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Resolves to 93%.

The discord discussion was strongly in favor of N/A, so even though there were only two votes here, I think this is a pretty good reflection of the thinking of experienced market authors.

I don't know much about the topic but I read Jack's argument and agree, so I vote 95% for N/A

Btw, there's a lot of discussion happening in discord, so people probably aren't going to be commenting a lot here.

My current vote is 90% in favor of N/A.

I'd say the issue here is the resolution criteria contain an incorrect assertion which caused the resolution criteria to diverge from the title question in a materially impactful way that reasonable bettors should not have been expected to anticipate. In such situations, N/A is often the best solution imo

To give an analogous example: If I had created a market that linked to the wrong youtube account, and this materially confused the market (people didn't immediately realize the link was wrong) - I would very likely N/A that market.

@jack I don't think I understand the analogy. If there's a wrong YouTube link, someone who reads the description without following the links will be misled into thinking that the question will resolve according to one channel when it will actually resolve according to another channel. But in the case of the linked market, anyone who looked at the description could see that it said that it would resolve YES in the 600k case (even if it was for reasons that a few people knew were flawed), and I don't see how it could mislead anyone into thinking that it would resolve NO in the 600k case. Someone who looked only at the title would probably be misled, but the title seems to me to have been underdefined enough to create a reasonable expectation that people consult the description for details.

@StevenK Even in the case of the wrong YouTube link, I would expect people who were planning to trade on the intended YouTube link to post a clarifying comment that they were trading on the expectation that the market description would be amended. This expectation seems to me to be much stronger still if people are planning to trade, not on something that the author clearly intended to write but didn't write, but on something that the author clearly didn't intend to write but would probably have intended to write if they hadn't been mistaken about YouTube rounding.

@StevenK (Oops, I ironically just now read the description on this question, and hope it was OK for me to comment as an unbadged user.)

@StevenK Comments are fine! I'm just counting votes from badged users only here.

Here's my thinking: Yev's mistaken claim was that if any of the 3 authors resolved based on the Youtube count saying 600k, that would be a premature resolution because the real count at that time could be as low as 599,500, and therefore the resolution would be disputed (satisfying the title question).

I think the context and wording of the criteria is important:

Any of those 3 market creators resolves their market based on the claim that the sub count was "600k". (This would mean that the actual sub count could be anywhere between 599,500 and 600,499, because YT rounds sub count to the nearest 1000).

Suppose one of the authors read the comments in Yev's markets, understood that "600k" meant a minimum of 600k, and therefore correctly resolved their market YES. They could very reasonably believe this should not count for Yev's criteria, because it is not in fact the case that the actual sub count could have been as low as 599,500. The fact the parenthetical explains (incorrectly) what "600k" means is the root of the issue.

If the criteria had been worded slightly differently, I would lean towards a YES resolution. For example, if it had said

Any of those 3 market creators resolves their market primarily based on Youtube displaying a sub count of "600k"

[changes bolded]

Another point: anyone who read the description would assume (incorrectly) that it would resolve YES if the final sub count was 599,500 (which would cause youtube to display 600k and then cause one of the 3 authors to likely resolve YES). So there are definitely real problems with the erroneous description, even if we ignore questions about intent.

@jack Ah, thanks, I think that helps me understand your point of view. So it sounds like it's about the difference between the following interpretations?

1

Any of those 3 market creators resolves their market based on the claim that the sub count was "600k". (I am defining this as including the claim that the actual sub count could be anywhere between 599,500 and 600,499, because YT rounds sub count to the nearest 1000).

2

Any of those 3 market creators resolves their market based on the claim that the sub count was "600k". (I note that, if this happened, it would imply that the actual sub count could be anywhere between 599,500 and 600,499, because YT rounds sub count to the nearest 1000).

I took it as saying 2, so my thinking was "this is a YES if it goes to 600k but no further, so I can sort of use it as an arbitrage together with the >=601k market". It didn't occur to me until your comment that someone could have taken it as saying 1, or that it could have not occurred to them that others took it as saying 2. It's possible that's what happened, though, and if so, then I agree that N/A seems right.

@StevenK yeah, I think that's basically the same as my interpretation.

I can give a cleaner simpler version of my argument:

We can simplify Yevs question to a key subquestion: at a certain time, will the displayed sub count be 600k, i.e. will the actual sub count be between 599,500 and 600,499. (Paraphrasing)

This question contains a error and the two parts of it contradict each other. And that was actually important because the sub count was very close and so the difference of 500 was important. Therefore the question is ill defined and should resolve n/a.

@jack The key thing there is changing "sub count between 599,500 and 600,499" from a statement to a question. It seems to me this makes sense only if the parenthetical is a definition of (some part of) the phrase 'resolves their market based on the claim that the sub count was "600k"'. But that phrase already has a clear meaning in ordinary language, and if it were a definition I'd expect it to say "this means" instead of "this would mean", so the reading of the parenthetical as a definition is unnatural to me. I didn't get the impression from the thread that there were people who read it that way and who didn't comment to disambiguate because they didn't see any other reading. Rather, the impression I got was that the disagreement was driven partly by the title ending up misleading, and partly by a disagreement about whether it's important for market creators to stick to their stated resolution procedure even if the results go against people's sense of the spirit of the question or are otherwise unpopular. I've consistently been in favor of sticking to stated resolution procedures, and I know you're in favor of this from the Time Person of the Year discussion (and your argument here is consistent with that), but Manifold culture as a whole seems pretty ambivalent about it, creating a sense of "anything can happen" that in my experience gets in the way of a focus on forecasting accuracy.

@StevenK (To be clear, I understand that your argument is that in this case it's ambiguous what the stated resolution procedure is. But I don't think that was most people's argument.)