Preference for DALLE-3 blue grass green sky market
30
294
resolved Oct 19
N/A
Do not N/A
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To expand on my previous comment, there's a minor and a major reason resolving N/A is bad. The minor one is that's anticlimactic and throws away work that people did, since it unwinds all trades as if they never happened (including clawing back profits of those who correctly predicted a price movement and then cashed out -- which always surprises people). The major reason is that it can be unfair. This can be subtle but here's a nice extreme example to give the intuition:

Imagine creating a "Will aliens arrive by Christmas?" market. You dump all your money on YES. If aliens show up, resolve to YES, win big. If aliens don't show up, you start stirring up fairness concerns. It wasn't specified whether you meant extraterrestrial aliens. Etc. Get the debate going and then suggest that maybe the fairest thing is to resolve N/A. Everyone gets their money back, no harm no foul. But it was totally rigged! You made a big bet on YES and then found a way to weasel out of paying up when you were proven wrong.

It's not normally so blatant but, well, it's just worth having that in mind, that "just give everyone their money back, no harm no foul" is not necessarily correct. Maybe even be 🤨 at anyone making that argument.

I'm actually pretty uncertain though how to decide in any particular instance whether there's actual vs mere hypothetical/theoretical unfairness. Like in this case we all know that you asked a totally honest question and everyone bet according to their own interpretation of it and the ambiguities that were uncovered were (I think) no more likely to push us towards N/A depending on how the object-level question played out (how smart DALL-E 3 turned out to be, in this case).

So I won't actually suspect any kind of travesty of justice if this one resolves N/A. I just wanted to spell out the theoretical concern.

To review:

CONs of N/A resolution:

  1. Anticlimactic

  2. Throws away work people did trading in the market

  3. It's bad in principle

PROs of N/A:

  1. Untangling the ambiguities is exhausting, invidious work

  2. Even with the theoretical unfairness, it may be the least unfair thing to do?

  3. The market provided valuable information about a real prediction regardless.

(I guess that last one is a mix. The ultimate value of a prediction market is to see the market probability and how it evolves. The final official resolution doesn't change that or undo that value. Except for one minor effect: it sets a bad precedent that makes people less motivated to do the work to make the market probability accurate in the first place if they think N/A is likely.)

So tempting to vote for N/A because I think that's in my own interest but I'm sticking with my principles! In general I think it's worth putting in some work to untangle ambiguities and avoid N/A unless it's really necessary -- and definitely not just because traders are lobbying for it.