Resolves to each answer that fulfills the criteria below, by my best judgment:
1. The person or team is accused of specific, serious scientific misconduct.
2. The accused are notable (in textbooks/syllabi, mainstream media, TED talks, etc.).
3. The accusations are at minimum favorably covered in the specialist circles (e.g. Retraction Watch, Andrew Gelman’s blog, Data Colada).
4. The scandal relates primarily to academia rather than the business world (Theranos should not count).
5. It is a new, well-defined scandal – not publicly established before 2023 as more than suspicions or rumors.
6. It’s not a Sokal-style provocation.
The named person or team does not need to be held individually guilty in 2023. Their work doesn’t have to be in English (but it has to have international notability).
The market is somewhat experimental. The goal is to pick up and reward good early rumblings; I may clarify the rules to align with that goal. Because free response markets have weird payout rules, if a promising name is added, it may be good to also give it a binary market. For calibration, in the past, valid answers would include (not completely sure about the years): Jan Hendrik Schön (2002), Brian Wansink (2017), Hans Eysenck (2019), Dan Ariely (2021), and Didier Raoult (2021).
Related questions
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ567 | |
| 2 | Ṁ369 | |
| 3 | Ṁ92 | |
| 4 | Ṁ63 | |
| 5 | Ṁ22 |
A quick feedback: for this type of market, it is very useful to have a rule similar to "the answer must be added before the accusations are made public/widely known" - otherwise the most likely outcome is that the winning prediction is a person that was added after the accusations and you don't really get any prediction...
@MartinModrak Maybe! As it stands, the highest reward potential is available to, in descending order: time travelers, insiders, and data detectives (most deserving of incentives I guess), people who pick up interesting news from niche circles and media (also valuable IMO), and everyone else. As far as I can tell, this is OK – this kind of market may be of use even if a particular instance was closer to 10000th than 1st to identify and amplify a true signal. There’s always a chance, too, that any specific claim is weak and turns out to be false later – falls apart within the market lifespan – that’s one reason to allow adding and secondary trading on old-ish/existing claims.
Another complicating factor, I think open-answer multiple-choice answers have wonky payouts, where if n more fraud scandals hit this year, bets that go over 1/n may be punished.
@yaboi69 partly agree. However, the current setup gives little incentive to actually do novel research because you want to beat the market: you need to invest a lot of time to improve your win probability a little. Whereas waiting for news and then sniping the market gives large payout for little work.
@MartinModrak Yes, in that regard it’s pretty much a “Ṁ500 bounty if you solve the Riemann hypothesis” type of incentive – I don’t really hope to directly encourage data sleuthing
@MartinModrak The new payout structure partly avoids that issue. Anyone is free to create a similar market with a better setup.
This will resolve positively, no?
@BenjaminShindel I would need to double-check, e.g. if criterion #5 was met (“not publicly established before 2023 as more than suspicions or rumors”), but without committing to a decision yet, I lean toward a positive (it’s mostly new, she’s famous enough, etc.)
actually, I've sold my seed shares in both outcomes, and I don't think I'll buy back in. something about buying yes on such a diffuse market with so little evidence was rubbing me the wrong way, especially after some of the candidates I found to add to the list who I decided not to mention.
wow, the graph looks funky now.
@L Are you against the entire idea, or just figuring out where your going-public threshold is? (I’m curious if this can be improved.)
@yaboi69 I don't know about the market, but I was going to try to comb the internet for people who sound popular because of their research and just list them all. but to take that strategy seriously would have involved listing dozens or even hundreds of honorable scientists in order to catch the one or two per year who have really serious fraud issues. or, I could include the ones who seem obviously fraudulent from the start; but then one or more of them will find the post and maybe show up and get in fights or something. idk, just seems like not a great idea to me now.
You might try asking, idk, first what fields will have major scandals, second will the field have a correction ready originating in ongoing debate in the field, third which researchers. but, idk mate. maybe this market works fine for your purposes. I probably won't rush here to list people, though.
@L Sure! I did not really consider the “casting a massively wide net” strategy, was thinking more of submissions like “few noticed it yet but one of the data sleuths on PubPeer wrote they’re uneasy about a specific author for specific reasons”.