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New market with the same terms but for January: https://manifold.markets/harding/will-kilauea-erupt-in-january-2024#

Happy new year @harding, this was a really well-run market!

@chrisjbillington Thanks! Congratulations on your winnings!

In the approximate 24 hours since yesterday's earthquake swarm and inflation increase, the inflation remains high but earthquakes have decreased significantly.

There are about 28 hours left in the market and I can't make or change bets starting soon, so good luck everyone!

HVO just sent an ad hoc notice of sudden elevated inflation and seismic activity: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hans2/view/notice/DOI-USGS-HVO-2023-12-29T21:02:45-08:00

They do say, "there is no lateral or upward migration of earthquakes that would suggest magma is moving toward the surface at this time".

@harding I want to applaud you for having clear and complete criteria and consistently updating your market. You are doing everything you can to keep traders informed, I love it.

@Eliza Seconding this!

eruptive activity at the summit is possible with little or no warning

That seems ominous.

@Eliza yeah, that's down from the 1-2 hour notice they were offering earlier in the day.

The summit is entirely within a national park and all eruptions there for over 100 years have been well contained lava, so there's minimal immediate threat to life or property. Short summit eruptions are wonderful to look at and bring lots of tourists; its longer and non summit eruptions that locals worry about.

@Eliza That particular language has been in every update daily, so seems pretty standard. Some of the other info in this update is less ordinary, but if I'm reading things right, there have still been several updates/advisories/notices in past months that sounded about as ominous and did not immediately precede eruptions, so still think this is low probability.

The park has re-opened the trail closed due to volcanic risk and the latest HVO update now indicates reduced risk of an eruption to that area, although there's still increased inflation at the summit and moderate seismic activity that are indicative of the magma chamber refilling from the previous eruption.

HVO is expected to release a daily report shortly before noon (UTC-10) on January 1st. If there's no mention of an eruption starting in December in that report, this market will resolve NO.

I thought people were trading down this market maybe a bit too low, so I decided to do some research to see whether I should become even more invested than I already am. Here's a list of eruptions of Kilauea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_K%C4%ABlauea_eruptions

Here's the above in spreadsheet form with the the number of days between eruptions calculated (only going back to 1918, where the data becomes imprecise, and with overlapping eruptions on different parts of the volcano combined into a single eruption): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JgAhyP2knB77XLrE4VC1PZIC6j-elPJgMMebuoOJZyc/edit?usp=sharing

In short: mean days between eruptions is 490; median days between eruptions is 265.

Using the median, and given there are about 11 days left in this market, that gives me a base probability of 4%. My math: 1 - (1 - 1/265)**11 = 0.04

I think the actual number is probably significantly higher than that given the details in recent USGS HVO daily updates and the fact that parts of the park near the recent activity are still closed due to concern about a sudden eruption, but I'd need to do more research to quantify that. For now, I'm content letting this market's implied probability sink a bit lower before I invest any more.

(BTW, thanks to everyone who's been trading. What Kilauea does affects my life significantly, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, so even if I lose a bunch of mana on this market, it'll be worth it to make me more rational in my thinking about future eruptions.)

@harding my logic was similar for betting it down: it's erupted three times this year so far, so that's 8% of an eruption per ten days. Sounds like including more history gets a slightly lower rate still.

But I'm not upweighting things based on the current state, because presumably if it erupts so often, there must frequently be signs of potential eruption like this, in between eruptions. So I'd rather ignore these additional signs and treat it as a Poisson process.

New traders tend to overweight details and underweight base rates, so when you made bets at high probabilities citing both, I wasn't too concerned - I assume you're weighting the details too highly, even though I don't understand them. I might be wrong, but it's a profitable strategy to trade this way without spending too much time becoming a volcanologist.

@chrisjbillington that seems like a sound approach. You're correct that Kilauea often shows signs of eruption even in short duration periods where it doesn't erupt. This is the first I've thought about it on a month to month basis; before I've just been impressed that the geologists' warnings always preceeded an eruption, without me paying much attention to how long they preceeded it. I suppose I was also biased by their clear predictions a couple years ago that one of our other volcanoes, Mauna Loa, would erupt soon after 40 years, which were correct.

I'm still hopeful that there's some other piece of evidence that I can factor in to generate a more precise prediction.

Thanks!

@harding you seem confident enough on YES to be dumping a decent amount of mana onto it around 60%. The latest update gives a "slight decline" in earthquakes. What makes you think this is 60%+, if you don't mind sharing?

@DanMan314 Kilauea has a historical average over the past 100+ years of being in an eruptive state 50% of the time. Its summit inflation is currently higher than the October eruption. It also seemed to have come near eruption in late November, with them even closing off Chain of Craters Road for a day due to the risk and Ka'u Desert Trail (one of my favorites) still being closed due to the risk.

That said, part of my bet is circumventing the subsidy tax. I wanted to subsidize this market using Manifold's feature for that but I discovered they take a 33% cut[1], so instead I'm taking an edgier position than I otherwise would. If I wasn't doing that, I think I'd be placing my YES limit orders at around 40% for there being 19 days left in the market. For the future, I'm thinking about establishing a second account for adding liquidity to my markets; at 0.25 mana per limit order to use the API, I could easily provide a good spacing of the distribution at much less cost than 33% of my subsidy budget.

[1] https://manifold.markets/SG/should-manifold-charge-a-fee-on-mar#qqMlar28UlaB7jH78ZvR

There was just a 4.9 magnitude earthquake a few miles south of the summit caldera. That sometimes precedes an eruption. https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/pt23339050/region-info

@harding USGS says this earthquake was unrelated to magma movement: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hans2/view/notice/DOI-USGS-HVO-2023-12-04T20:45:49-08:00