Please read this update before participating in this market.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/08/10/hananias-name-gone-ut-austin-center-after-expose

Hanania's name is gone from a UT Austin center after exposé

A HuffPost exposé connected a visiting scholar at UT Austin to posts made under a pseudonym. It’s not the center’s first brush with controversy. Richard Hanania, a Ph.D. and J.D. who’s been associated with the University of Texas at Austin, previously used a pseudonym to make racist statements online, according to a Huffington Post investigation that used a data breach to connect him to a former alias. Hanania has written in response to that report, criticizing it but also saying, “My posts and blog comments in my early twenties encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling and overall bad faith.”

Note...in this case filed in the State of Texas... Plaintiff: ..., Predict It, Inc., ..., Richard Hanania, ..., Josiah Neeley, ... https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txwdce/1:2022cv00909/1188469 ... was published at this blog post here: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-im-suing-the-federal-government - note that Josiah Neeley is a co-plaintiff along with Richard Hanania. Note that Josiah Neeley profited S$1,170 on this clearly wrongly resolved bet, with still no justification written for why it was resolved the way it was resolved. Sketchy AF.

@PatrickDelaney My proposal for a new podcast about prediction markets called Crystal Ballin' was funded and the first episode is gonna be about this scandal. Consider this a formal invitation to be a guest on that episode. And let's get Hanania on to make the case for Salem! I am so serious.

@PatrickDelaney https://manifund.org/projects/crystal-ballin-podcast?tab=bids

@BTE sure, why not?

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2022-08-11..latest&facet=none&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~CHN

So, it would have been N/A or YES, in either way. Free YES bet under disguise of "Salem market mirror". You managed to fail to "mirror a market". It is like one of the easiest resolution criteria, and yet.. I hope admins take action and overwrite this mess to NO where it belongs.

I would advise to report this market

@DavidChee @Austin @JamesGrugett @ian I would love to hear your thoughts on this situation and see some action

@Catnee @Austin @JamesGrugett @ian @SG @PatrickDelaney @jack I absolutely 100 percent agree that this market resolution should be revised by Manifold but I DO NOT agree that it should be resolved NO because, as Patrick and I have established without credible refutation, Salem is the dishonorable actor in this situation. I would enjoy arguing this out in front of the entire Manifold team and a panel of fellow "trustworthy-ish" users.

Perhaps this is the perfect scenario to explore a peer mediation style remedy for disagreements about high stakes resolutions. IMO it is inexcusable for Salem to resolve without clearly articulating their reasoning for ignoring their own criteria is akin to academic dishonesty because of their affiliation with a university and the fact that it could possibly impact who wins the fellowship at stake.

I found it very interesting that @1941159478 bet honorably on the Salem market at the risk of losing what was probably a slam dunk tournament victory and made all of the same arguments Patrick and I and others made in favor of YES in that forum. Yet here they choose to bet aggressively against that principled position. This was an obviously dishonest attempt to take advantage of Salem's predictable dishonesty. As you can see this type of behavior can rapidly compound if left unchecked.

I like Johnny and hope he still wins the fellowship but I think it is self-evident that it is a problem that this type of incentive is being created with lots of mana on the line, leading a high profile Manifold partner to attempt to use the cover of opportunists to avoid explaining their sketchy, biased abuse of the Manifold honor-based resolution structure basically to make a political statement.

Do you think it is a appropriate for an academic center like Salem, who is effectively using this platform as a recruiting tool, to be so flippantly disrespectful of the Manifold community when the stakes are so high?

@Catnee Is it trustworthy to argue that you bet the way you did because you knew the market maker had no intention of behaving honorably?? Further, you think the only honorable action taken in this situation, by @AndyMartin, should be undone to reward you for actively providing Salem cover for their behavior?? I am anxious to hear what the Manifold team thinks about all of this @Austin @SG @JamesGrugett.

@BTE what are you talking about, "bet to cover someone" what does this nonsense even mean. I try to "predict the outcome we'll get", not "imagine the future I want"

@Catnee By disingenuously I mean betting the Salem market down to 5% the bettors gave Salem the ability to resolve with no explanation. I was not talking about this market but the mirror. Pure exploitation all around. Being complicit with a dishonorable resolution is also dishonorable, regardless of how much you profit, actually, especially if you profit from it! So to come here to a mirror market and insist the fact that it was not blindly willing to resolve dishonorably just because Salem did means you should have your profits returned by the Manifold team is shameless.

@BTE you asking me to become delusional and start to bet against my interests? I get it, Salem's criteria were bad and somebody was late by a week trying to patch the data on a specified source site. It happens, I saw worse.

But that is the point of deadlines. It's not a war crime jeez

@Catnee I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't complained and called on Manifold to fix the resolution. I just wanted to make sure it was clear how ridiculous you were being. Sorry, too much espresso and red bull before breakfast and I just can't stop... Nothing personal! I love cats!! Got three laying around me at this moment!!

Can we please stop throwing around accusations of exploitative or malicious intent without evidence? (If it's backed up by evidence I haven't seen it.) It's really harmful to people making a best effort to resolve ambiguous questions.

@jack I am accusing Salem of giving no explanation for the most controversial resolution in their tournament. Even the team from OWiD weighed in and were basically like "yeah this is strange, here is the exact data we are importing on the 8th". Which is my whole point. Salem already can look at the source data that supposedly came late or whatever. We aren't waiting in suspense!!!! They all but admitted to their bad faith in their last market update when they realized their preconceived notions about absolute censorship of covid data forever in China were baseless.

Dec 17, 9:06am: This market was never meant to estimate the true number of cases in China, but was always to be based on government reports. Thus, any alternative source to Our World in Data will have to rely on official numbers to be used. If at some point China stops reporting data completely, this market will resolve as NO as long as there was never 100,000 cases reported for any 7-day rolling average.

Never do they acknowledge that OWiD subsequently identified an OFFICIAL DATA SOURCE. Or that someone from OWiD literally confirmed this in the comments on the Salem market.

Do I really need to keep going to show the bad faith resolution?!? Cause like I said earlier, I am going to do it in a Substack regardless but sneak preview I guess.

@BTE Why would they use an alternative is Our World in Data is still technically displaying JHU data?

@BTE I totally agree they should have explained their reasoning. That doesn't make it bad faith. And furthermore, I highly doubt that people betting NO on the Salem market are engaged in any sort of conspiracy. You talk about people betting YES on Salem and betting NO here - there's a much simpler explanation for that, the Salem prices were lower than the prices here!

@cc6 In that case they could have said "this question is about whether or not China reports to JHU". Not to mention the fact that they say what they want is "official confirmed cases" and will defer to whatever meets THAT CRITERIA. Not OWiD!!!!

@jack johnny is well documented in the comments on both markets. And I believe he did change his mind briefly last month. Anyway, I said clearly in the same comments I was critical that I think Johnny is awesome and his name is one of my faves fosho. No hard feelings. The whole point was that Salem is hiding behind traders instead of owning their shit. Nothing but love and respect for you @1941159478! And you too @jack. But Salem, meh...

@jack a job is on the line. Explain yourselves. I am not even participating in the damn tournament!! LMAO!!

@jack Daddy chill.

@Catnee is your account really a bot?

Lol didn’t expect that, but I guess well played by the Yes betters, hoping to force the market to n/a in case of a no of the Salem market, didn’t think that would work. (Obviously this market wasn’t about covid since a long time, but about mind games and the Salem market resolution, as per title… oh well).

By the way don’t envy @AndyMartin pretty difficult resolution decision, handles as best as he could

To be clear I personally think this market would have made more sense to resolve NO at this point, and feel the resolution might have been somewhat influenced by the excessively aggressive comments of the YES camp (I think they knew it what a likely resolution would have looked like or they wouldn’t have put this much effort). But then I’m biased as well having bet quite heavily on NO here, plus losing a lot of market making profits :/ Though probably the biggest losers in all this are the bots 🤖

@fela I will pay everything I got back and take it as a loss if the Manifold team allows me to bring a formal challenge against Salem's indefensible resolution.

Do you even hear yourselves arguing for NO because, to paraphrase, you all saw how biased and dishonorable Salem obviously is and simply accepted that they had no intention of following their own resolution criteria and bet accordingly?!?

You are okay with a geopolitical think tank being so ignorant that they assumed the Chinese government would illogically both end zero covid and pretend that there was still, uh, zero covid?!?! The most contagious virus we have ever fucking discovered?!? I would be shocked if anyone at Salem has ever been to China or bothered to discuss Chinese politics with, idk, Chinese people who weren't born in the states!! Maybe one or two of them have been to Hong Kong pre-Xi. Or to visit a TSMC factory in Taiwan.

@BTE I never really took this market as being about China or about Covid: I started betting after the name had already been changed to "How will Salem resolve..".

And honestly you can say the same about the Salem market: it's wasn't so much anymore about how many cases there were in China on the ground, the resolution criteria was clear, even if in retrospect unfortunate, (and I think looking at the OWID data at resolution is the much more natural interpretation, and not how it will later likely be retroactively adjusted). There is always a chance that a market resolves against the "spirit" of the original intent, when trying to use more easy to check objective signals. As long as betters are aware of that it's not such a big deal. I didn't follow so much but I assume it was always clear that there was a chance of No just because of unreliable reporting of China, it follows quite obviously from the probability in the market being < 90%.

In the same vein I took a risk here, I assumed that most likely the resolution would be No if Salem would be No, but there is always some risk the creator does something unexpected, which happened. I update to being a bit more cautious on the future, but think it still was a good bet given my information. I think resolution here (as well as for Salem) was in good faith, and it seems unlikely this was planned. ( even though it seems Andy got some of his losses returned thanks to the N/A, could that be? )

I understand that it is annoying having to take these considerations into account when betting, but that is reality. We can try to find guidelines, resolution criteria and processes that will improve things. But there will always be trade offs and corner cases, and certainly having super extremist positions like some shown in the comments here is IMO not useful.

@fela I appreciate all of your comments and understand your position totally. My real issue is with Salem and the fact that they are jerking around the participants in the competition and making Manifold look bad publicly, and as someone who cares about trustworthiness and Manifold's reputation I want to try to make sure this doesn't become a new norm. Manifold can't survive if users end up feeling their time was wasted. Especially when a potential job is on the line. I imagine people spend more time on the Salem markets than the typical user here does on a given bet. If Patrick wasn't so effectively arguing the proper resolution and I wasn't risking a ridiculous amount of mana Salem will get away with being wasting people's time and I can't stand for that.

I am not even participating in that contest but I have participated in others and won one after spending a week reading grant applications to decide which would be funded. I took a risk of wasting my time and if I had gotten screwed by a dishonorable resolution I would be furious. And I am a big believer in peer mediation so let's have the debate as a community and set Salem straight if need be. Manifold's reputation is paramount IMO.

@BTE I don't know man, I feel like you have to stretch arguments quite to the extreme to see anything too nefarious about the Salem resolution. Maybe they could have communicated their reasoning more, but that is really the only criticism I can really agree with

@fela Not nefarious. Dishonorable. And also clearly predetermined. They have to literally cover their eyes not to acknowledge the YES resolution was met when official data became available. It is really that simple. Nefarious would be like they are doing it to harm people on purpose. I think the motive is benign confirmation bias.