What is Manifold's favorite short story?
19
closes Oct 8
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov
33%
“The Egg” by Andy Weir
13%
The Scorpion and the Frog :)
9%
'—All You Zombies—' by Robert Heinlein
9%
Nightfall
9%
"...And I'll Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes" by Scott Alexander
7%
"BLIT" by David Langford
5%
"The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton
5%
"The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft
4%
"A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace" by Roger Williams
3%
500 Million, But Not A Single One More
2%
Teatro Grottesco by Ligotti
0.9%
Other
0.9%

On my upcoming survey, I will ask respondents to rate all the short stories that are options here as either "Excellent", "Good", "Okay", "Bad", or "Haven't read". This will only include submissions that I can verify are actually short stories. Don't worry too much about whether something counts as a short story: When in doubt, I'll count it.

Each story will get a score based on the total number of points from each response. A rating of "Excellent" counts as 2 points, "Good" counts as 1, "Bad" counts as -1, and the other two options count as 0. The story that gets the highest total score wins. If multiple stories are tied for the best score, this will resolve to all of them equally.

See Plasma's Manifold Survey for other questions about the survey.

Edit: The survey is officially out! You can take it here: https://forms.gle/xZqWVxuY5irgLigu9

That also means new responses to this market won't be considered.

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Sort by:
BTE avatar
Brian T. Edwards

Wow I just got a unique trader bonus for the answer I submitted here!

1 reply
JosephNoonan avatar
Plasma Ballin'

@BTE Supposedly, they actually have always been paid out to the user who submits them, ever since fixed payout free response was introduced, but they erroneously gave notifications to the wrong person before.

JosephNoonan avatar
Plasma Ballin'bought Ṁ1,000 of Other NO

The survey is now out. That means no more responses will be accepted for free response questions.

TomPotter avatar
Tom Potter

Seems like the scoring system will be biased toward stories that people have already read and/or sound interesting, since otherwise they'll just get 0s

7 replies
JosephNoonan avatar
Plasma Ballin'

@TomPotter It kind of has to be. It wouldn't make any sense for a story that no one has read to be Manifold's "favorite". But if you rank a story as "bad", it gets -1 point, so the method isn't that biased. It counts a story you haven't read as neutral, which seems like the only reasonable thing to count it as to me.

TomPotter avatar
Tom Potter

@JosephNoonan Fair.

I think I'm just a nerd who cares less about "favorite" and more about "the ultimate objective subjective quality measure" which maybe doesn't actually exist .. haha 😏

JosephNoonan avatar
Plasma Ballin'

@TomPotter Well, I think that measure would just be range voting, but without the "haven't read" option, where you make the sample of people voting read the story if they haven't already.

JosephNoonan avatar
Plasma Ballin'

@TomPotter But yeah, this is "Manifold's favorite", which is slightly different from "What story does Manifold think is best?" if the latter is interpreted as only counting people who have an opinion on the story to begin with. Though I might make a market on whether the results of the "favorite" markets would be different if we only counted people who had watched/read/played each option, and averaged the score.

TomPotter avatar
Tom Potter

@JosephNoonan For sure, sorry I didn't think through the actual meaning of the word "favorite" enough :P yeah it does prob. imply a component of popularity.

I'd definitely be curious of the quantified difference between the two methods, that's interesting to me.

TomPotter avatar
Tom Potter

@JosephNoonan Nice! Didn't realize you had 14 different such markets -- that's actually a significant dataset, I'll be very curious to see how it plays out! I think voting methods and their differences in how + what they actually measure, and the biases they encode, is a really fascinating and consequential topic. Thanks for making the new market! :)

evergreenemily avatar
evergreenbought Ṁ5 of "The Last Question" ... YES

"The Last Question" is one of the only short stories I've read that's stuck with me - I read it a decade ago, but still think about it pretty often. "The Egg" is close.

BTE avatar
Brian T. Edwards

Nightfall by asimov