I've decided to apply @jacksonpolack's suggestion of resolving the market N/A. I apologize to traders who tied up their mana in this market, or who spent time trading.

@Nick332 unfortunate :( I thought it was pretty clear in the way you wrote it

@Nick332 Nah it was funny, I don't understand how people can decide not to read resolution criteria on an obvious joke market and then get mad over it but this won't be the last time

It's not obvious that it's a joke market unless you actually read the whole (very long) description. When I first saw this market, I assumed that Vivek had a history of talking about Vivec and that was just a thing for him. That was before I noticed that Vivec was from Morrowind - which I only just noticed literally as I was writing this comment, even though I was buying YES ages ago. The description is very long and even if you read that bit, people might just assume Morrowind is an ancient historical city or whatever.

If the question had generally been written to make important context clearer, then it would have been both a funnier joke and a fairer market, imo.

@Nick332 (boooooo)

@jack nah

Vivek already said "in the middle of", "the head of the", and "the people of this" in the first debate. It seems quite likely that he'll hit it again in the second round.

Does this count four-word strings that could have come from any source, like "but also as the" or "it can sometimes be," or would it have to be a string that's (probably) unique to the 36 Lessons like "love supplies approximately thirteen?"

@evergreenemily Those count.

https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Community-Guideline-f6c77b1af41749828df7dae5e8735400

Users don’t maliciously take advantage of ambiguity, loopholes, and technicalities, at the cost of others. This is especially true if they are the market creator.

Exactly nobody would expect that "it can sometimes be" counts as a quote from the lessons of vivec, or whatever. This market breaks the community guidelines as it stands

@jacksonpolack Have you read them?

The lessons of vivec or the community guidelines? Regardless, four modifiers or connectives in a row do not count as 'quotes' by any common-sense meaning of the word. This is basically a levi market.

@jacksonpolack The lessons of Vivec.

Yes? If he says "He was born in the ash among the Velothi, anon Chimer, before the war with the northern men", that should count. If he says "We should DEFEND OUR NATION before the war with CHINA", that obviously isn't a quote from the lessons of vivec, even though it satisfies your four word criteria

@jacksonpolack I don't really know what to tell you. The four word criteria has been in the market from day 1. This basically amounts to a criticism that I should've written a different market.

I'm willing to consider changes to the market, but I'd like you to take a less confrontational tone, and consider that there may be ambiguities present in other phrasing of the market. (eg. if I add a requirement that he subjectively intend it as an allusion, then I must decide what his internal state of mind is, and bettors must guess about what my guess will be.)

Anyways, I'm going to go to bed.

There's an established precedent on manifold that market descriptions can't go entirely against the spirit of the title. Levi was sanctioned and temp banned for doing that a lot. What you're doing isn't fundamentally different from a market that says 'I'll flip a coin and resolve to that' and then, somewhere in a long description, says "the market actually resolves YES".

@jacksonpolack I'm going to go to bed; I have work in the morning. If you have a constructive suggestion, I'm willing to hear it.

This is a pretty funny larp, funnier than Levi's. You know what the 'right' way to resolve this is, though. "resolves YES if he says something that is clearly an intentional excerpt from The Lessons Of Vivec".

@jacksonpolack the title indicates a joke market, it's flagged as fun and the resolution criteria are clearly listed and separate from the text wall. Intentionality is never referenced or implied. I do think Nick should remove the part about achieving CHIM though, which is materially different from quoting from the Lessons.

It's a fun market, that doesn't mean the creator should be able to mislead people about the resolution. Dark Muckerberg is also a fun market, it still shouldn't resolve yes!

@Nick332 constructive suggestion is to replace "quote" in the title with "say 4 words from" or add "see description".

It looks like several bettors figured it out, but one didn't.

My claim is that all 20 no betters bet on the very unlikely prospect that he'd actually quote the lessons of vivek, as the title claims, and not on the overwhelmingly likely prospect that four consecutive words from one text will also occur in another randomly selected text, so just changing the title now is still very misleading!

I don't care about this market specifically, it's a more general claim that intentionally misleading markets are bad, and make the site less fun to use, and as levi demonstrated, allowing them at all means they're incentivized, and will explode in number.

Is it really good that I can - like - create a market that says "will Trump tweet "I LOVE CHINA"", and then in the description say "resolves YES if his tweets contain those words (they can be in different tweets)"?

Yeah, if you're going by these criteria the title is horrendously misleading. I 100% agree with Martin's suggested edit to the title.

My approach to "title and description contradict, should the title be changed, or the criteria be changed", is generally:

If the details in the market description are somewhat related to the topic at hand, and are, in princple, something worth betting on, then it's often better to stick to the description, even if some people were misled by the title. Could go either way.

But if the resolution criteria aren't actually related to the title, or the thing the question claims to be trying to predict, then changing the title screws over past bettors for no benefit, and the criteria should be changed. Then, whether it was intentional or not, nobody's gaining from participating in the market, or predicting anything of interest.

The market would have 3 total traders if it explicitly announced the four word overlap rule, and the four word overlap rule essentially guarantees it resolves yes, as it would for any two randomly selected english texts of sufficient length (and indeed as it did for the last debate and the lessons of vivec). So there's no signal whatsoever here. My guess is the author intentionally phrased it like that, along the extended quote and exposition in the description, to reduce the chance people would notice the four word thing. Encouraging that is bad!

It should probably resolve N/A tbh, as people have bet on it in both interpretations.

@MartinRandall Thank you; applied.

@Ramble TBH the part about achieving CHIM was an afterthought when writing the question. I was trying to close the loophole that Vivek might learn about CHIM from a different source, like Molag Bal or Talos.

Did you, when you created the question, expect it to resolve YES by default despite him not actually intending to quote the lessons? I don't think changing the name is enough, given a majority of existing bettors bet on the question 'will he quote <fictional text', instead of the question 'Resolves YES'

@jacksonpolack You can read my thought process in creating the market in the thread below this one. It's a copy of Steve's plus some changes with the intent to re-balance this closer to a coinflip. My personal preference is that markets with 97%/3% odds are uninteresting to bet in. It's boring to spend 100 mana to shift the probability from 3.0% to 2.9%.

My personal preference is that markets with 97%/3% odds are uninteresting to bet in.

It's fine to make markets with bizzare conditions, it's just against the Manifold guidelines to make markets that are actively misleading because you find certain markets uninteresting. It's not just that the title was misleading. The old description could've explicitly noted that the market was effectively a coinflip - instead, it buried the 'four words' qualifier under a paragraph of excerpt. And then twenty people bet on the market believing that it had something, at all, to do with 'the lessons of vivec' specifically, on the grounds that the market title had some meaning! It's not good practice to do things like this, and it makes manifold incrementally less fun. When people have done this in the past, casual users have consistently been frustrated. N/A is the right resolution here, recreating it if you want.

Also, the probability isn't that close to a coinflip. For the first debate, my script found the following:

in the middle of
for a long time
the middle of a
and i am the
the head of the
the people of this

He's going to use one of these phrases again!