See here:
If Kickstarter cancels the fundraiser, withholds funds or otherwise interferes, or forces concessions on the creators, this resolves YES
Dec 11, 8:55pm: Will Kickstarter interfere with or cancel the unstablediffusion Kickstarter? → Will Kickstarter interfere with or cancel the unstable diffusion Kickstarter?
Related questions
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ165 | |
| 2 | Ṁ157 | |
| 3 | Ṁ101 | |
| 4 | Ṁ6 | |
| 5 | Ṁ5 |
So here's a fun question for how Manifold Markets should work. I made a few modest hedged bets both ways on this as it was going, and made a small net profit.
Then I came back to close the market just now based on the recent news, and realized that it was within a few percentage points off from 100% (98.5% I think). So I just dumped LITERALLY ALL MY MONEY into it to bring it up to 99.99% and then hit resolve. Return % was low, sure, but I made instant free manifold money for no risk.
How does everyone feel about this?
On the one hand, generally when something's a sure thing, you want a prediction market to close that distance out all the way to 99.9%. That incentive is a good thing because a prediction market's purpose is to provide good information.
However, on Manifold, where the creator has the full ability to resolve a market, if you are a better who didn't create that particular market, dumping all your money in on something whose resolution criteria has already obviously passed and is now a "sure thing" is still risky, because the market creator could go rogue at the last moment and resolve against you (a small risk, but maybe not one to bet all your money on).
Of course, because I am the resolver here, that risk to me is zero. The only risk I sustain from exploiting little things like this is potentially to my reputation -- which of course is the site's real currency, and something I don't want to undermine. But if I do things in a way that doesn't work against the true resolution criteria, and supplies an extra little bit of juice to the underlying information being provided, is this just a good thing Manifold norms should encourage? Or is there some problem I've overlooked?
Because if norms prevail that this is Not a Problem, everytime I have a market I need to resolve and it's not closed out at 99.9% certain yet, then why wouldn't I pick up some free money on the close. I suppose this would eventually send a signal out to anyone who trusts me to JUST DO THIS THEMSELVES before I close out the market.
So... seems like a good and normal thing? But let me know what y'all think.
@StevenK Okay! So consensus looks like this is a norm people are okay with but maybe newbies will get annoyed if they see it.
@LarsDoucet That sounds right to me. I do still think the time delay factor makes it a pretty big advantage.
@LarsDoucet There tend to be a lot of markets that are at 99% when they're virtually 100% certain to resolve YES, because people don't know when they'll be able to get their mana out. In an extreme case, if you controlled a hundred of those markets, you could multiply your mana by a pretty large factor by resolving them all, without knowing anything that everyone else didn't.
@StevenK Gotcha. Things like, "will the human race be eradicated by a race of uplifted sentient platypi." Pretty sure that's ~0%, but we won't know for sure for some time.
@StevenK In practice it feels like kind of an accidental subsidy to market creators, a "victory lap" of sorts. Which if it motivates people to actually close out their markets in a timely manner, isn't necessarily a bad thing.
@StevenK What it DOES mean is that prediction profit on markets you DIDN'T create is probably a more meaningful accuracy metric than prediction profit on markets you DID create (and the two mixed together).
It motivates people to resolve their markets at a time when the price isn't too close to 0 or 100. Being quick is one thing that sometimes helps there. I guess the evil way to do it would be to create a lot of doubt about when you're going to resolve, so traders take their mana out because of the opportunity cost.
@StevenK Yeah, and that will come back to bite you in the end. On most of my markets there's not much meat left on the bone by the time I realize its time to resolve, it's already been cranked to 98.5% or 1.5% or whatever. The only profit margin I'm able to make is by just dumping literally everything in to pick up some free tens of mana.
@LarsDoucet I think Manifold has a lot of flaws that need fixing. The creator having full power to resolve as they please is really risky which means no real skin in the game for traders as no one wants to risk losing based on a creator's judgment call.
@TimothyKassis Also isn't unreasonable to think that a market creator should not be allowed to train on their own market?
@TimothyKassis I agree with you on both creator resolution and creator trading, but most here seem pretty attached to these things.
@TimothyKassis "I think Manifold has a lot of flaws that need fixing. The creator having full power to resolve as they please is really risky which means no real skin in the game for traders as no one wants to risk losing based on a creator's judgment call."
I mean this is basically an experiment where we can see how big that risk is in practice, no? I could have made a lot of money just now by just resolving completely the opposite, and yet I didn't do that. If I kept doing that, how long would people keep betting on my markets for?
I'm quite sensitive to the theoretical objections to Manifold's designs, but I'm much more interested in the empirical results of how many of those fears actually come to fruition. We should ask Manifold to publish some data on a lot of the "fundamental design flaws" fears versus how much that actually seems to happen in practice so far on this platform.
@TimothyKassis There's an ad hoc little badge (the check mark) which I think manifold staff assigns to people, but it's quite binary.
@LarsDoucet Unfortunately, it takes on the order of 100 correctly resolved markets to establish that someone's risk of misresolving a market is under 1%, and few market creators have correctly resolved that many.
@StevenK I think delegating resolution to, say, a council of three particularly trustworthy people would qualitatively improve the Manifold experience. They could still follow the market creator's advice on resolution in cases where it was marked in advance as subjective.