bad n/a. what if walz dies or something? should've waited until election day

they could un-NA in that unlikely event, but it seems like such a longshot that it's better to NA based on the market description and free up people's Mana.

if Nathan says he wants everyone to wait until election day then mods/admins can reverse but locking up Mana for eventual NAs seems bad (and a lot of the people on this market weren't even on the shortlist, or wouldn't be considered)

@mods n/a except walz

All of them shouldl resolve to N/A now except of course Walz. What are we waiting for?

This is the most interesting market at the moment:

It's a poll, not a market, though.

For every market except for Shapiro, it's mostly a game of how many mana in fees someone wants to throw away to tell their preferred story, since there's no way to be profitable by correcting the other markets. For Shapiro, you can at least earn mana in expectation if you notice it's off by several percent.

That comment aged well...

If you're talking about my comment, then I think you're misinterpreting it. My comment didn't imply that only the Shapiro market had decent incentives for accuracy at that time because Shapiro was going to be the VP nominee. As I explained in the next thread down, it implied that only the Shapiro market had decent incentives for accuracy because other Manifold markets at the time had Shapiro as most likely by far to be the VP nominee. That created some arbitrage potential on this Shapiro submarket in excess of the site fees, in a way that barely applied to any other submarket here at that time.

(If you thought Walz's odds of being the VP nominee were underpriced at the time, the amount of mana you could make by correcting this market paled in comparison to the mana you could make in the markets about who would be the VP nominee!)

Fair enough.

Manifold's reference to this market in their Substack post amplifies my discontent with this market, especially because it turns out I materially shaped an entire section of the post for just the fees on 140 mana worth of trades.

The post gives the disclaimer that Romney's numbers shouldn't be taken at face value, but that same argument applies to basically every number on here: there's just not that much mana to be won in expectation by correcting imbalances in this market (and on long-shot candidates you're losing more in fees than you'd gain by correcting even major absurdities), and the visibility of the market makes it very appealing for activist traders.

(I note that several of these options are buttressed with large limit orders; in particular, @SemioticRivalry really wants to ensure that Josh Shapiro leads the main contenders.)

A few days ago, I saw Whitmer at 38%, thought "oh come on, someone's being silly, it's worth sacrificing a few mana to set that number to a sane prior", and spent 140 mana to bring it up to the 44% that the average VP candidate would get[1]. And that's where it was when the Manifold post cited the market to show that she was competitive with the main contenders; I suspect that they might have dropped the Whitmer section entirely had she been at 38% on this market!

If I were motivated by shifting the narrative rather than by correcting silly prices, it would have been cheap to push her up further, until other activist traders started getting into a tug-of-war. Because it's so easy to push agendas on a market like this (without the counterbalance of the sharps), I would discourage people from reading anything into the numbers here.

[1] At the time of the post, selling my shares would have dropped her down to 37%, so yes, my cheap contribution really did make the difference.

If manifold has markets that they want to cite in posts they should dump lots of liquidity into them early so that they're not so susceptible to tiny bets

Yes, i do think this market should try to approximate reality and I also like cheap shares. You caught me

@Tripping That would help in many cases, but not in a market with a bunch of long-shot conditionals! Since the sharps still have no incentive to participate, the market would remain a tug-of-war between activists/memelords.

@SemioticRivalry There's no need to be coy! Perhaps I should have said explicitly that I respect the hustle. You clearly like Shapiro (as is evident from your comments in this market), and you realized that you could buy objective-sounding media reporting (at minimum, it's likely that someone prominent will cite the market on Twitter) for the price of pennies in expectation, so you did.

I'm objecting to the game, not the player.

if you think that this market is getting to Kamala's inner circle and will have any effect on the selection process I think you're a bit out of touch, to say the least

It's more charitable, I guess, to say that you saw that it cost pennies in expectation to correct the market and ensure it reflects the truth that Shapiro gives Kamala the best shot. My implication about the market remains the same whether you're aiming to be epistemically cooperative or not.

I do think it has an epsilon effect on the decision, via people like Yglesias who might cite this market, and then via columnists influenced by Yglesias even if they don't cite the market. It's definitely a larger epsilon than one could get with a couple hours' effort in more standard ways.

I also find it amusing that in my complementary non-conditional market, the main activist distortion seems to come from Kelly fans, who've propped up P(Harris-Shapiro loses) and P(Harris-Kelly wins) to silly levels at various times.

You raise a fair point - it was a bit lazy of me to cite this market in the newsletter. My assumption when I did it was that Harris-Whitmer was a semi-plausible ticket a couple weeks ago, so at that point traders would've had an incentive to make it say something reasonable (whereas that incentive never existed for Harris-Romney). I also happen to personally agree with the market that the Harris-Whitmer ticket would be competitive.

It is true that "activist traders" can have a disproportionate incentive on markets like this, and they should be taken with a lot of salt. I'm not sure that Harris-Shapiro is really an example though; that is one of the most likely of these to resolve, so there's a clear incentive for that one to be accurately priced. Similarly with Harris-Kelly.

@Conflux There's not sufficient incentive for sharps to correct irrationalities in Harris-Shapiro or Harris-Kelly of less than 5%, though (look at the disparities between the various "who will be the VP" markets, and note that these conditional markets have 1/3 the mana incentives of the regular ones), and a small boost makes a world of difference when casual readers are going to simply look at the rank ordering.

yeah. I think the best takeaway from this market is “oh look they’re all basically the same (and maybe Shapiro’s a little higher)”

The choice itself doesn't matter much (Nate silver had VP effects at about 1% max unless you pick a disaster like Palin). What it implies about the attitude of the campaign says more, but we now have more information than we did about the campaign so it would update us less.

I was under the impression that your fees get refunded if the market is N/A.

The creator portion of the fees gets refunded, but the Manifold portion doesn't.

Interesting (and annoying). Thank you for the explanation.

Nate Silver concludes in his analysis that Shapiro can bring 1% improvement to win probability in expectation:

These conditions were satisfied in 427 of the 40K simulations, or about 1 percent of the time.

So in theory, if Biden had replaced Harris with Shapiro — ignoring all the other crazy reverberations that move would have had — he’d have increased his chances of winning the Electoral College by about 1 percentage point based on home-state effects. That isn’t nothing: if you consider this election to be existentially important, then even a 1 percent improvement is meaningful from an expected value standpoint.

This is for an average VP candidate from Pennsylvania. A governor with +30 favorability is clearly well above average.

Right and the favorability can help outside of one swing state too, but it helps setting a bound on the value of VP pick. 2 point boost relative to average candidate is my guess, max