I wish I understood the market creator's psychology. He says he's "certainly not the smartest person on Manifold" and his"phrasing could have been better"...

And he makes no effort to fix anything.

@PatrickKertz Any chance you'd be willing to add some resolution criteria to the description?

Exiting this market because the resolution criteria are extremely vague. This might not be a big deal if the question creator/resolver had a long track record of resolving hard-to-define questions in ways that satisfied consensus, but @PatrickKertz is new and their other questions seem to have similar issues.

@Jai I don’t blame you- I’m certainly not the smartest person on Manifold.

@PatrickKertz You could remedy this by specifying more precise criteria. One would be to pick someone who agrees to give their subjective confidence in "COVID-19 originated in a lab" at market close and say that this market resolves YES iff their confidence is >=95%. In a pinch you can nominate yourself for this role.

Alternatively, you could pick a consensus of media sources and resolve YES iff on the day of resolution a majority of them have published something (in news, not editorial) to the effect of "the scientific consensus is that COVID-19 originated in a lab".

The important thing is to pick a pre-defined, publicly-verifiable, specific and unambiguous resolution criteria, and state that in the description. And that can be your own judgement - but if that's what the resolution criteria is going to be, you should say so now.

In addition to providing clearer terms, this also resolves a large class of outcomes which don't appear to have an obvious resolution in the market as defined right now. For example, if the preponderance of expert opinion shifts towards "likely lab leak", would this market resolve yes?

Technically this can only resolve NO.

@LightLawliet Why? That sounds like a conspiracy theory.

@PatrickKertz Because something does not "become truth". It already is true or false, forever.

@LightLawliet What’s the public narrative right now? Is that the definitive truth? Or will more data become available in the future that rewrites the “truth”?

@PatrickKertz The public narrative has nothig to do with the truth. Regardless of the narrative, there is just one truth. That may be the narrative, it may not be.

@LightLawliet I interpret it as meaning a "socal truth" for example among some tribe, they believe the truth is "The world was created by X, Y years ago". It's a truth in their society. No reference to actual truth.

If so, then this would be about whether in some group (English language? The USA) the conventional truth will contain the Covid Lab Leak theory.

I am not making any absolute truth statements here (although I do believe some are possible to make).

@StrayClimb "Will it be accepted?" would be the better phrasing then. As you say, there is at least one truth statement we can make, so conflating the two is bad.

@LightLawliet

My phrasing could have been better.

How are you going to resolve this?

@peterpumpkin

When a reputable journalist delivers irrefutable facts I will resolve the question.