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https://plasmabloggin.substack.com/p/survey-results-pt-3-manifolds-favorites

Survey Results Pt. 3: Manifold's favorites

Alright, everyone. It’s time for the part I know you’ve all been waiting for. What were the winners of the Manifold’s favorites section, and which category had the mysterious upset? For anyone who doesn’t know how this works, I ran a series of free response markets asking what Manifold’s favorite movie, book, TV show, print comic, webcomic, song, video game, board game, role-playing game, short story, poem, podcast, YouTube channel, and play are. In each of these markets, users could submit any work they wanted as an option, as long as it was a member of the right category of work. Then, on my Manifold survey, I included a section asking what users thought of each option. They could either rank it as “Excellent,” “Good,” “Okay,” or “Bad,” or select that they hadn’t watched it, read it, heard it, etc. To determine “Manifold’s favorite” in each category, I converted these qualitative ratings into scores: Excellent = 2, Good = 1, Okay = 0, and Bad = -1, and then I added up the scores from each respondent to get a total score. I used a total, rather than an average, so that a work has an advantage if more people actually know about it - it wouldn’t be Manifold’s favorite if it’s only beloved by a small but dedicated group of Manifolders.

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

@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.

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

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

@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.

@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 😏

@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.

@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.

@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

@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! :)

"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.

Nightfall by asimov