This poll https://forms.gle/5yLeSZhNfs7fE5Vq6 asks participants: "What do you believe was the probability that SBF committed willful fraud in the FTX collapse?"
This is meant to measure the community's current beliefs. Please respond to the poll if you're interested.
This market predicts the result of the poll. The poll will run until the end of January. The market resolves to the average (mean) poll response at that time.
(Note: the poll and the market are different things! Your predictions in this market are not a response to the poll, submit your poll response in the above form.)
Notes
Poll responses must be honest. Do not attempt to manipulate the poll - if I suspect manipulation then I reserve the right to restrict the poll to reputable Manifold users or resolve N/A.
I am aware that this poll would likely be highly subject to selection bias. I am considering some ideas to mitigate this in another variant of this question; let me know if you have suggestions.
I will not bet in this market, since the poll results are only visible to me until I post them.
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The mean poll response before the end of January was 76% (this is the value this market resolves to). The median response was 95%. Here are charts showing the distribution of responses - 60% of responses were >=95%, 20% were between 50% and 95%, and 20% were <50%.
I think using the mean is definitely not the best aggregation of the poll responses, although it's not clear what the best one to use is.
@jack I think the fact that there was incentive to choose 0 if you were buying no is definitely why there were so many of that response. I wouldn't see the problem with using a median as it would probably give you better consensus, though it wouldn't represent peoples' actual extreme takes. (I'm using extreme to mean 1 or 10, not that the opinion is unreasonable)
@DesTiny Nobody answered 0, the lowest response was 2%, the histogram is showing several responses in the 0-20% bucket.
I did specify that you had to answer your honest beliefs. Of course, motivated reasoning is a thing, but I didn't see any clear indications of poll manipulation (except one person who didn't see the instruction to answer honestly, submitted several answers that explicitly said they were manipulation, and then submitted another answer with their actual belief after they saw the instruction - I removed their other answers from the analysis of course).
Median is one useful measure, but it doesn't reflect all the information we're interested in. There might be a way to average log odds or something like that to reflect that there is a big difference between 99% and 98% that isn't reflected in the mean.
@jack sorry yeah I forgot it was a bunch of questions, I'm not sure what the best means would be
@DesTiny There's only one question that was actually scored here. The other questions were to try to understand how well calibrated the poll answers were. Unfortunately, they weren't very helpful because nearly everyone said they weren't familiar with Lehman brothers
@jack Yeah, I think multiplying the odds together would be reasonable to aggregate a bunch of point estimates?
I bought "no" supposing that the average probability of the poll would be less than the 89% the market was at.
But actually the market will only resolve YES or NO, and the threshold for that is the poll being at probability 50%. So the actual price for buying here is not "what % do you believe the poll will come out as?" but rather "what's the probability that this poll will come up greater than 50%"?
These are very different quantities.
@AdriaGarrigaAlonso I presume the market would actually resolve to the average poll probability (markets can be resolved with a fractional result, so e.g. resolving to 0.93 means you get 0.93 for your yes shares and 0.07 for your no shares)
@StanPinsent You might be mixing up the poll and the market. The poll results are hidden until it closes, so there's no way for anyone to see that the poll has reached 99%. If the market reached 99%, then it would be profitable to predict NO if you believe the poll will be less than 99% - there's no weird game theory there, it's just predicting as normal.
@StanPinsent No, see my comment above -- the probability that the market resolves YES is not the same as the average result of the poll
@Fion Not only that, but the polls will very likely be answered by different people, so there's a lot of random noise and/or selection bias that can occur.
However, I think it is probably true that the expected value of the markets should be reasonably close.