Will I cause drama by violating a social norm on Manifold at some point in the next year?
Basic
23
Ṁ1383
resolved Jan 5
Resolved
YES

I prefer having strict rules to follow, and I find fuzzy norms confusing and frustrating. This tends to lead to me pushing boundaries too far and making people upset with me.

This market resolves to YES if at some point in the next year I do something that causes a significant number of Manifold users to feel I have violated a spoken or unspoken norm or guideline that I should have followed.

I don't plan to try and do this on Manifold, but neither do I plan to try very hard to avoid it. It does not qualify if I violate an actual rule that has been clearly laid out somewhere by Manifold's devs.

I hereby commit to not doing so intentionally in order to move this market.

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I would resolve this yes as a significant number of users have now reported Isaac, meaning they think he's broken rules or norms or something.

People can disagree about whether they are right, but that isn't what the market is about.

I'm beginning to think that the Holocaust market and the DesTiny market are at least close to enough drama to resolve this to YES. They're right on the edge though. Any thoughts?

@Mira the fact that you seem to think my manipulation on the DesTiny market was inappropriate was a significant update in this direction for me, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

@IsaacKing Mana, leaderboards, badges, etc. aren't worth anything. A Mana-maximizer would prefer any minimum wage job and converting all earnings to Mana, to actually using the site or writing clever strategies into bots(judging from the amounts of leaderboard all-time profits).

Instead, I see the purpose of Manifold Markets is for people to get used to prediction markets and to popularize the idea. That doesn't mean it should be your goal too, but it should probably be considered as a cost to any action. Thus:

  • The Destiny market is off-goal because it causes the Destiny crowd to think prediction markets are all rigged, even if the market creator is site-approved(has a trustworthy badge). Important is I estimate they don't care about prediction markets, this site is just a novelty to them, and thinking through manipulative edge cases is a burden to their goal of getting free subs. This case is drama.

  • If I did want to exploit their market, I would've left a comment immediately after resolution explaining that I thought it'd be funny to manipulate the graph but that I'm willing to refund everyone their money(at a loss if necessary). This is less effective after days have passed, because people will assume it's a reaction-to-threatened-consequences(even if no consequences have actually been threatened), but I would still do it. People would still be a little annoyed even if you refunded them, but it mitigates most of it so I would still do it if it amused me.

  • In contrast, manipulating gamble markets are okay when people like @Gurkenglas are the main opponent. In fact, the original reason I put money into that 69 market was solely to see what Gurk would do when pressed into a corner. This isn't drama because I estimated Gurk & friends love that sort of chaos. He probably studies prisoner's dilemmas and game theory and is just aching for the opportunity to test out strategies.

  • In contrast, if I see the exact same market but the only participants are brand new accounts linked from a woodworking Youtube channel with the default M$500 testing out the site, I'm less inclined to do much. "Stealing candy from a baby" is drama because it makes the baby cry and the candy isn't even worth much to me.

  • The holocaust market is off-goal because markets expected to be near 0% or 100% give no prediction accuracy, yet everyone using the site is paying the penalty of seeing an offensive title in their live feed every time someone bids or leaves a comment. So there's no benefit to you, high cost to the community goal, so likely to be pure drama.

  • On the holocaust market, I put M$10 on YES for the memes, and then felt bad when I saw a user report a few minutes later - this means I was likely the direct cause of someone seeing the market because my purchase showed in the live feed. I don't really care about the market myself, but I don't like annoying others for no reason. And I can't engage with that market in any way without annoying people, so it's very drama-prone.

  • On your holocaust market, weak evidence that it is drama is also that people like @MartinRandall and @a are willing to push it to 1% constantly and set relatively large limit orders at low percentages. They don't do this on other "guaranteed" markets that hover at 5-10%, so it's not a simple mana-maximizer calculation of "I expect this to resolve NO and want to profit", it's more of a statement of strong belief that it should resolve NO and possibly an implication that there will be social consequences if it resolves YES. That is to say, people tolerate the market but I interpret an "implied threat to create drama". Related: 1% or 99% markets usually don't spam the feed or attract a lot of orders, because there's no profit - so the activity on your market in excess of similarly-classed markets is a weak measure of drama. (You could probably calculate a "drama index" as some kind of trading-volume-to-information ratio.)

  • If your holocaust market was unlisted, didn't show up in the live feed, was only distributed among friends or on Discord, I would not consider it drama. People would see it once and forget about it. Instead, people that have never used a prediction market are seeing it show up and wondering if they'll constantly see that sort of market.

  • There are a lot of "guaranteed resolution" markets. "Will the sun rise tomorrow?", "Will 1=1 on New Year's day?", etc. So there's the question of "Why this market in particular?" One reason might be if you wanted a holocaust denier to show up and present evidence. Another reason might be "The topic enters my attention as a controversial subject, and this causes me to select it over 'Do all hydrogen nuclei have 1 proton?'". The first one would not be motivated by drama, though would still cause drama; you might even find it useful to argue with someone presenting 1000 pages of evidence that you can't refute without a history Ph.D - there's probably a life lesson in "Just because someone gives me an argument I can't refute doesn't mean they're right". The second reason of selecting it as a controversial subject cause drama and also even be motivated by drama.

  • In general, I think the reason people are annoyed by markets like the holocaust one, is that it's common for people that believe it to "raise questions" to get people to bite, and then lay down a ton of "evidence" that most people are bad at refuting. And then onlookers see one side is worse at arguing than the other, so give the holocaust deniers more bits of credibility than they'd otherwise deserve. And it's not like the deniers sat down to study the evidence and independently arrived at the conclusion "The holocaust was faked" - rather, they already dislike Jews, and the arguments come after and are motivated to support that. So the strategy of debating them in any way is already flawed, since the arguments are non-causal on their belief. This makes it actually correct in most cases to reflexively turn your nose away in disgust, since people like yourself that maybe are just curious to see any surprising evidence are the exception and perhaps not worth allowing the other type to prosper.

  • I don't know that any of these are Manifold norms in particular, or that my inferences on any people mentioned are accurate, or that anyone else shares these opinions. My account is like 2 weeks old and I don't otherwise know people here. They are just my 30 seconds of thinking(and then several minutes of typing) on why I would or wouldn't do something similar.

@Mira I can confirm that resolving the Holocaust market yes would create drama.

I'm betting it further than other "guaranteed" markets mostly because it has lower research cost and resolves sooner. I put in limit orders to take mana from trolls.

I don't plan to try and do this on Manifold

/IsaacKing/did-jews-make-up-the-holocaust-and

predictedNO

@Yev I don't think I've violated any social norm held by the majority of Manifolders, which is why I was willing to make that market.

@Yev how about the norm to say "try to do this" instead of "try and do this"?

predictedNO

Will this do it? Let's find out!

You’ve been on Manifold for awhile, I feel like maybe it would have happened already.

predictedNO

@Conflux Actually, is there anything you’ve already done that you feel qualifies?

This may have come close, but I don't think it was serious enough to qualify:

https://manifold.markets/EnopoletusHarding/will-so-much-as-a-single-banned-pos

An example of the sort of thing I'm referring to is here:

https://manifold.markets/Gurkenglas/will-adam-face-enough-social-conseq

I also investigated a specific norm a while back, and chose not to break it:

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/is-it-socially-acceptable-for-a-mar

@IsaacKing For what it's worth I think there's a norm against sock puppets.

@MartinRandall Yeah, that's what I meant when I provided that as an example. People didn't seem all that upset, just a little miffed, and in large part that was about the resolution criteria rather than me. There are other people using multiple accounts too and I haven't seen many complaints about them.

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