Following reporting, this market resolves YES if the Labour Party have u-turned and confirmed by market close that the WFA will be available for winter 2025. Does not require legislation passed to resolve YES, a press statement is sufficient.
Increases to means-tested pensioner payments or other related benefits will not trigger a YES. It must be a full cancellation of the previous revocation, restoring the WFA policy and keeping the payment at a similar level to it was previously.
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I'm not trading on this market because it's probably going to involve a subjective resolution, but right now this seems incredibly high? As per the description, this requires a full revocation and return to universal WFA. Right now Labour are talking about an increase to the number of pensioners receiving fuel payments through what sounds like tweaking the eligibility criteria, which is a pretty clear NO resolution unless something changes.
@Noit Seems like a slightly unfortunate clash between title and description. I think it's reasonable to say that what they announced in June is a "U-turn", but I agree with you that it clearly shouldn't count per the description.
Given that they've already announced a massive climbdown, it seems very unlikely to me that they'll do a second climbdown and go all the way back to how it was before. My true estimate for this market is 10%. I think the only reason I'm not betting it down that far is because irrationally it feels a bit scary to move a market so much.
@Fion I've been thinking about this, because I do think you're right in it being something of a mismatch between title and description. What I was trying to avoid was any minor tweak being labelled by an overactive media as a u-turn. For example, if they'd rolled out additional support to low-earning pensioners then that would clearly not be a u-turn, but I'm sure that it would have been labelled as such by sections of the media.
I'll be honest that the level of reversion, even though it falls short of the full u-turn in the description, has surprised me, I didn't expect such a significant return to WFA payments, which might be part of the issue.
In similar circs next time I might do something like asking three matching questions. The first two would be "u-turn: is any change made to revert to previous state", and "u-turn: full return to previous state". Those would be relatively easy to resolve. Then the third one would be "u-turn: vibes-based, how close to the previous state is the u-turn" which I would then resolve to a vibes-based percentage of how much of a u-turn I think it is. But I don't generally like vibes-based questions so would have to think about that. I've just tested a ChatGPT "help me quantify this as a percentage" deep research and it's given me a score of 85%, which feels in the right ballpark, but I can imagine in other political manoeuvres assigning a specific figure could be much harder.
@Noit I like your idea of three versions of the question. Maybe in a single unlinked MC market. I think outsourcing the vibes-based version to AI is quite an interesting idea. You could put the prompt you'll use in the description box and maybe ask three different AIs (again, pre-registered in the description). It would be clear to everybody that it's woollier than the two extremes, but still have a bit of "objectivity" to it.
Of course, you can still do the vibes-based intermediate question (either outsourced to AI or based on your own judgement) in a binary way. Heck, if you felt like doing an experiment, there'd be little cost to doing 6-10 different versions in an unliked MC market:
Full return to previous state
Any change towards previous state
Binary vibes-based creator discretion
Resolve to % vibes-based creator discretion
Binary AI resolution based on majority vote of three AI tools with pre-registered prompt
Resolve to % based on mean of three AI tools with pre-registered prompt
Binary based on poll of manifold users
...
If you could get enough engagement, it would be interesting to see how similar/different all these versions are over time. If one was a bit of an outlier, that might be a sign it's not as useful as the others, and next time you could omit it.
It's always an issue with prediction markets that somebody designs a question that seems to get at the thing they're interested in, but then a scenario comes up that nobody really expected that drives a wedge between the intention and the resolution criteria. But I also think this is a big advantage of prediction markets, because the same dynamic happens in real life but nobody is forced to notice it in the way we're forced to notice it on Manifold. Winter fuel maybe isn't the best example because I'm pretty sure even the staunchest Labour supporter would call this a U-turn, but there will be lots of cases where some pundit calls it a U-turn and another calls it a refinement based on listening to public feedback. Before the fact, these two hypothetical pundits will make different "predictions", but they're not actually predicting a different outcome, because after the fact both of them will say they were right.
The art of prediction markets is to force people to make sure they are predicting the same thing.