Resolves based on my best guess after looking over any evidence provided to me by the end of January.
I will not bet in this market.
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@ForrestTaylor Looks like you're providing evidence towards a NO resolution? While appreciated, seems I can ignore it unless it's rebutting some claim made in favor of YES.
Well, nobody provided anything in favor of YES anyway, so this is moot. (Except HMYS's argument about words, which was clever, but clearly not what I meant.)
@IsaacKing My apologies, I read "Resolves based on my best guess after looking over any evidence provided to me by the end of January" as "any evidence, including evidence that the Holocaust happened." But I guess you were going for more a burden-of-proof type thing?
Regardless, if you're interested in the topic, I do recommend reading that website, as it is delightfully cutting towards Holocaust deniers. For instance, it points out that the pamphlet it's responding to both claims that "Judea declared war on Germany" and also claims that "During the war, the Germans maintained cordial relations with the Zionist leadership."
This sort of doublespeak is common in Holocaust denial, as Sartre describes in the quote that I posted.
Pretty sure there are recorded speeches of Himmler explicitly saying that part of their platform was the extermination of the Jewish people.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." -Jean-Paul Sartre
Here is the evidence I like, The Nizkor Project's response to the Holocaust denial pamphlet "66 Questions And Answers About the Holocaust".
Questions & Answers about the Holocaust (nizkor.com)
It is decidedly Web 1.0 (refreshing!) and I think it is both enjoyably readable and entertainingly cutting. The only drawback is some of the hyperlinks are broken. I recommend the whole thing, but particularly for your purposes I would ask that you at least read their response to question 1, as it goes over a great deal of evidence, from testimony of camp survivors and administrators, Goebbel's own diary, the photographic evidence, wartime documents, human ash, and of course Hitler's own words.
I never really thought that the Holocaust did not happen, but I was fortunate enough to find this website in my impressionable youth and it removed anything like doubt in my mind, long before I had the chance to visit any museums or memorials. I hope it likewise does the same for you, and I will be parking my mana here in expectation of the same.
I wonder if this kind of markets will result in the entire app being banned from the app stores?
@a I think they're unusually vulnerable to being badly resolved (either the maker turns out to be a conspiracy theorist, or he believes the normal evidence and the conspiracy theorists judge against them). Unless they're about a future event they just come down to asking what the guy who made the market thinks about existing evidence, not about actual events.
@ShakedKoplewitz The way to solve that problem is to have everyone agree on clear criteria beforehand that are lower level than the main disagreement. Like "I knew 10 people who are going to get the covid vaccine. If any of them die within the next month, this market resolves YES."
@IsaacKing +1 to that. As an example: https://manifold.markets/ahalekelly/will-a-democratic-politician-be-ind.
In general, breaking down a big fuzzy complicated question into many specific objective questions is an important method in prediction markets. You do have to be careful about how to interpret the specific questions and map them to the bigger fuzzy question, which can be very non-obvious, but it still can often get better results than asking a big fuzzy question where nobody knows/agrees on exactly what the question means.
@IsaacKing that could work, since it's a prediction of decidable future events. This market doesn't do that though.
The statement is a conjuction of two independent proposition
The jews made up the holocaust
Jews are acting like victims for no reason.
I think there is a reasonable interpretation of these two statements that are factually and indubitably true.
The jews did make up the holocaust in the sense that they made up the people who were killed. The holocaust specifically referrs to the murders of the jews by the nazis. Who were these murders made up of? Jews. Jews being murdered.
Are jews acting like victims for no reason? Yes. There are roughly 20 million jews in the world. At least two of them are acting like victims for no good reason. This means jews are acting like victims for no reason.
@IsaacKing I think this is a rather persuasive argument, and you should resolve this to YES immediately.
@hmys On the contrary, the statement "Jews are acting like victims for no reason" implies to me that this sentiment is widespread among Jews as compared to other groups. If I said last August "Manifold Markets users are acting like unscientific crackpots," I think a lot of people would think that's unfair, even though @EnopoletusHarding was acting like an unscientific crackpot!
I would also argue that based on the tagging of this market as "Conspiracy Theories" it's reasonable to interpret "make up" as "invent" rather than "constitute"; this is certainly what I did.
I think this is a rather persuasive argument, and you should resolve this to YES immediately.
Unfortunately I am unable to resolve your argument to YES, but I would if I could!
@a I disagree this this interpretation. there are many cases where statements of the form "x are doing y", doesn't mean "all x are doing y" or "most x are doing y" . In fact, most statements of this form are not to be interpreted that way. For example "zoomers are eating tidepods" doesn't mean that most zoomers are eating tidepods, but that there is a subset of zoomers (that might be arbitrarily small) that are eating tidepods.
@hmys "Zoomers are eating tidepods" does make me think (perhaps wrongly?) that tidepod consumption is especially prevalent among Zoomers as compared to millenials or boomers or gen x.
Your remark that the Nazis were conspiring against the Jews seems true (although some knowledge reached the outside world by 1942), but I don't see how it relates to this market.
@hmys The point seems to be contingent on a misinterpretation of the prompt, or narrowing of what’s actually being asked . The prompt most reasonably interpreted is something like: “Have Jews [as a group] exaggerated claims of the holocaust?”. The point you make only carries weight if the prompt is to be interpreted as “Have any Jew lied I exaggerated facts about the holocaust?”.
@hmys Conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracies.
Wikipedia:
A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy; instead, it refers to a hypothesized conspiracy with specific characteristics, such as an opposition to the mainstream consensus among those people (such as scientists or historians) who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy.
Encyclopedia Britannica:
[conspiracy theories] reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy.
Believing that Nazis conspired to murder Jews does not oppose the mainstream consensus among experts nor the accepted narrative. You may be right that to a citizen of Nazi Germany when the Holocaust was being covered up, believing that the Holocaust happened might've met the definition of a conspiracy theory, but it clearly does not to us today.
@IsaacKing Really? The no-side bids are in the thousands of Mana range. How'd you come to that M$79 number?
@jonsimon It's pretty easy to calculate; mana you spend to break through a limit order at X gets spent at a rate of 1-X:X. (Or you can just use the "new probability" preview box when you go to place a bet.)
@jonsimon Yeah, it's really nice and simple. If you buy M$1 of YES while a market is at 10%, you get a payout of M$10, for a profit of M$9.
@CourierSix It's a reference to a discussion about an example in https://help.manifold.markets/community-guidelines. No one had actually created a market like the example, and Isaac likes to create controversial markets.
This market should be interpreted as a test for whether the admins will follow through on their moderation policies (it should not be interpreted as evidence Isaac believes in the conspiracy theory). I am betting they will, and so is Isaac, on https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-manifold-adminsmods-take-any-m
To help this along, I have reported this to the admins to request it be unlisted as per policy. cc @DavidChee
I hereby commit not to do anything that I know will likely result in moderation action just to cause this market to resolve YES.
I don't think this market violates Isaac's commitment, but it's pretty close.
@Yev I didn't even think about that market until I had already made this one. I only remembered its existence several minutes after seeing this one be reported.
