Been a crazy week y'all! Resolving now to "He'll perform somewhat well, better than his ABC interview".

Some insight into our reasoning after much deliberation:

This market was close. Both "He'll perform somewhat well, better than his ABC interview" and "He'll perform somewhat poorly, but still better than the debate" seemed like reasonable interpretations. To resolve it, we combined our observations of the debate itself and media reactions. Neither were strongly in one direction. While most of the press conference was reasonable and coherent, the large error drew very disproportionate attention, and it's not obvious how to weight those. And observers, often based on their priors, weighted them very differently.

Divided reactions were a big theme in reporting. "The president’s remarks on foreign policy became a Rorschach test for allies and experts." "Biden's performance at an hourlong press conference Thursday produced opposite reactions". "It was, as one House Democratic aide put it, a “Rorschach test.”" Some articles and commentators praised it as lucid with a few mistakes, others highlighted the (very notable) mistakes and claimed the lucidity was overstated.

Most measurements, whether subjective or objective, have components of signal and noise. If the linked multiple choice market "What will Biden's approval rating in August be" has a "true" value right on the edge of a bucket, the noise due to the limited sample size of all polls will determine the outcome. Resolving this market was tough for that same reason, and it's inevitable it'll happen sometimes.

Watching the debate itself, the three of us were conflicted! During the ABC interview, most of Biden's responses were coherent, but objectionable on the basis of content, his reasons for staying in the race despite his age. His foreign policy thoughts were still coherent and inherently less objectionable. But calling his VP "Trump" was a glaring mistake worse than any he made during the ABC interview, one emphasized by calling Zelenskyy Putin earlier in the day. Combined with many verbal stumbles and a visibly aged demeanor, it's one that might lead an ordinary president's press conference to "mostly poor".

And the media reactions were mixed. It not being obvious which bucket they supported more after a quick look, we made a somewhat comprehensive list of around 50 written reactions to the debate, and scored them in decimals for the option they supported, with 2.5 as the midpoint between option 2 and 3. The simple average was 2.46, and under various methods of slicing and dicing the average was generally around 2.4 - 2.45. (At that point, arbitrariness in the way we selected the articles is a big factor). Which aligns with the percieved closeness of resolution, but does point towards "mostly well".

That pushed two of the resolvers over to the second option, which is the resolution.

@Joshua @SemioticRivalry @jacksonpolack with the assassination attempt in the news, there is going to be basically zero additional press coverage of this press conference to influence the resolution. Do y'all have a timeline on resolution by chance?

Did I imagine it or did he call somebody else "commander in chief" (before correcting himself)? If he did then I'd consider getting both the vice-president and president scrambled in his head along with the number of "anyway" lost thoughts and general weirdness as "at debate performance". Media reactions are better than debate so I think this resolves based on moderator opinions.

Are you guys going to broadcast your decision making on this week's Manifold Live?

I blame eigebrobot for the confusion here. He was tweeting that Biden looked terrible, but that's just not at all true relative to the debate and Stephanopoulos interview. He was cogent, the gaffes were just name mixups instead of 5s of jibberish, and he had moments of real energy. Clear step up from previous appearances.

People have to remember how hard he's trying. He may be too senile to be president, but all we can ask is that he give it his best effort.

😆

Perhaps this was an example of... his goodest job?

He did the good-ass job he could do.

I gotta take eigenrobot’s side on this one, I’ll be honest. I think the bar is just on the floor after the debate.

This market also depends if we are accounting for expectations. For this conference expectations were lower than the ABC interview, and imo he did outperform by filibustering through foreign policy talking points he is comfortable in.

The misnaming gaffes aren't as politically disturbing as the whole if I gave it my best, that's what counts position, and much better than giving your opponents a clip of you saying you finally beat medicare

I think the bar should be set at what you would expect for an average "world leader".

Do you think Xi, Ursula, Keir or Vladmir would have performed better or worse?

The option is literally "He'll perform somewhat well, better than his ABC interview".

That does not say "He'll perform somewhat well, as goodest as Xi, Ursula, Keir, or Vladmir".

I thought it went ok due to this market. Just watched it. He looks and sounds awful. Not much better than the debate. “By the way, remember how I got so roundly criticized for being so pro-union - not labor, union. Well guess what. I’ve been the most pro-union-labor president in history. Not a joke.” He leaked his system prompt.

I’ll zig back to somewhat poor because surely >30% the mods saw what I saw.

Leaving aside cognitive decline, was his former self likeable at all? The few obviously cherrypicked clips I saw make him seem really unlikeable. Maybe his only window was actually when he was old enough to appear unthreatening but not too old to appear cognitively impaired.

Yeah, sort of. He had a Mr Smith goes to Washington vibe. I don’t find young Joe threatening.

@ElmerFudd What exactly is wrong with clarifying that he means pro-union and not just pro-labor?

Labor and union are synonymous in this context. Sounds like his staff drilled him on saying union instead of labor and he couldn't help but say it and then leak their instructions.

Ah, okay, I understand your point now. But I don't think they're exactly synonymous - to me it just sounded like he was deliberately emphasizing his support for unions.

For what it's worth, he said the same thing at his rally today - "it's not labor, it's union". And that was with a teleprompter, so it's definitely on purpose.

Hard to benchmark this performance between somewhat well and somewhat poorly. The Vice President Trump gaffe was hard to forget. Answers were not coherent.

How does he performed somewhat poorly, better than his ABC interview resolve?

imo, ABC interview accelerated concerns, while this conference decelerated

Feel like this markets always just resolve to the highest percentage, since that’s how the majority felt it went.

This interview didn’t tip the scales at all, the democrats who want him out still want him out and have a bunch of gaffs to point to, the people who want him in can easily shrug it off since he didn’t make any major blunders

Slightly decelerated, maybe. I dont envy the deciders of this market or Nancy Pelosi / whoever decides how to move forward

New conspiracy theory unlocked:
Joe Biden has an incredible ability to hop from one train of thought to another; with zero regards to perplexity. What he is really doing is speaking in a cryptographic sequence in order to speak truth past all the bots that have been invading our spaces. Why do you think all the successful politicians are seemingly incomprehensible, like trump and RFK? It's to throw off the AIs.