Ogi Ogas has made a bold claim on his Substack today, Feb 28, 2025: he will reveal a grand unifying theory for the nature of reality, on Monday:
The core accounting of how and why the universe exists, how and why we are here. How it all works, in plainspoken words anyone can follow and understand.The explanation of the great mystery is a form of Grand Unification, that supreme theory or perspective that scientists have been tirelessly and fruitlessly hunting for, transcendent knowledge that explains all that is and was and will be.
https://ogiogas.substack.com/p/how-can-nothing-change-into-something
I've been reading this man's writing, and my assessment is that this is real. I think what he will write about is going to be genuinely novel & paradigm shifting once it gets reviewed & spreads. I'd like to register my prediction publicly of this as having been one of the earliest people to spot it.
This market will resolve to YES if the following researchers read it & publicly admit it blew their mind / that the announcement post was NOT hype. If they say it is interesting or novel but not a good contender for "grand theory" it will resolve to NO.
Researchers who have committed to reading it & giving an objective opinion:
Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, President & Director of Research at Qualia Research institute, https://qri.org/ - (https://x.com/algekalipso/status/1895588938217373916)
1,000@bens yes I'm trying to work out whether it should be (1) specific person that people trust who will read it & have an opinion or (2) just run a general survey / google form. Right now everyone who has read this blog post is clearly saying "no this is clearly BS", so if the people surveyed change their mind, i'd like that to be the resolution criteria? (I can run the survey, but do people trust me? does it make more sense for it to like, get posted on a physics stackexchange or something and be resolved there?)
@bens I've added new resolution criteria, what do you think? I got Andres (president & director of Qualia Research Institute) to commit to reading it & giving us his unbiased opinion, he wrote some words on his thoughts about Ogi here: https://x.com/algekalipso/status/1895586181339058312
I want the criteria to be erring on the side of "NO". If Andres (or other researchers we can find) say "this is potentially interesting" it's not enough. It needs to blow their mind / they have to publicly admit the original post was not overhyped for it to resolve to "YES")
@Defender no offense to the Qualia Research Institute and Andres, but that organization is not credible in my eyes at all. I've looked at their work before and I think its critics would describe it as "complete pseudoscience gibberish", and perhaps, most generously, "fringe, outsider science".
@bens that's fair, I feel like your input (or whoever you trust) would be the most meaningful to me. Would you like to be on the resolution criteria, or can you think of someone whose judgement you'd trust (and who wouldn't mind committing to reading this blogpost?) and we can say it'd only resolve if BOTH people concede, with their subjective judgement?
@MingCat hi thanks for participating in my first ever market!!! I made a little tweet thread here (saying the same thing). I don't actually know if i'll be able to get a rigorous resolution criteria, but if Ogi blows up I want this public record that I tried to call it 😄
@Defender Awesome! I agree the criteria are going to be tricky to figure out here. Usually you'd want to try to nail them down before making a market but as long as your criteria are reasonable it should be fine. For now maybe edit your title to include (WIP Criteria) or something like that?
Some ideas you could try for resolution criteria:
-Take a poll later, see if the share of people who think it's plausible crosses some threshhold
-Take a poll when the theory is released, take a poll later, see if the share of people who put stock in that theory increases by a certain amount
-Will it get mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Grand Unified Theories, (in a capacity listing it as a serious contender) and stay there for at least a month?
-Make a second market on if the theory will ever become "described the majority view", and then this market can track if that second market will ever stay above a threshhold (e.g. 25%) for at least a week
All of these should probably result in markets with subtly different titles! You something with a relatively short timespan is generally much more attractive to traders (under a year is usually the limit) but if you feel like a longer term criteria is really necessary that's OK too.
@MingCat i like the polling idea, especially considering that most people reading through his announcement post today are clearly saying "no way, this is BS". I think I'd be satisfied with like, on Monday people reading it and filling a little google forms survey with their thoughts "BS or no BS + free form text" ? Is that easier/more straightforward than making another market on Monday?
if i don't make another market, how do I broadcast/communicate to the traders (to give them the survey) ? Or i guess it doesn't have to reach the traders, it just has to reach people (and I can tweet it?)
@Defender another idea i just thought of is whether 1 or more specific community will endorse it, or to predict their responses to it. Like will LessWrong say "obviously BS here's why" or will they find it intruiging? if I make a post about it on Monday? What about HackerNews? What about [physics stackexchange] or something?
@Defender Manifold does have a built in polling option, though its feature set may not be what you want - it's just a choice from a list of options. A survey would be easier and simpler than having two separate markets, yeah - the use case of a market about the future % of another market is that it allows you to track the change of calibrated belief, without having to commit to an extremely-far-off resolution - but that's definitely not necessary here.
You definitely have freedom in what to go for! Any of these communities could probably work for this, as long as the resolution criteria are both objective ("X% think this", or "X% find this plausible") and a fair reflection of the expectations set by the title (definitely include which group in the title).