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One approach would be to anchor it on your own judgement. For instance, you could ask "After six dedicated hours of study (using the comments to this question as a reading guide), what will I think is the most plausible answer to the question?" You could also provide a quick summary of your current thinking on the topic with a starting point percentage and maybe a few things that might change your mind if someone can show them conclusively.

This really seems like the kind of thing where, if it was admitting of obvious solutions, we probably would have found it by now as a society. Vibe is similar to, like, trying to solve the halting problem -- only that it's in the realm of epistemology, not mathematics, and therefore any ironclad proof even of its impossibility seems unlikely.

@Primer ?

@Traveel There's a reply from the market creator below suggesting a YES resolution

An important question which made me think about the problem from a new angle:

a) Expert consensus can be wrong or short-lived (Covid had at least some close calls in that direction). It would need to be a consensus holding for at least a generation, say 50 years?

b) I can't think of a good solution for markets like here at Manifold, but something like Metaculus could work if the community prediction were hidden. They do this for tournaments already.

@WinstonOswaldDrummond A possible manifold-ish implementation: The platform would need to make it possible to predefine resolution as N/A. Then it would be possible to immediatelly repay 100% of betors' investment as a loan, so the market would not lock up mana.

Not anything you could implement right now as a market though.

@Primer I like the idea of saying the consensus needs to be held for a given amount of time. It doesn't solve all the issues, but I think it'd be an improvement and I'll probably use it in the future, meaning this market would resolve YES.

If anyone thinks that's not sufficient to resolve YES or not actually an improvement, let me know.

@WinstonOswaldDrummond I don't have a stake in this market, but that sounds like just nibbling around the edges of the problem, and if it were me judging it I wouldn't think it would pass the "non-negligible" bar set by the resolution criteria. A faulty consensus held by poorly-selected experts can last a short or a long time. Waiting longer may help avoid views that swing with ideology from one election cycle to the next, but not much else IMHO.

@chrisjbillington "Non-negligible" is doing most of the work here. I would guess there are some people who don't trust "expert consensus" and who might predict otherwise or at all if the criteria of "expert consensus" would be harder.

Imagine:

Should prediction markets be used for political decisions?

With politicians as experts. This might resolve no next year, but yes after a waiting period of 50 years.

I do agree this is just a little improvement which might only interest a small percentage of bettors. Would 1% suffice for being "non negligible"? I'd say yes, but in the end it's a subjective judgement.

@Primer Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. Yeah, I guess non-negligible was too vague. I'm torn on what to do here because I can see the case either way, and I worry that some people will lose mana due to misunderstanding the criteria regardless of how I resolve it. Some options I'm considering:
1. Resolving N/A
2. Resolving based on a poll

I figure these options are also unsatisfying, and I'm not sure they're actually preferable to me just resolving to whichever I feel is most accurate at the time. What do you guys think is most fair?

I'm also happy to pay Primer (say, 50 mana?) as a bounty for the suggestion if this market resolves NO or N/A.

@WinstonOswaldDrummond Thanks for the heads-up. Don't worry about me, I just closed my position with a minor loss. Please don't put much thought into this. Resolution criteria are hard and this market didn't attract enough mana to justify spending much time on this. I was holding No myself after my comments, so I hadn't considered them nonnegligigle enough myself.

Also, I prefer to stay in my current league, that little loss might do the trick.

Multiple-choice markets tend to help with disambiguation, such as in the sense of "not clearly an outright yes or no, but with legibly distinct cases that can be broadly agreed upon".

@cloudprism Interesting. Could you give an example of how I'd apply this to one of the markets I linked to in the description? I'm still not sure how I could resolve it in a way that everyone agrees with that doesn't also make the market obvious/pointless (e.g. by having an option like "IDK" which doesn't add any information).

@WinstonOswaldDrummond "how many definitions of sentient" could be one way to look at it

@WinstonOswaldDrummond gotta break the question down into manageable components