On my Manifold survey, I will include a question asking whether the respondent likes or dislikes certain types of markets (or is neutral about them). This market resolves to the type that gets the most net dislikes (dislikes minus likes).
The types of markets described here have a lot of overlap between them, which will be mentioned on the survey to avoid confusing respondents. The survey will also tell respondents not to answer for market types that they haven't encountered before and will provide the following definitions of each type:
Self-resolving: Markets that resolve based on some characteristic of the market itself, like the average percentage or the number of traders
Whalebait: Markets that encourage large bets because a user with lots of mana can more easily influence their resolution
Personal: Markets that resolve according to some aspect/event in the creator's personal life
Subjective: Markets that resolve based on the creator's opinion on something
Meme/joke: Markets that were made for a meme or joke rather than serious predictions
Death: Markets about whether a given person will die by a certain date
AI wiping out humanity: Markets about whether AI will wipe out humanity
Parodies of AI wiping out humanity: Silly variations of AI wiping out humanity, like "Will AI wipe out AI?" or "Will AI out-wipe humanity?"
Rationalussy: Markets about the made-up word "rationalussy"
Poll: Markets that use a poll to determine the resolution
Stock: Markets that never resolve and are meant to reflect how much people like or dislike the subject
Far future: Markets that won't resolve until a very distant time
Long odds: Markets on things that basically certain to happen or not to happen, and for which everyone agrees that this is the case
Daily: Series of markets that are about the exact same commonplace occurrence, but shifted back by a short period of time, e.g., a series of markets asking "Will Stock X be above price Y on date Z?", where there is a new market for every day.
"Completely legal Ponzi schemes": Bountied questions where the first people to add to the bounty get mana from people who add to the bounty later, but are completely open about being Ponzi schemes
I might change these definitions slightly based on feedback from the comments if you think some of the definitions aren't clear/accurate enough. I might also change the names of some of the categories if the current name isn't clear enough, but nothing that would change the meaning of the category.
See Plasma's Manifold Survey for other questions about the survey.
The survey is officially out! You can take it here: https://forms.gle/xZqWVxuY5irgLigu9
Related questions
The survey is officially out! You can take it here: https://forms.gle/xZqWVxuY5irgLigu9
I don't know why I didn't think to include "Resolves to MKT" as a type here. I guess I just overlooked it as a subtype of self-resolving, but it's prevalent and misused enough that I probably should have given it its own entry. Even though I like self-resolving markets, I have always hated "Resolves to MKT" because it's not interesting as a self-resolving game (it's just "last person to make a big bet wins"), and people frequently try to use it as a judge of public opinion despite it being the most trivially easy method to Goodhart possible.
@JosephNoonan And yeas, I'm aware of the slight hypocrisy in saying this when I just recently made /JosephNoonan/does-manifold-think-im-a-furry, which uses "resolves to MKT" as part of it's resolution criteria. However, I only used that because it was used in the original market /LivInTheLookingGlass/does-manifold-think-i-am-a-furry that mine was based on, and I didn't want to confuse people by using different criteria. Also, the "Resolves to MKT" criterion is only triggered under certain circumstances, so it's not as trivial to Goodhart it.
Why did "self-resolving" have a higher probability than whalebait? I think everyone who dislikes self-resolving markets also dislikes whalebait, since those are usually self-resolving, and they're the most controversial kind.
I think we recently saw a lot more general self-resolving markets than we see whalebait, because they provided easy unique trader bonuses. Obviously the non-predictive tag has cut down on this now, but there's still a lot of controversy over what counts as non-predictive.
The funny thing is, "Completely legal Ponzi schemes" sounds like it would be the most controversial based on the name, but they actually don't seem to be very controversial at all despite speculation that they would become controversial.
@JosephNoonan I personally dislike them.
(The thing I hate most, by the way, is so tangential: I keep getting notifications for like a M$5 bounty on the ponzi market, and I can't seem to turn them off without disabling notifs for all bounty markets)
@Conflux Good point, the notifications from them can be annoying. And yeah, I think they would quickly become controversial if everyone started making them, the same way "Will this market get X traders?" became controversial. They would become a thing that was fine when only a few people were making them but was eventually seen as a lazy way to get free mana by copying someone else's idea.
@Conflux you can increase the minimum payout to whatever you want, there are instructions in the description
@Conflux in the future if you see some fixable problem like that feel free to message me, I'm generally very willing to adjust
