You can submit any market here which did not resolve before 2023, in which Manifold looked dumb but the market was still a good market(we want more markets like it).
This is a test market for a potential series of Manifold Awards.
The loose plan is to resolve to a panel of TBD manifold user judges, who will choose amongst the markets that are submitted as options here. The winner selected by a vote of the judges will resolve to Yes, and all other options will resolve to No. I'll update the resolution criteria as more details are decided.
My general rubric is that resolution for this award would be based on an approximately equal weighting of:
How dumb the manifold community looks in retrospect based on the market's price (accounting for if we had a good excuse to look dumb)
How much we want to encourage market creators to create more markets similar to the market (for a fun user experience and to encourage valuable predictions, not for virality/site growth)
But this may be updated to better fit the spirit of "Best market where Manifold was really dumb".
I have put in some obvious candidates(POTY, Spanking, LK99), but as one of the potential judges I will note that I think there probably better, non-obvious candidates which could beat any of these. While a market with very few traders probably won't win, a medium-sized market could certainly beat one of these massive markets, as I don't intend to give points just for virality.
I will not bet in this market as long as I plan to be a judge, and will try to keep my opinion private on which answers I think are best.
However, I will be only one of several people judging the resolution, so don't bet too much based on your model of me. I encourage you to make the case for your favorites in the comments.
1,000
1.00@FergusArgyll I absolutely agree, I think that Manifold has a big blind spot in this area. I feel like markets about AI being acknowledged outside of the tech community are consistently too high.
@Shump Yeah I think it's easy to say it should never have been above 1% in retrospect but there was a lot of confusion in the initial reports.
@Shump Similarly I think a lot of the other options (POTY, Aella, Speaker) were just extremely hard to predict and I think Manifold did do a decent job. It's just that the world sometimes throws curveballs at you.
@Shump On the other hand, some markets like the Abrams tanks I just added, just sit at almost certainty forever, for no good reason. Or something like the GPT 4.5 market, where people were trading on completely bullshit rumors.
Aella spanking is extremely underrated - we made a collusion cartel to supposedly "share" the profits from the bots buying NO, which turned out to be an absolutely terrible decision. We simultaneously had high-minded moral drama about if what we were doing was "ethical". Then Aella basically trolled us for the next 2 days while those who found the real data online tried to sucker others. All over a market that wasn't even forecasting the future.
@DanMan314 This market must have been hilarious as an inside joke, but zero new users are going to care about it. It just bolsters the impression this place is a self-regarding snoresville. Which may not be wrong, but if true, is unsustainable.
@DanMan314 I'm going to qualify that. Maybe new users who want to be spanked by Aella etc. might care.
@ClubmasterTransparent An interesting dilemma, are we trying to sell the website or choose the best dumb market of the year? I wonder if there are any magazines who had a similar dilemma
Were we really that dumb in the house speaker market? I would actually advertise it as a success, it was an insanely chaotic event and the market reflects that, but nothing feels that stupid.
Scalise topped out around 85% at a time when the overall consensus was that he was a lock, Mike Johnson would not have even made most people's radars and he was consistently trading >1%, and the market basically correctly identified that Emmer was never going to make it.
How dumb the manifold community looks in retrospect based on the market's price (accounting for if we had a good excuse to look dumb)
To elaborate on this and play Manifold's advocate, one might say for the examples I put up that we had the following excuses:
Person of the Year: Manifold had Taylor Swift at #2, which isn't that bad.
LK-99: Existing manifold users were confident the market should be lower, they just didn't have enough mana to stop the flood of twitter users buying yes. Some users also let the market get high on purpose to buy in at the best price and get the most profit.
Aella Spanking Market: For most of the population boys are spanked more than girls, and Aella's survey reporting otherwise was a very surprising result that polymarket also failed to predict.
Not saying any of these excuses are necessarily good excuses, just giving examples.