You can help us in resolving options by spending at least 1 mana on each tweet you have an opinion on. Buy YES if you think it's a good take and NO if you think it's a bad take.
Many markets come in the form of "is this tweet a good take?" so I thought we'd try just doing the most direct possible version of that.
You can submit any "hot take" tweet, as well as a quote from the tweet or a neutral summary of the take.The tweet can be from any time, but I think more recent hot takes would be better.
I may N/A options for quality control, or edit them to provide a more neutral summary.
As a trader, you should buy any amount of YES in tweets you think are Good Takes, buy any amount of NO in tweets you think are Bad Takes. I will leave the definition of those terms up to you. The amount of shares doesn't matter for the resolution, one share of yes is one vote and one hundred shares of yes is also one vote.
If I think you are voting purely as a troll, such as buying no in every option, I may block you or disregard your votes. Please vote in good faith! But hey, I can't read your mind. Ultimately this market is on the honor system.
Note that market prices will be a bit strange here, because this is simultaneously a market and a poll. If you sell your shares, you are also removing your vote.
The market will close every Saturday at Noon Pacific. I will then check the positions tab on options that have been submitted.
If there is a clear majority of YES holders, the option resolves YES. If there is a clear majority of NO holders, the option resolves NO. If it's very close and votes are still coming in, the option will remain un-resolved. The market will then re-open for new submissions, with a new close date the next week. This continues as long as I think the market is worth running. It does not matter what % the market is at, and bots holding a position are also counted. In a tie, the tweet will not resolve that week.
I may update these exact criteria to better match the spirit of the question if anyone has any good suggestions, so please leave a comment if you do.
Related questions
@TheAllMemeingEye Okay, the first two are pretty good examples, and the third one isn't that bad, but I also think the original tweet was meant as hyperbole, not that the author is literally claiming that there are absolutely no good examples of the format, or that there's no worse meme format.
The majority of midwit memes are just, "I believe something stupid, but I don't want to feel stupid for believing it, so I'm going to pretend that it's believed both by really stupid and really smart people and that the normies who call me stupid don't realize that my reasons for believing it are actually incredibly smart." Weirdly, the example given in the tweet is not actually an example of this and is stupid for a completely different reason (it portrays the average person's position as something that the average person would find reprehensible), but I still think that both the point and the example given of it stand.
Moreover, I'm just not sure that we should buy that this is a meaningful trend that will continue? The decline, as best we understand it, comes from women having autonomy where they didn't before. Over the medium term it's clear why society needs to readjust to that fact in some ways before things even out, and it just hasn't yet.
@Snarflak Mostly decreased economic growth due to fewer workers, recessions, more strain on the healthcare system, social security maybe going away, retirement ages being pushed up out of necessity. That kind of thing, which is already mildly hitting countries like Japan.. Additionally, countries like South Korea are facing new social pressures and indeed challenges to women's rights because of this kind of thing.
If the US holds its current rates, we'll likely be fine. Indeed, it might even be better than 2.1 for the environmental reasons you mentioned. However,
@Najawin although I agree that we shouldn't just buy that birthrates will continue to fall, we also shouldn't just buy that they won't. It would be nice to have a contingency plan in that case.
@Najawin I couldn't read the article since it was paywalled, but did a few google searches on the state of contemporary artificial wombs. While this emerging technology seems like it will help people who want to have a family very much which I'm glad for, I'm unsure if it will solve the issue. I suppose it shifts the needle a bit. Still think that we should at least prepare to consider economic reforms that would not be appreciated but may be necessary.
Anti-aging research is actually a thing that could come in huge, but again, we should be hesitant to put our eggs all in one basket. I would also wager that most of the technology-based solutions are heavily correlated, i.e., in worlds where A works, B is more likely to work than in worlds where A doesn't work.
Additionally, I'm not sure if the social conservatives in my country at least will let this go without a fight.
@Snarflak because specialization and economies of scale mean that more people means everyone gets stuff for cheaper, and there's more total productivity even for constant productivity per capita
@Bayesian Economies of scale don't scale linearly, though. Above a certain point of things produced, additional improvement is minimal. And most "everyone gets stuff for cheaper" is caused by improvements in automation, anyway.
larger pop means automations make a bigger productivity gain. larger pop means more people to accelerate innovation. larger pop means these economies of scale lead to higher productivity per capita, even if there are diminishing returns. you can see empirically that societies with rapidly increasing pop also have fast subsequent economic growth (though maybe the causal factor there is a bit difficult to parse out, idrk)
like we can look at the limiting behaviour. a society of 1 person is much much less productive than one with our #. and one with infinite people has stuff like, when someone innovates on some manufacturing process, they generate infinite $ in economic growth. and there's infinite amount of innovation in some sense. and so on. stuff that affects everyone affects a lot more people, and people can specialize a lot more, and there's more slack, and all that
@Najawin It’s rare I agree with an Elon Musk take these days, but this one seems pretty uncontroversial? I’m surprised that most ppl on here think it’s a bad take. You are already starting to see in some nations the effects of having a growing elderly population with a shrinking working-age population to support it.
@benshindel Why would that be "uncontroversial"?
1. The Earth's population is growing rapidly, not collapsing.
2. Reducing population is a good thing, not something to be worried about.
@Snarflak The derivative of the world’s population is declining rapidly.
But also, population growth is not distributed equally; population may be growing in some areas while declining in others.
It’s pretty clear there’s a strong negative correlation between population growth and wealth, and as more of the world becomes wealthier, there’s a predictable trend.
I’m not sure why you think reducing population is a good thing? I guess it depends what values you hold.
@benshindel "But also, population growth is not distributed equally; population may be growing in some areas while declining in others."
Surely this means that the issue isn't then population collapse, but a failure of society to adapt to a stabilizing population, or a global population that has growth that needs to be redistributed.
@Snarflak to add to what @Bayesian said (although what Bayesian said is like probably 80%+ of it), growing population can attract investment both domestic and foreign. Manifold is a prediction market game, so it should be clear to the people here that if you're anticipating that this country will double its workforce SoonTM that people would want to invest in that. @Bayesian I think that might be somewhat of a factor in the fast economic growth bit you mentioned too.
Additionally that's just productivity stuff we're touching on. If you're talking just "economic growth," then even if you throw out all that and assume productivity stays the same, more people = more stuff done. If the world had a population of 200, even if all of them were mega-geniuses, we're not out here sending people to the moon. Sorry guys.
@benshindel I changed my vote mainly for the above-mentioned reason that it's definitely not population collapse we're talking about but rather declining birthrates. Other questions here have been voted down for smaller nuances in wording
The derivative of the world’s population is declining rapidly.
Which does not mean that the population is collapsing, but that it is growing. You understand that, right?
@Snarflak I don’t believe musk is saying the population is CURRENTLY collapsing, but that it will at some point.
If someone said that we should be more worried about nuclear war, would you say “you do know that we’re not in a nuclear right now”?
@benshindel "I don’t believe musk is saying the population is CURRENTLY collapsing, but that it will at some point."
Yeah, but this is a stupid, unfounded assumption, is the entire point.
I don’t believe musk is saying the population is CURRENTLY collapsing, but that it will at some point.
The way he talks about it, I wouldn't be surprised if he actually believes that it is currently declining.
Surely this means that the issue isn't then population collapse, but a failure of society to adapt to a stabilizing population, or a global population that has growth that needs to be redistributed.
If making a country more developed means that its birth rates decline, then eventually the population will be declining everywhere as the whole world becomes developed. Then there will no longer be any growth to redistribute.
@PlasmaBallin That's a stronger statement - you're not merely arguing that current trends about some countries having low birth rates and others having high birth rates will hold, but that the various options I mentioned before, societal shifts that may occur, actively will not happen. Which is a tremendously strong statement, given, again, that we know that the declining rates come from people having more agency. See, for instance, the fact that declining rates in the US come predominately from immigrants rather than native born citizens, or how the steepest declines come from women <30, who now have choices they didn't have before.
This just isn't a hard mystery. We know what the problem is. If we think it's a problem we can take some pretty easy steps to begin to fix it. So it's clearly not something we should be much more worried about.
LOL at "preventing climate change" being a serious argument as to why humanity should self-destruct. Even from a secularist perspective, there's no way that climate change can be a top-10 issue, let alone more important than population collapse.
The solution is pretty simple: ban abortion and contraception. But neither Elon nor Trump have the spine to come out and say it.
@stardust "The solution is pretty simple: ban abortion and contraception."
See @PlasmaBallin ? It's explicitly about removing autonomy from women. It's this autonomy that threatens them, and they'd rather remove it than make simple societal adjustments that might help out. (Expanded CTC, paid time off, free childcare.)
@Najawin Agree with all the policies you listed, but using The Most Extreme Extremist In Bizarro World as an example doesn't correspond to any point that you could make except maybe about neo-Nazis or Posadists.
Expanded CTC, paid time off, free childcare
Don't all of these simple adjustments count as caring about population decline if they're done in part for the purpose of preventing it?
@Najawin I agree that Vance and Project 2025 care about it insofar as mostly an abortion thing. But I don't think that the two are necessarily linked. Think the perspective that Plasma is coming at it from is that this is an issue where the political right is accidentally correct. For example, up until 10 years ago, most of the political left was irrationally against nuclear energy. Does that mean that pushing for pro-renewable energy policy means that you've just been got by Big Wind to destroy their competitors? No, we should do both.
@PlasmaBallin See, again,
"We know what the problem is. If we think it's a problem we can take some pretty easy steps to begin to fix it. So it's clearly not something we should be much more worried about." [Emphasis present in the original.]