🏅 Top traders

Polling bettors is tricky because they've all got skin in the game. (Myself included). If you were to conduct a thought experiment whereby you go back in time to the past self who created this market, and show that person the final result, how would they say you should resolve it?

Nope

Alright, everyone, that's it! Can someone confirm whether the following URL resolves on their end?

https://nomic.garden

If it does, what are your thoughts? Did I meet the requirements I laid out in my response to @JoyVoid?

See: https://manifold.markets/cos/will-i-launch-my-digital-futarchy-b#0qmzrID2UYk6FN8Jb4xm

@cos The page does do those things! Although it's not clear that it's actually representing the treasury and isn't just a placeholder.

@cos The market should still resolve NO because you posted it at 0:15 on Sep 1.

@horse I am afraid to admit that the treasury is truly, woefully empty. :(

@Yev Ah, but the site was up well before then! I stopped all development at midnight (I even had a little "git push" script running on a timer). Feel free to audit the timestamps yourself: https://github.com/nomicgarden/nomic

@cos Oh, you sneaky ba...d person! I was checking your personal github, I didn't realize you made a separate account for it.

@cos I agree it's a YES. I should have read all of your comments before betting :(

@Yev Haha, feel free to call me a bastard; smack talk makes the game more fun! That said, I apologize if I failed to be sufficiently transparent. You're right that I probably should have shared a link to the repository ahead of time, and I should have updated the top-level description after I hammered out the details with @JoyVoid. I'll make sure to do both in my next market!

@Yev @horse Thank you both for your feedback! Sounds like we've got a consensus of three leaning towards a "YES" resolution. Well, really two, given the incentives (I will go bankrupt if this resolves "NO"). I'm going to leave this unresolved for a while longer to give everyone else some more time to contribute their opinions.

@cos

Anyone who can tell a server to serve an HTML page could have thrown this together in 5 minutes flat! It's a YES.

@cos Definitely NO by market description. By comment thread by joy, I think it's still no, as I don't know that it conveys the "current" state of the treasury, and I'm also not clear that it conveys the state of the game.

That said, congratulations on doing something, and best wishes on part two.

@cos My two cents here is that, coming from a place of not knowing what a digital futarchy is, when I visit that site I still don't know what a digital futarchy is or if there's one in place on that site or what I'm supposed to click on to participate.

Disclaimer: I own a bunch of NO (at the time I was on day 3 of a coding project I told my wife would only tie me up for a hour and a half. Still in progress, of course)

@MichaelWheatley I thought futarchies were when decisions were made based on conditional prediction market outcomes, but the linked markets on the site are pure predictions: the only conditional market doesn't have a mirrored pair (?)

@cos I will not call you a bastard because the marital status of your parents has no relation to your moral character. You'd be dick either way :P

@MichaelWheatley It didn't show up because the mirrored market wasn't in the right group. I've added it, but it still doesn't show up on the website. That's sus.

That's because the market links are hardcoded in https://github.com/nomicgarden/nomic/blob/main/src/routes/index.svelte. And the treasury status is hardcoded in https://github.com/nomicgarden/nomic/blob/main/src/routes/treasury.svelte. I'm back to NO.

@Gurkenglas Yeah, you're not wrong! I appreciate the open textualism, though. On that note, I'm not sure whether we welcome Metaculus in this house, but I think this would resolve "YES" over there. In other words, I believe this market resolves "YES" by the letter of the law and "NO" only in spirit.

What does Manifold prefer? Are we originalists or textualists?

How should Nomic operate? (I'm leaning towards textualism.)

---

Running total: 4 YES / 0 NO

@cos I count two NO?

@MartinRandall Can you expand on the "NO by market description" so I might be convinced? Aside from that, good points on whether it literally conveys the "current" state of the treasury and the general state of the game!

As of right now, I think it does! And as of midnight last night, I believe it did so as well. The treasury is empty, and those markets are all that exist and all that are driving the behavior of the digital futarchy. In the final hour, I did worry about whether someone would donate money to Nomic or open additional markets before I had a chance to update the site.

Note the condition, "accessible on the public Internet at any point before August 31st, 2022" in the description. There's no mention of dynamic updates. This is merely supposed to be a web-based frontend for an abstract organization. Yes, I intend for it to become more complex, but as of right now, I believe it serves its function. I don't think there's much room for argument there, but please do correct me if you think I'm wrong!

---

Running references:
> The question resolves to "YES" if my digital futarchy is accessible on the public Internet at any point before August 31st, 2022.
> At the very least, users must be able to view the current balance of the treasury as well as markets related to the game/organization. Bugs are ok so long as they do not interfere with the core functionality of the website.

---

Running totals: 4 YES / 1 NO

@MichaelWheatley Thanks for responding! Should I put you down as a YES or a NO?

> My two cents here is that, coming from a place of not knowing what a digital futarchy is, when I visit that site I still don't know what a digital futarchy is or if there's one in place on that site or what I'm supposed to click on to participate.

This is very good feedback, thank you! However, I believe I'd be going back on some of the things I had said about the resolution criteria prior to market close if I were to consider this in my resolution. See the references below.

> I thought futarchies were when decisions were made based on conditional prediction market outcomes, but the linked markets on the site are pure predictions: the only conditional market doesn't have a mirrored pair (?)

Indeed! Although, I do intend to stretch the definition a bit. Regardless, Nomic does, in fact, meet your definition as that market does have a mirror (see below). It's been resolved since, by the book, futarchies ought to return money to consequentially irrelevant bettors when decisions are made.
---

---
> The question resolves to "YES" if my digital futarchy is accessible on the public Internet at any point before August 31st, 2022.
> At the very least, users must be able to view the current balance of the treasury as well as markets related to the game/organization. Bugs are ok so long as they do not interfere with the core functionality of the website.
---
Running totals: 4 YES / 1 NO

@MichaelWheatley P.S. Good luck on your coding project! What's it about? Can I see it? 🧐

@Yev Welcome back to the discussion!

> It didn't show up because the mirrored market wasn't in the right group. I've added it, but it still doesn't show up on the website. That's sus.

Hmm? All relevant markets are available in both #Nomic and #Nomic Garden. I made sure of this awhile ago. Let me know if you see fewer than 5 markets in either of those when filtering by "All" and sorting by "Newest" so I can submit a bug report.

> That's because the market links are hardcoded [...] And the treasury status is hardcoded [...] I'm back to NO.

Indeed! Everything is hardcoded right now. However, I never stated that the website must be dynamic (although I intend it to be dynamic at some point). In fact, being a game traditionally played over email, Nomic is almost never managed with any sort of dynamic frontend. I am in no way violating either the letter or the spirit of the game by manually pushing HTML to a webpage. Nay, I'm carrying on the tradition!

Alas, I shall change your vote from YES to NO regardless. Let me know if you change your mind again.
---
Running totals: 3 YES / 2 NO

@MartinRandall Sorry about the slow replies! I'm multitasking.

Let me know if you change your mind, by the way.
---
Running totals: 3 YES / 2 NO

@cos I'm abstaining due to my financial stake in the resolution. Which I don't always do, but here the answer is borderline enough that I can't trust myself not to be biased.

I was going off the title and description so I didn't see the comments with resolution clarification.

To my read, "users must be able to view the current balance of the treasury" is not satisfied by a static website. It seems to me that "current" most naturally means "as of the time the user is viewing" (with some allowance for things needing time to propagate). It could be "as of some fixed time" (when you write the words, or publish them, or when the market closes) but I think those are sufficiently unnatural meanings that they'd need clarification if you intended them. And I think "as of the time I most recently updated the website" is even less natural.

This kinda feels like... suppose you have a calendar website, and you say "the user must be able to see the current date". If it's just a static page, you could say "well at the time the market closed, it showed the current date, and in fact it still shows the current date". But I would consider that cheating.

(Disclosure, I have M$90 at stake here. I think I don't care enough for that to influence my opinion.)

@MichaelWheatley Ah, I'll mark you down as "N/A" then.
---

Running totals: 3 YES / 2 NO / 1 N/A

@PhilipHazelden I appreciate your discussion of the "natural meaning" of words! I wholeheartedly agree with the interpretation laid out in your first paragraph. However, I believe the analogy to a calendar website in your second paragraph is way off the mark.

At present, Nomic is organized as a sole proprietorship with its own little bank account (i.e., a disused checking/savings account at my backup bank) currently sitting at $0.00 (ignoring the minimum amount I maintain to keep it open). Since I posted this question, that amount hasn't changed a single cent. It is the current balance, and it's been the current balance for a long while now. Unlike the information provided by a calendar website, it is obvious that this information isn't updating frequently enough to warrant some sort of reverse-engineered dynamic API integration with my woefully antiquated credit union.

At present, hosting this treasury information is more like hosting a blog that I update whenever I experience significant life events. Unfortunately, those are fairly rare at present.

Given all of the above, how shall I mark you down?

(NB: I intend to resolve this relatively soon.)
---

Running totals: 3 YES / 2 NO / 1 N/A

@cos If you're going to resolve it by vote, note the option to go with 60% if it remains 3 YES to 2 NO :P

@cos I approval vote for N/A, NO, and all answers in the 1-40% range.
(do we need a futarchy market on what voting system Nomic Garden should use to resolve disputes?)

I'll vote N/A.

That said, I want to say NO, because it is not really something you can show to other without context, which to me was the question implied by the question. I'm not able to use it to really see how it works for me

Congrats on making it though, and best of luck for the rest :)

@cos

At present, Nomic is organized as a sole proprietorship with its own little bank account (i.e., a disused checking/savings account at my backup bank) currently sitting at $0.00 (ignoring the minimum amount I maintain to keep it open). Since I posted this question, that amount hasn't changed a single cent. It is the current balance, and it's been the current balance for a long while now. Unlike the information provided by a calendar website, it is obvious that this information isn't updating frequently enough to warrant some sort of reverse-engineered dynamic API integration with my woefully antiquated credit union.

So, a relevant thing here is that I didn't know this was actually a bank balance. I guess my opinion here is that "view the current balance" isn't implemented and you don't plan to implement it; what you actually have and want sounds like "view the current balance as-of the most recent manual update". But I agree that if I knew it was a bank balance that would only update rarely, your wording isn't that unnatural for it.

But also, I think my complaint about "current" also applies to the list of markets, and your argument here doesn't apply to that. Your wording was "users must be able to view the current balance of the treasury as well as markets related to the game/organization", which leaves open that "current" might only have applied to "balance of the treasury" and not to the markets, so I didn't lead with that one.

But like, my read of your comments was that a YES resolution would need two features to be implemented. In fact neither of them is implemented. You can argue for each of them that it wasn't technically needed. But I think to do so, you need a kind-of-weird reading for one ("current is okay to be a manual update in this context") and a different kind-of-weird reading for the other ("it doesn't technically say current markets").

At any rate I think I wouldn't have bet if I'd expected that you'd resolve a simple static website as YES.

Hm, okay. I still think I don't care much about M$90, but I do think I have some emotional stake. I don't claim to be unbiased. I don't know how I feel about getting a vote. But if I get a vote, I vote NO.

My take on the "current balance" and list of markets question is that although generally "current" can often just mean something is being updated reasonably often, in the context of a website, people are so used to websites tracking things with API calls that when they hear "current" they 100% take it to mean the content will be dynamically kept up to date..

@MichaelWheatley No. Your digital futarchy is not now accessible through the public internet, you did not build a digital futarchy at all. There is still none accessible.

At best there is now an analog futarchy run mostly in your own head, and a publicity webpage.

@Gurkenglas That's a good idea! I think that's what I'm going to do since I'm having so much trouble with this. I didn't intend this to be a "vote" per se, merely a means of quantifying feedback, but I must admit, I don't feel comfortable resolving either YES or NO given the all of the feedback, so your recommendation for resolving PROB sounds ideal.

@MartinRandall Approval voting is my preferred voting system! Well, really score, but that's a bit too complicated without proper tooling. You're absolutely right that this would make a good market for Nomic, by the way. You should make it! Anyway, I've marked you down as both N/A and NO.

@JoyVoid Thank you for the kind words! I'll mark you down as both N/A and NO following the approval system that @MartinRandall recommended.

@PhilipHazelden Thank you for the feedback! What I'm basically taking from all this is that I should have specified feature goals with as much precision as possible when I first posted the question. By leaving it as broad as I did, I risked misleading early bettors, and it wasn't until a week later that I provided additional specification in the comments. I've marked you down as a NO.

> At any rate I think I wouldn't have bet if I'd expected that you'd resolve a simple static website as YES.

This convinced me more than anything else. It seems many feel this way.

@hamnox Given that most of Nomic's actions have taken place and will continue to take place via Manifold, and Manifold is digital, I'd argue that Nomic is at least somewhat digital. Given the paucity of markets, though, yeah, it's more in my head than it is on the web.

Ideally, in the far future, Nomic will operate independently of where its markets manifest while curating all of that information in one place (i.e., nomic.garden). For now, Nomic exists almost exclusively on Manifold.
---
Final totals: 3 YES / 3 N/A / 5 NO
---
Resolution: ((3 × 1) + (3 × 0.5) + (5 × 0))/(3 + 3 + 5) ≈ 41%