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@mods It appears that only one of my three trades on this market was reflected in my league earned mana total. All three trades are reflected in net worth however?

@DevdaDavid trades made before 1 May will not count in the May league.

@Eliza ok thanks

Why were we so off here?

@CraigTalbert No insider info or informed knowledge base from the typical manifold user on this type of thing made it essentially a guessing game based on other prediction markets as a baseline.

@Predictor I think all considered we did about as good as can be expected

@Odoacre I don't think so, Manifold was overconfident and overrated polymarket and kalshi

@CraigTalbert because people don't like betting much on very low percentage options perhaps.

Especially in a market where favourites are known to underperform, bettors should probably have shown more humility in exploring the other options, especially those that had a little buzz in the past weeks

@CraigTalbert I've been busy ok

@CraigTalbert Having him at 1% or 2%, which we did for most of the conclave, was not great but it wasn't horrible either, he is largely seen as a surprise pick. I suspect he was mainly trading at 0.1% at the end because, after the white smoke, a lot of people were buying and selling Tagle and Parolin, causing the auto-arbitrage mechanism to gradually push down the tier-3 candidates, and in the chaos, no-one was paying attention to the prices of the low-probability candidates and so hadn't noticed how low they had gotten.

@Lorenzo well I dunno what you are expecting from "the wisdom of crowds" I'd say the average guy in the street never even heard of Prevost before today. We at least had him on the radar. I personally bet on him too. Although it was a longshot, I thought it would be unlikely because he is both from the US which is not very popular right now and had some connections (although disproved) to child abuse

@MichaelWheatley They should really let us set limits at 0.1

@MichaelWheatley Actually this morning it was relatively mentioned in the newspapers, at least the Italian ones, as at least as much as Aveline, which, however, was at 4-5% and not 1%. Then all things considered, the Vaticanists were also wrong, so who knows.

@Odoacre the market couldn't have been more wrong!

@Odoacre Idk I'm always surprised when I make a profit on Manifold, prediction markets should work better than my random judgment

@Lorenzo why? It's j̶u̶s̶t̶ mostly Brownian motion

@Odoacre You don't have to know who Prevost is to bet Parolin NO, especially when Parolin jumps from 25 to 60 for no discernable reason.

TBF, I think the reason is people felt that the short conclave meant that the choice would be a frontrunner.

@Emanuele1000 That pro-Italian bias is incredible.

@MichaelWheatley I think if you cut the scores of every Italian in half and redistributed the points to the rest of the field, you would get a chart which holds up very well.

@MichaelWheatleyI think more against the U.S. “if he were not American, this would make him automatically a papabile, certainly” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/world/americas/pope-candidate-cardinal-robert-francis-prevost.html

@Joshua ya wait when can Manifold fully switch to decimal like Polymarket? I think ppl here are nerdy enough that decimals below 10% and above 90% should be fine?

@BoltonBailey but of the last five conclaves, three had ended before before a third black smoke, and only one of those had elected the favourite. It wasn't an early result and absent extra knowledge it didn't favour Parolin

@JoshuaWilkes Yeah, not saying that the price wasn't too high both before or after the white smoke, just explaining the reason that @Domer articulated in his tweet for why the price went up.

Did the other two elect the favorite? (How are you deciding who was the favorite in those conclaves?)

@BoltonBailey Wikipedia covers to some extent who were the favourites for each Conclave. It seems Benedict is the only recent favourite to win

@BoltonBailey oh the Domer thing is very good. I hadn't seen it.

I did a similar thing with focusing on papabiles who had fallen below 1% over the past two weeks, but unlike him I also bought YES in Tagle and Parolin when they dropped at various points.

But I still disagree with him about it being a early end. If I had been awake (I live in Taiwan), I would have shorted Parolin hard to 50% I believe. I might have been doing that under the misguided belief that it was five ballots not four already though so perhaps still a little questionable.

I also am not sure about his assertion that an administrative pope is unlikely to follow a pastoral one. That is the opposite of the usual run of things. But one of the views that I took was that we don't live in ordinary times and the chance of electing a reforming pope to follow Francis was higher than the background rate (although I made a lot of mana on pope markets overall, I had a very specific set of losses betting YES on Francis II as the name)