This market resolves as YES if, at any point during our travel from the state where we currently live to the state where we will be living to attend grad school, my partner or I personally experience transphobia. Otherwise, this market resolves as NO upon us moving into our new apartment.
Because driving from our current state to our future state would take 38 hours of driving going only through blue states versus about 21 hours going mostly through red states, we'll almost certainly end up driving through some combination of two to four red states, all of which are among the most conservative places in the country. In particular, it is illegal for me to use the women's bathroom in one of the states, and probably illegal in another. The remaining states are highly conservative, which means even if I can't be arrested for using the women's bathroom, I'm at an elevated risk of being yelled at, chased out, threatened with violence, etc.
My partner is nonbinary, but is not visibly trans. I pass as a woman most of the time, but not always (and as I live in a progressive area, it's entirely possible that people have been "clocking" me as a trans woman and referring to me with the correct pronouns out of respect.)
This market resolves as YES using a common-sense definition of transphobia. That is to say: something must happen that causes me physical harm or significant emotional distress/dysphoria, and it must be a direct result of anti-trans policies or someone openly discriminating against me because I am trans. Possible YES resolutions include:
Being arrested or harassed for using the bathroom that conforms with my gender identity rather than my sex assigned at birth
Being forced to use the bathroom that conforms with my sex assigned at birth due to fear of being arrested (being harassed is quite likely; as I said, I typically pass as a woman.)
Verbal abuse from a stranger because I am trans - could include slurs, mockery, etc. (NOTE: This only counts verbal abuse directed at me or my partner from someone who is physically nearby; random transphobic comments on my social media, random transphobic texts, etc. do not count.)
Physical abuse from a stranger because I am trans - includes any action taken to harm me or my property (would include someone keying my car etc.)
In the (hopefully very, very unlikely) event that I am literally murdered as a result of transphobic violence, this market resolves as YES.
Verbal or physical abuse that is not provably tied to my status as a trans woman - e.g. being honked at, having non-discriminatory insults yelled at me, being punched for apparently no reason - are not sufficient for a YES resolution unless I have strong reason to believe they happened as a direct result of me being trans.
If an incident sufficient for a YES resolution occurs, I will post a short summary of the incident in the comments shortly after resolving YES. I probably won't be able to provide proof, so you'll need to trust me. To ensure I have no incentive to lie, I won't bet on this market and will have no personal stake in its outcome (other than obviously hoping it resolves as NO.)
The close date is set to August 28, since that's when my partner and I will be moving in to our new apartment. It's very possible that this market might resolve a day or so in advance of that.
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Status update 3: Safely at the third hotel.
P(YES) is now equal to the chance that, in the next 19ish hours, I run into some transphobic ass in a city I lived in as an openly trans woman for four and a half years basically without incident. The city is (roughly) 80-85% Democratic and highly progressive.
I probably should have had a NO resolution at us reaching the city, not us moving into the apartment - but since I didn't, this is probably free mana on NO.
@evergreenemily Happy to hear you're having a good journey and haven't encountered such nonsense!
@firstuserhere Thank you! It was a bit rough in other ways, but I'm glad I didn't have to resolve this as YES.
Status update 2: Arrived safely at our second hotel. Got a few hostile looks here and there, but I think that's mostly because I'm an obvious City Slicker™️, not because I'm trans. The people I've actually interacted with have been polite. This is going basically how I expected it to go, so far.
My partner and I are going out to get dinner later, but I doubt anything bad will happen there. Tomorrow is our last day of driving, and the latter half is through an area I'm very familiar with & at home in.
I used a public women's bathroom in a small largely red city in a blood-red state and lived (granted, no one saw me enter or exit, and I am carrying a purse, with my hair in a long ponytail.)
I had to double-check afterwards if it was illegal for me to do that or not. It was legal, which is kinda unfortunate because now I can't make jokes about being trans and doing crime.
Status update 1: Arrived safely at our hotel. No incidents so far, aside from a potential misgendering that I'm less than 50% sure I heard correctly (and may or may not have been malevolent.)
Day 2 covers the roughest territory politically. I'd estimate it holds about two thirds of the remaining risk.
Packing up my computer now! I'll be around on mobile every once in a while.
I'll post status updates at the end of every day. If I miss a status update, assume I forgot. If I miss two (*and* miss a day on Manifold entirely, losing my prediction streak), assume I've been killed and bet YES accordingly.
Half-joking. I do plan on checking in daily and since we're going to be on interstates for more or less the entire trip, I should always or almost always have mobile data. I certainly will at the hotels we're staying at.
I'm not tweaking the resolution criteria now, but since the chance of my partner and I facing transphobia in the city we're moving to is infinitesimal (I've only faced transphobia there once and it was less than a month into my transition), if I post a status update like "we've made it to the city," then it's free mana on NO.
@DavidChee I think there should be absolutely no case where someone gets fined mana for a comment, and basically no case where they should get banned from the site (I caveat this part because maybe there are some cases where they post something that risks Manifold getting shut down).
Misconduct in the comments section should only lead to penalties related to comment privileges. I don't feel comfortable with the idea of Manifold staff being able to freely ban or fine people who post things they don't like because this heavily influences markets and the kinds of people who will sign up to trade on this site.
As a comparison, it would be very bad if PredictIt banned vocal election deniers from trading. Prediction markets should not be blocking people with any perspectives from trading, and removing dumb money from a prediction market significantly reduces the incentive for smart money to trade.
@nmehndir I did revoke that person's privilege to comment (on my markets, anyways - thank you, blocking,) so there's that!
I do think people should be banned for posting hate speech (I don't think anyone who supports hate speech should be here, so...) but I also think that a warning was the right response in this situation. The comment was only borderline hate speech, and was just incredibly ignorant and condescending instead (I was tempted to post a link to statistics about how many trans people are murdered for being trans in the U.S. every year, but that's depressing and I didn't feel like feeding the troll.)
I do think people should be banned for posting hate speech
This is a prediction market platform, I don’t understand what posting hate speech has to do with whether or not someone should be allowed to trade. I think people who post hate speech should at most be banned from commenting, and maybe market creators should be able to ban them from trading in personal markets.
Banning hate speech means losing some people, leaving hate speech also means losing some people. Even if you only care about the quality of the predictions at the expense of everything else, you should still prefer to discourage low-effort hate.
I predict the population that posts hate speech makes worse predictions than the population that doesn't tolerate hate speech. Hate does not always, but tends to come from a place of ignorance.
(If you do care about more than just the market, there's also the idea that being prosocial is good, actually)
@BarrDetwix Re-read my comment, I fully support banning people who post hate speech from commenting but do not support banning them from trading and absolutely do not support any Manifold staff being able to fine people any amount whenever they feel like it’s justified.
@nmehndir That's true, I think in retrospect my comment is more an opinion than a direct reply, apologies for not exactly responding to the other point you made
(There's a slightly more circular/self-fullfilling argument of "if people still feel bad about being in the silent company of the comment-banned population, they may reasonably be less attracted to the community, which has a non-zero price", but I'm not sure what to think about this. You can sort of see ways for a profit-majority to do some slightly heavy-handed democracy in this fashion! But then again, maybe that's good actually, and we should just have more polls about it. I'm not sure.)
@nmehndir free speech is fundamentally a truth seeking endeavour, and as such is wholly integral to the process of prediction. You cannot uphold an accurate predicting process without sitewide protections for speech that may be off putting to others. You cannot have an optimally functioning prediction site set apart from an open prediction culture--without which the opposition, open dissent, and vigorous argument that free discourse protects would stymie our efforts to collectively interpret and unveil the truth.
There little wrong with his comment (and yes, it WAS additive to the predicting process and wholly relevant to the market). Did it have a snarky veneer? Sure, but that in no way justifies the threat of a ban or a mana penalty. If you don't like it, a simple block suffices. I'm extremely disappointed in how the Manifold staff is handling the situation.
I wholeheartedly agree that there is almost no case in which someone should be sitewide banned for actions in the comments section.
@BarrDetwix This argument just doesn't withstand basic scrutiny. I agree with the premise that those who spread hate are more ignorant. So what? Intelligence or informedness does not alone inherently make one a better predictor and may even be somewhat counterproductive due to the dunning kruger effect. Your ability to think says little about your ability to make decisions.
Moreover, if you buy into the wisdom of the crowd hypothesis or agree with the conclusions of research conducted on prediction markets, you must acknowledge that sufficient diversity (of all opinions) is required to cut through the statistical noise to arrive at sound conclusions. Accurate community prediction is less about who has the right predictions and more about aggregating the greatest sum of diverse predictions from risk adverse traders that we possibly can.
When prediction markets fail to deliver a sound judgement, it is invariably always due to lack of sufficient diversity in the prediction market. Whether due to panic, bias, bubbles & hype trains, etc, there is one singular prominent cause and one singular solution.
I'm going to say something very controversial here and further posit that ignorant people provide a unique benefit to prediction markets because their hardheaded judgement cannot be skewed as easily.
@jeremiahsamroo Your whole argument falls apart because of the simple fact that bigots are extremely effective at making a place unwelcoming (and unsafe) for a much larger number of people.
Manifold already has a lot of work to do on attracting and diversifying viewpoints if it will become a healthy community with more rigorous predictions. Not actively policing belligerent behavior will put the nail in the coffin.
@jeremiahsamroo
I don't want to do too much offtopic arguing, so I think I should commit to not reply past this point?
>Intelligence or informedness does not alone inherently make one a better predictor and may even be somewhat counterproductive due to the dunning kruger effect. Your ability to think says little about your ability to make decisions.
The claim is that if you empirically take the population of people who post low-effort hateful messages, you also see relatively worse predictions. That's falsifiable, I'm sure one could find examples and counter-examples, but that's really just my opinion based on vibes, I haven't done any work.
>if you buy into the wisdom of the crowd [...] you must acknowledge that sufficient diversity (of all opinions) is required [...]
I think I can tie this to the paradox of tolerance. Diversity is good, but it can't be absolute. On some axes we have very little diversity, which is the same as saying that we have any rules at all. There are a lot of diverse ways that people can behave that are not prosocial, usually considered abusive and forbidden by rules.
Sending the signal that abusers are tolerated makes a different part of the crowd flee, which I think hurts your goal.
Punishment such as fines is an imperfect but reasonable and time-tested way to limit bad behavior. Sometimes warnings and fines teaches people to behave in more prosocial ways, which beats many counterfactuals (this might seem to assume a little bit of moral realism, but I don't think that's required)
I think it's important to not conflate ignorance with hate. Hate is sometimes borne of ignorance, but I'm certain that ignorant people are and should be welcome here.
If you care about the wisdom of the crowd, there are very many axes on which people can be diverse that aren't propensity-to-hateful-comments. This particular kind of diversity is not very much compatible with other kinds of diversity, and I don't think that's the best way to go about getting a more diverse crowd.
@Stralor Yes, exactly. The admins taking action against ignorant/hateful comments makes me feel significantly more comfortable here than I would otherwise.