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Resolved to Austin by extrapolating from the current referral counts as of today, instead of end of July, because figuring it out from the past data was a bit too annoying.

(totally not because Austin was the one resolving this)

@ManifoldMarkets Should've resolved to BTE with 120+ referrals

@ManifoldMarkets So you can check through the API or something, but you forgot to check until three weeks later?

FWIW, I would have sold my @dreev shares if I knew the question would be resolved based on numbers three weeks after the fact. He picked up an early lead from proselytizing at a conference on the week referrals were introduced, but I didn't expect that lead to hold out long. (Even July 31st was pushing it).

@ian How many did BTE have at the end of July though? I can't remember when his big surge happened.

@ManifoldMarkets Pretty sketch resolution, yo. You shouldn't ask questions you aren't willing to do the work to resolve correctly. Who had more at the end of July, Austin or Dreev?

@ian Oh wait, BTE wasn't an answer so his referrals don't matter for this question.

I mean on one hand I'm sorry if I got it wrong - on the other, too bad, everyone on the core team had a chance to resolve it for weeks and nobody did

And I'd say let it be a lesson on how bad Manifold the product is at reminding people to resolve markets and also how hard resolving correctly is, because we weren't able to do a good job here ourselves

And I kind of defend the idea of resolving to MKT here - this means the community at large had a chance to set the probability differently, and the consensus at market close is that Austin (me) was in the lead, which was the other bit of data I took into account when resolving

@Austin "I will resolve 100% to whichever answer names the user with the most referrals out of all of the answers."

Words have meanings, dude. People placed bets assuming you would resolve how you said you'd resolve. If you were thinking about resolving MKT you should've given some indication of that before the market closed.

" let it be a lesson on how bad Manifold the product is at reminding people to resolve markets and also how hard resolving correctly is"

Don't really know what to tell you here. Don't ask questions you can't/don't plan to resolve properly?

I don't think anyone's majorly unhappy about or throwing a fit about this resolution - just pointing out that it was not a proper resolution and that it should make people less likely to trust the market creator to resolve properly in the future. That's kind of the whole thing you're going for with Manifold, right? Reputation based market creator reliability?

FWIW I think this resolution is certainly not ideal but also a reasonable best-effort without doing a ton of work, given that the resolution was already late. I agree that Manifold doing a better job of reminding authors to resolve is important, maybe I should start another instance of "Will Manifold send more than one reminder email to resolve markets by July?" https://manifold.markets/jack/will-manifold-send-more-than-one-re

@ManifoldMarkets You guys are putting a lot of trust in my comment, I did not do any research other than look at bte’s referrals and see a very big number. I didn’t also see this market said in July so it’s very possible bte didn’t lead then. If no one submitted the right answer that’s the bettors’ fault

I think there is a systems improvement that can easily help reduce late resolutions (and late resolutions often make it harder to accurately resolve, as in this example and many others where the underlying data changes over time).

And I also think the Manifold account has a poor track record of timely resolution - there's lots of past examples of this. It's not an attack on anyone personally, it's just a problem bettors will experience if they trade on markets created by the main account, which potentially worsens their experience on Manifold.

yup I’m +1 for more reminders. My original comment was just for posterity’s sake - like if anyone comes to this market you gotta REALLY check out BTE bc he’s killing it

In my view, the improperness of the resolution is not related to whether Austin was actually the right answer, but the methodology by which the author arrived at the resolution. Austin took a reasonable guess as to what the correct answer was based on the available information, but it wasn't known for certain what the answer was. And I think that's generally ok in many situations when it's hard to know the right answer. But reasonable bettors would have expected the question to be resolved on time based on the referral accounts maybe a couple days after the end of July, which would have avoided that entire problem.

BTE wasn't a valid answer so that wasn't a problem by the resolution criteria. But I suspect if BTE had been submitted as an answer he would have won - https://manifold.markets/BTE/how-many-referral-bonuses-will-i-ge was just before the end of July, I think BTE started getting tons of referrals at that point

Created here:

@MattP Look, I get that the process was not super ideal here. Some things I'd like to note:

• The main Manifold account suffers from bystander effect, since we can all create markets but no one has sole responsibility. And having interesting markets on the main account is a positive externality, but someone has to pay the cost of actually posting those, and then also resolving those.

• Specifically, I wasn't the one who created this question, and I was just kind of on a best-effort "resolve a bunch of things to return mana to traders" spree. Maybe that means I should have just left it to whoever asked it to resolve? Or N/Ad it? shrug.

• Basically nobody cared about this market; total transaction volume was M$740? and no one commented asking for a resolution, either at market close or weeks later

  • This wasn't part of my conscious decisionmaking while resolving, I don't think, but in the counterfactual world where there was tens of thousands of M$ and lots of comments, you can bet that either I or someone else would have been a lot more careful about resolving correctly

    • To be fair, there's also the Biblical view of “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much."

Anyways, feel free to update in any direction; I'll understand if you choose not to bet in my or @ManifoldMarkets markets as a result. That's one of the nice things about Manifold, you get to decide whose resolution policies you prefer!

All in all, I have enjoyed hearing all y'alls takes about how this market resolved, but my overall position remains "I think my actions were reasonable given what I knew at the time"

@Austin Hey man - like I said - not mad. Just noting for future reference. I do tend to take the view that from a creator reputation perspective it shouldn't matter how many bettors the market has, though I can understand how you'd look at that as at least a factor.

@Austin "Basically nobody cared about this market; total transaction volume was M$740? and no one commented asking for a resolution, either at market close or weeks later"

I cared. I had lots of dreev shares. I didn't comment out of politeness: I have lots of closed & unresolved markets and don't want to be pestering David about them constantly.

@Austin If markets were routinely resolved this way: abandoned for a month and then resolved according to a half-assed approximation of the resolution criterion instead of the actual one, I just wouldn't use Manifold.

Maybe you're not personally to blame, but then the blame just falls to whoever created the market with no intent to resolve it, or the whole team for running the official account on a tragedy-of-the-commons system.