally, even if the other party is doing nothing but listening (or even if they're a literal inanimate object like a rubber ducky).
Finally, for my own anecdotal "folk" solution that I completely made up, but which helped me at one point and might be helpful to you as well: try to imagine two selves inside of you in a dialogue, one of them completely calm and rational, and the other embodying whatever your emotions and impulsive thoughts are (so during a panic attack, this would mean picturing one of you who's having the panic attack and another who's calmly thinking about what to do next to resolve the situation). Then, in the dialogue, picture the rational one consoling the emotional one (which is a perfectly rational thing to do for someone who's stressed or anxious).
That last one, I used for a week or two with moderate effectiveness, and then I transitioned from that to standard self-compassion. I'd heard about self-compassion before, but I didn't really get how to actually do it until I'd gotten some practice with that toy model of the rational and emotional selves.
Do you believe that the world would be better if everyone shared this moral system, or is this more of a nihilistic "This is the best way for a individual agent to act for their own true gain, but I certainly wouldn't want every agent to act this way" sort of deal?
I ask because it really does seem devoid of any traditional "goodness", except for the part that encourages wisdomists to protect all wisdom, including the wisdom of others. It espouses wisdom and creativity as virtues, sure- but what part of wisdom and creativity, as defined in the paper, can't go into the act of publicly torturing you to death in an agonizing fashion? Quick thinking, medical knowledge, and cruel creativity would all be quite helpful there, and nothing in wisdomism seems to prohibit it provided that it can be reasonably called safe in context and lead to a net increase in wisdom among members of the public who are watching the spectacle and collectively gaining more wisdom from it than you're losing from the trauma. New information would be learned; the fact that the information has no utility is irrelevant to the wisdomist, since the paper explicitly contrasts itself with utilitarianism by saying that it values wisdom instead of utility.
Does it matter if it's the same wisdom, repeated over and over? Are two wise minds with the exact same wisdom better than one? Is the same wisdom spread between multiple minds less worthy than the same wisdom in one mind? Who decides what counts as wisdom and what counts as mental "noise" or garbage? Is consciousness required for wisdom to count? How about qualia? Does it have to be accessible to others?
Hopefully you see where I'm coming from now, though I would actually like to hear your answers to those questions. I see nothing of actual utility here, and nothing particularly wise either. It encounters the usual pitfalls of a system with arbitrary values, with the added issue of a larger amount of ambiguity than the average moral system.
Could go a little more into what makes this moral system attractive to you, specifically?
If the purpose of this betting is to reward those who bet on the truth, though, then allowing a spike in credulity to count for it works against that purpose, and turns it into more of a combined bet of “Odds that the true evidence available to the public and LW suggests >50% likelihood or that substantial false evidence comes out for a very short period within the longer time period”.
In his comment reply to me, OP mentioned he would be fine with a window of a month for things to settle and considered it a reasonable concern, which suggests that he is (rightly) focused more on betting about actual UFO likelihood, rather than the hybrid likelihood that includes hypothetical instances of massive short-term misinformation.
While you are correct that the probability of that misinformation should theoretically be factored in on the better’s end, that’s not what the OP is really wanting to bet on in the first place; as such, I don’t think it was a mistake to point it out.
That sounds reasonable enough.
Respectfully, that sounds like the "catch" here, though I doubt you have any actual ill intentions. If it applies at any point within the period, then it could apply for something as simple as a brief miscommunication from the White House that gets resolved within 24 hours. Some overworked and underpaid headline-writer makes a critical typo, aliens suddenly seem confirmed to LWers, and then... it's game?
I would strongly recommend that you amend that edge case interpretation to only consider the state of things at the end of the period. While there could still technically be a spike of credulity around that time, it would be quite unlikely, whereas if UFOs have actually properly been established at some point in that time period, they will remain so throughout.
EDIT: You can safely disregard the second paragraph of this, I misread the post initially. Still, the first applies.
In the event that you decide you're being stiffed, how will you quantify community sentiment on the issue to try and prove that the majority of the community believes in one of your categories of anomalous claims? Will you conduct a poll of some kind? Will you just say that you beg to differ?
Also, in the event that you're actually someone who has assessed that they don't want to be on LessWrong greater than 5 years from now anyway in the timeline where no substantial UFO/UAP evidence has surfaced by then, what would compel you to pay up instead of ghosting?