The Seattle Effective Altruists (sEAttle) Meetup group (join us?) has a book club. After reading and discussing a book in person, everyone present can throw in a suggested title for the next read, and then we use Approval Voting to select.
After a spirited discussion about Suffering-Focused Ethics (which, incidentally, led to @RobertCousineau's commitment to being consensually waterboarded - of course, there's a market for that) we took a vote for November.
Results dubbed Open Philanthropy's AI Worldviews Contest winners as our content. Now, the question is: how many of the attendees on November 30th will have actually read all of the winning pieces? To save me from making a complex market, the question is: what percentage of attendees will have read all of the material when the Book Club meets on the evening of the 30th?
Relevant points:
in the past two, 7-10 attendees have come to the meetings (not all of them respond on Meetup)
it's not uncommon for book club members to attend despite not reading all (or any) of the material
this is our final book club before 2024, as the holidays are approaching; this may mean people will show up for a chance to get together regardless of status
the book club is also shared amongst the local EA/Rats/ACX groups, along with a note that people are welcome to join to discuss AI more broadly
this is an admittedly oddly-framed market, but it's easier to factor percentages of attendees than material across multiple people and articles.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ52 | |
| 2 | Ṁ20 | |
| 3 | Ṁ12 | |
| 4 | Ṁ11 | |
| 5 | Ṁ4 |
People are also trading
this market resolves Thursday night. only time will tell how many people show up at the actual event, and I haven't asked anyone else about their progress. nothing has changed on my reading status.
given the nature of the market and material I may be charitable in considering a person to have read it (meaning, if they've read all but didn't make it through the last few pages of the final piece, I think it's fair to give them credit unless it would dramatically affect the resolution in a way that doesn't feel integrous).
weird time to use EA and AI in the same sentence, but here we are.
I'm not in regular contact with Book Club members (I'm relatively new myself) and so have zero context except for the above regarding the likelihood of people reading the pieces.
as a pessimist, my bets are on-brand in this market, mostly because I have read exactly 0% of the material and tbh, I don't expect that to change.
(also, I didn't vote for this material 😅)
@shankypanky I’ll give you 50 mana if anyone read 100% incredibly low odds. I think it’s about 2k pages that probably all went out the window last weekend 😅