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M’lady said discord said something something something kitten smfh

@chrisjbillington is a goofy nerd

https://manifold.markets/Pyra/will-my-pussy-in-bio-spam-stop-by-a?r=Qm95ZEthbmU

???

Huh, this was resolved by @chrisjbillington who also appeares to be the #1 beneficiary on the top trader list? That looks super sketchy no matter what happened behind the scenes

@JamesBakerc884 There was a vote in the discord, chris just pressed the button

@jacksonpolack I accept that information as true, which I also think does not contradict my statement.

@jacksonpolack But he brought the question up in the discord and mod shopped until he found 3 that would vote his way. One of the mods even originally voted the other way but was bullied into changing his vote.

@Parks I did not mod-shop, I picked mods randomly from the list of mods. Below is a link to the ChatGPT chat where I did so. One mod self-selected, and then I pinged others in the order that ChatGPT's Python program picked them, pinging the next if one didn't reply after a time. Then another user picked another mod. All up only one of the mods in the final vote was due to me, and it was properly random.

https://chat.openai.com/share/2b4ccd63-a7c2-4ff5-98cb-03ebc5c7a987

@Parks No-one was bullied into anything.

But he brought the question up in the discord

yes, that is how you'd expect that to work

mod shopped until he found 3 that would vote his way

no he didn't? NCY and Noa and Wie Dan are random choices. I volunteered separately and chose Semi after Noa and Wie didn't respond.

One of the mods even originally voted the other way but was bullied into changing his vote.

He initially had a 'tentative' opinion of N/A, which wasn't a vote. He then asked for more information, and after being provided that decided to vote YES. I don't see anything resembling bullying - I was also willing to change my vote to N/A for instance.

Wait what just happened. Re-resolving this in the opposite way seems pretty bad. Why would that not be an N/A if there's that much disagreement.

@JamesBakerc884 Without being specific to this market, I think it's good that "amount of disagreement" among traders isn't treated as an important metric, since everyone always talks their book. It's bad if people are incentivised to kick up a stink in the hopes they can get a market NAd. Though mods should of course factor in the arguments people are making.

@chrisjbillington I agree with you on the general principle, yet would also add a time factor to quelling "stinks". Isn't "getting a market flipped" even more extreme than "getting a market NAd" and thus this case flipping 5 days later incentivizes more future arguments?

@JamesBakerc884 It is more extreme, and again I didn't expect it, but that's what the voting mods decided. Nonetheless I don't think they should factor in "amount of disagreement" itself, as opposed to the arguments being made, and as long as they don't then no, there isn't any additional incentive for arguments.

Given the current rules, markets can be re-resolved, and the three mods that vote have to decide on an outcome unanimously, otherwise it gets NAd. So the rules are skewed towards NA by the fact unanimity is required for anything else.

@chrisjbillington I'm hearing that as you having an opinion that time shouldn't raise the bar for reversals. Ok. My personal opinion is the opposite, that the bar should be higher the more time passes. Just noting my opinion for any policy-setters reviewing this.

@JamesBakerc884 I see what you're getting at, but the discussion on discord (link) about resolution did begin right away, it just took this long for mods to respond and come to a decision. Randomly-chosen mods aren't always active, so they were given some time to reply, and then another mod picked if they didn't, then there was some discussion, so it took a while.

The three-mod vote system is new and I hope it will improve. In particular I'd like to firm up on how voting mods are chosen and how long to wait before picking new ones if they don't respond. Ideally random mods are good so that bias can't enter into how they are chosen, but in practice it should be mods that are active - perhaps "random out of the mods active in the last 24h" or something is a good rule. The more randomly chosen mods are, the slower they can be to reply. I likely could have picked mods to resolve this within a day, but that would have allowed bias to enter into the choice of mods, so I like the random approach. But it's slower because people aren't online.

It would be good if the platform could choose random active mods, give them a deadline to respond before picking others, give a deadline for voting, etc. Right now things are a bit ad-hoc and people don't know how long they should wait before pinging people again, picking new mods, etc. There is definitely room for improvement.

@JamesBakerc884 I'm confused, I still see the spam, and I don't know why it was resolved in this direction

@Lorelai whilst it won't affect the resolution of this market, out of curiosity could you link to some?

As for the rationale for (re)-resolving, see discussion downthread and specifically the discord discussion here:

https://discord.com/channels/915138780216823849/1224519850936762449

@chrisjbillington May I suggest exporting relevant discussion from discord? I think it's pretty bad from a transparency standpoint to have to sign up for a closed platform just to see the information you're citing.

I don't think I have an issue with the decision itself, but I can't be entirely sure.

I just want to comment, as a new user, that seeing how that mod discussion played out, plus really the whole discourse on this makes me pretty bearish on this entire operation.

First, as soon as April 1st afternoon passed, and there was any question as to the outcome, it should’ve resolved to NA. Both the messages themselves and the search behavior are ephemeral. It’s impossible to have a copy of the whole dataset as of that moment and the search API as it would’ve performed. As a result, any post-hoc analysis becomes more or less moot. Searching for a date of April 1 is nonsensical. The spam would’ve been removed by now, or at the very least, you can’t prove it wasn’t.

Second, the fact that a mod in a decision-making capacity even said this: “My first thought is that I feel uneasy having the deciding vote when two other mods agree it should resolve YES” makes the whole mods deciding framework seem totally bankrupt. For any chance of legitimacy, it has to be a blind vote.

All-in-all, I don’t really care about losing mana or whatever, but it just seems insane to me that the clear answer isn’t that it was probably (definitely?) poorly written and should just resolve to N/A.

@ColinD For the record, I agree (even though I gained mana from a YES resolution).

I think the discourse around avoiding N/A resolutions has gotten a little out of control. It’s not like… THAT bad to have some N/A resolutions, especially in cases like this with genuine confusion and ambiguity. What’s annoying are N/A resolutions in cases where, for lack of a better metaphor, there’s a preponderance of evidence on one side but not “beyond reasonable doubt”. Those should just resolve YES/NO.

@benshindel I generally agree that NA should not be considered the worst thing ever and reached for when things are unclear. And I was surprised the vote went for YES.

But I will add that whilst it's true spam will have been deleted by the time a search is run at a much later date, folk did searches both with and without keywords on the day this resolved, and found no spam. The most recent 100 replies did not show any spam of this kind when I searched on the day, and I don't know if I scrolled exhaustively to cover all of April 1st when using the creator's search term, but I scrolled for tens of minutes and saw only legitimate accounts using the phrase (as a joke or otherwise).

So whilst again I was surprised to see it go YES, and whilst I may have my biases because I bet YES, it kind of seems to me the preponderance of evidence was in that direction. Nobody showed any spam on April 1st meeting either interpretation of the criteria, and some were looking for it (I certainly was).

Both the messages themselves and the search behavior are ephemeral. It’s impossible to have a copy of the whole dataset as of that moment and the search API as it would’ve performed

You can filter by time in advanced search! I think I also did do such a search on that day myself and didn't see anything.

My first thought is that I feel uneasy having the deciding vote when two other mods agree it should resolve YES” makes the whole mods deciding framework seem totally bankrupt. F

Why? It's reasonable to believe that the process should be 'majority vote' instead of 'unanimous'. But we said he should vote on his genuine belief anyway even if that leads to an undesirable outcome.

but it just seems insane to me that the clear answer isn’t that it was probably (definitely?) poorly written and should just resolve to N/A.

A general principle of manifold questions at the moment, and for manifold's history, is that descriptions take precedence over titles if the description is somewhat reasonable.

A contributing factor for me is that the screenshot the creator posted as evidence was not, in fact, bot spam, it was real users joking.

@jacksonpolack

Filtering by time in advanced search is moot if the tweets in questions no longer exist (or have since been suppressed by change in search behavior). I’m not saying this is the case, but I’m saying it’s possible thereby making reproducing the original results impossible. Therefore, one must rely on screenshots and word-of-mouth.

As far as as the “majority vote,” sure that’s a system. I’m just saying as an unbiased way of deciding ambiguity it’s unquestionably inferior to a blind vote where each mod weighs the evidence independently. There’s a huge confounding effect knowing the other votes. If that’s the system, fine, but it reinforces my perception from this whole exercise that it’s really more about persuasion and who’s connected (by that I mean I totally doubt if it were I and not a mod “sounding the alarm” here it would’ve been taken seriously) and not truth-seeking.

Clearly, the intention here is that the original asker be able to neutrally decide in a timely fashion. The problem here was clearly in the original NO resolution. It probably should’ve been N/A if the asker couldn’t decide or if it did need to get kicked to committee, then unresolved while in limbo.

I’ll finally add, also giving feedback as a new user, it’s pretty annoying to get blindsided by something being overturned days later. If you’re not keeping up, it comes as a total surprise that it’s even in question. Pretty poor user experience. There should be a notification when something is called into doubt formally.