Did Scott write the Njal's Saga book review?
126
4.9K
1.9K
resolved Sep 15
Resolved
YES

Scott's implies he may have written one of the contest books reviews this year. Did he write this one?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga

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predicted YES

[admin resolved]

predicted NO

@SG not that I mind, but I thought admin resolution was for cases where the original market author wasn't resolving it in reasonable time? I had like ten minutes!

@ShakedKoplewitz lol @SG getting ahead of himself

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@DavidChee (I think he only did it because he wanted to screenshot the market as resolving YES for a Twitter post)

predicted NO

I'm getting a lil concerned about @SG's descent into tyranny 😨

predicted NO

Answer is officially Yes:

sold Ṁ78 of NO

I still think the voice is off, but in combing through for clues I noticed an occurrence of spaced ellipses—". . ." as opposed to serial periods "..." or the single unicode character "…". These are rare in other posters but, apparently more common in Scott lately.

bought Ṁ10 of NO

If the Stanford admissions essay market taught me anything, it’s that people are bad at telling who wrote something on voice alone.

bought Ṁ100 of YES

Pretty sure he did.

The sections are separated by Roman numerals followed by a dot like he does, there's a bunch of rare words ("efflorescence") and phrasings ("insane moon X") that he's used before. and references to specific things he's written about ("one of those duck-rabbits"), and capitalization of Important Concepts. Not to mention the frequent "microhumor" he's fond of utilizing.

predicted YES

@JensGoldberg Quality analysis right here.

predicted YES

@JensGoldberg The humor's a dead ringer, e.g. the exaggeration for comic effect in that description of the typical icelandic feud

bought Ṁ35 of YES

@MichaelWheatley My gut said the same thing

predicted NO

Does anyone know when the book review contest is scheduled to end? I should extend this market, but don't want to extend it past the point where the actual information will be out.

predicted NO

@ShakedKoplewitz I think there are 5 weeks of posts left then maybe 2 weeks for voting?

@Cytokine sounds about right. Extended 5 weeks from today (Hopefully there should be info about voting shortly after the last review, might extend this further depending on that). Either way, I'll close it before official confirmation comes out.

predicted YES

@ShakedKoplewitz what's the reason to want it closed when the word comes in?

predicted YES

@MichaelWheatley It rewards the people who spend all their time online or use a bot, when the intent is to reward predicting ability.

predicted NO

@MichaelWheatley I want people to be comfortable putting limit orders without having to worry about fully-informed adversaries.

bought Ṁ100 of NO

Am I crazy? I thought this was one if the poorest reviews to make the finals, suggesting that if Scott wrote it, he was drunk at the time.

predicted NO

@AlQuinn Alicorn bought a 1k stake in 'yes' and could very well have insider info, otherwise I would have continued betting down.

predicted NO

@Frogswap I too dumb to know who alicorn is. I stand by my review of the review, however!

@AlQuinn He could be sandbagging to avoid winning his own contest.

predicted NO

@Tossup I reread the review and it's not quite as bad as I remembered. I think what triggered me was the incredibly stupid decision to include that annoying YouTube video.

predicted YES

@AlQuinn that video was hilarious

predicted NO

@hmys it was sort of a "Calvin and Hobbes" video for me then (something a reasonable number of people like which I find worthless)