A "serious market creator" is any user who has created at least 50 markets and has at least 1000 unique traders across all those markets.
"Death" refers to legal/medical death, not information-theoretic death. A serious health event that renders them unable to use Manifold also counts, such as entering a coma.
If they die and they had some contingency plan to have someone else resolve their markets for them, this resolves to YES. If they die and their markets are abandoned, this resolves to NO.
In the event that they didn't have any markets that should resolve any time soon, I'll switch to the next serious market-creator to die instead. So the title should actually be interpreted as "Will the next market that was created by a dead serious market-creator to encounter its expected resolution date be resolved promptly?"
If the Manifold admins step in of their own volition to resolve the market, that doesn't count and this market will resolve to NO. However if the creator had worked out a plan with the Manifold admins in advance, that does count to resolve this to YES.
If Manifold implements some policy that means market creators won't need a contingency plan, such as Manifold admins always attempting to resolve markets in accordance with their creator's likely wishes, this market resolves N/A.
Related questions
Only two questions seem relevant here:
Other than Isaac, who does this?
@IsaacKing How old are you?
Manifold is great but when it comes to end-of-life planning this is a very low priority indeed. I expect the answer to (1) is very close to nobody.
@IsaacKing I see no reason a random friend resolving my markets makes more sense than a trusted manifold author. I'd much rather delegate to one of them. Someone I know can just provide the information of my death, much more reasonable than asking them to figure out potentially hundreds of complicated market resolutions.
And I'd be willing (in many cases) to take on their markets in case they died. So, anyone interested in making a contingency arrangement of this form?
(There's a possible exception of personal markets, but for those of my own I'm generally happy with n/a as a contingency)
If I declare here that my contingency plan is whatever manifold admins would do as their default policy, how would that count? I am a strong believer in making general policy to do the right thing by default rather than requiring individual market creators to figure it out themselves. If an individual does want to make their own arrangements, power to them, but it shouldn't be expected.
Will the first serious market creator to die ensure their outstanding markets get resolved?, 8k, beautiful, illustration, trending on art station, picture of the day, epic composition