This question is based on a study suggesting the potential presence of the Meissner effect in copper-substituted lead apatite near room temperature. The market will resolve to 'Yes' if firm, peer-reviewed evidence or independent/laboratory verification confirming this is published by December 31, 2024.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999
https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1742566608554627227
Related questions
According to Yao Yao, 国内某top2大学的一个课题组, 配方复现出来了. If published, it should resolve this market YES. (Yao Yao is an author of the paper in question of this market.)
@MilfordHammerschmidt If Seo is right about RTSC he will be by far the wealthiest Manifold user, and Chris will be destitute.
@jim That's just a truism about long shots vs sure things. "If I'm right I'll be very rich" - very easy to make bets for which that is true, that's how market pricing works. Most who do it don't get rich though.
@chrisjbillington OK, but it's also a truism that "true believers" will look stupid until proved right.
Here is the report from the Sukbae Lee (L in LK99 presentation).
The class of room temperature and room pressure superconductors is real.
He and other researchers have formed a corporation and the success of the company and its patents is the priority.
IBM is the first company to start discussions.
Sukbae Lee believes the China groups have successfully reproduced the sample.
They have a video detecting zero resistance.
Sukbae Lee and his team are confident
APL materials review process : Ongoing
Patent registration: Ongoing
Why no samples and data? -> We are a corporation. Patent.
We are going to be proved by other researchers
There are still instabilities and other issues to be worked through.
There are currently limitations around a narrow range of magnetic fields.
Real money markets are biased away from 0% and 100% because of the opportunity cost of the invested capital on the side that has to bet a lot to win a little.. Manifold’s loan system probably makes it more accurate than real money on such questions.
@JonathanRay If the prediction market currency was redeemable for fractional shares of an equity index fund, that’d solve most/all of the long odds bias problem. But regulatory barriers.
@f I'm 8000 mana deep, and I don't have the slightest clue what a Meissner is, or what an apatite is. I know what copper and temperature mean though
@Tumbles lol nice. Everyone likes to bet on an underdogg... too much. It's my whole strategy and I've been doing pretty well. I've thought about taking it to sports betting but I figure the fees would probably eat any profits
I thought it would be interesting to broach the discussion of why this market is at the probability it's at, based on this tweet from @mattparlmer, who claims that a single "whale" is distorting the probability.
While it's somewhat possible for a whale to (at least temporarily) distort pricing, especially on low liquidity markets, that's not what's happening here.
This market is within 5 percentage points or so of other prediction markets (Kalshi ~12%, Polymarket 13%).
There are a bunch of "whales" on the NO side of this market (@jacksonpolack, @chrisjbillington, @JonathanRay, etc)
For a market with this much visibility/liquidity, even if it was just one whale, it's telling that no whales want to take the other side of the bet. Whales are ultimately people who have a track record of good predictions (that's how you accumulate mana). The fact that there's no one willing to take up YES at <10% should be a strong signal.
You should be able to exclude certain specific people from participating in certain markets where they’re participating in explicit bad faith, or at minimum have some platform feature that computes what the market state would be absent the distorting behavior of whales
Without Chris this market would be at most a couple % points higher. A feature that computes the market state absent a specific user wouldn't take into account the counterfactual of other users buying down that higher price, that's how price discovery works.
If anyone wants to take me up on it, I will loan you up to Ṁ50,000 with no interest if you can credibly promise to pay me back in mana if this resolves YES, or $$ equivalent on NO, at the end of 2024.
I suspect even if someone dropped an Ṁ50k limit order at 15% or so, this market would be back down beneath 10% within a day.
@DanMan314 I was definitely running low on mana when it was about 15%. But I see the real odds as being very low, and will take the mana of yes betters.
@DanMan314 Anyone who's been using this site for a while knows that Chris is an excellent trader, and as such he earned the ability to exercise outsized influence on the market price. It is of course possible he's wrong here, but the proper channel for people upset about his trades is to take the other side of them.
@mattparlmer There might be some misunderstanding here - I'm not participating in bad faith, and deleting 25% of my net worth to manipulate these markets would not benefit me. What kind of game might I be playing where it would? It would create short-term paper profits at great long-term cost, and unless I was planning on quitting the site next month, this wouldn't make much sense and probably wouldn't even succeed - the smart money would bet to take my paper profits away if they thought that was what I was doing.
Not reading the paper sounds strange, but really isn't - good forecasting is often about priors and broad trends, and ignoring details that can be more misleading than they're worth. These are serious bets, and the flippant "I haven't read the paper" isn't really evidence to the contrary - it's just drawing attention to my view that the contents of the paper aren't really what should inform people's views about this. I know that sounds really weird compared to the ideals of science that we're taught and aspire to, but those are built with different goals in mind than forecasting.
One reason it's me rather than another whale with the largest position here is because I am being a bit lax about capital allocation compared to others. Even if all the whales think this is ~zero, a 7% return in a year isn't great compared to the rates of return available elsewhere on Manifold. And even though Manifold will loan me my mana back, they've recently imposed a leverage cap for these loans. Some other whales are above this cap, so can't really afford to bet in markets that won't resolve soon. I'm still below it for now, but am maybe being a little careless increasing my leverage with a market like this that won't resolve until end of year. We will see!
.