I have a lot of lawyers in my family, one of whom is close to me and the main part of his job is to write legal documents in clear, precise, unambiguous language, so I'm used to thinking about language and rules in a certain way (I also have a STEM background, where things have precise definitions). I've been blown away by how bad otherwise intelligent people are at writing and interpreting resolution criteria. They throw out basic principles which I would have thought were necessary for there to be any hope being able to decide these things in a consistent and predictable manner. I even explained one of the resolution disputes on Polymarket to these family members, one that was ambiguous due to a blatant self-contradiction in the resolution criteria, and they said it should definitely be resolved one way, which ended up being resolved the other way (essentially on the principle of most people wouldn't read that far into the description of the resolution criteria).
One possible solution is that you have people pay to have questions answered, and as part of that payment, they pay people to act as oracles who have good reputations. So the incentive is to decide things in a way that most closely matches what the question asker intended and also most closely matches what bettors think the question is about so that they are willing to bet on it, since this improves the market's accuracy.
This is a big problem on Manifold Markets and on Polymarket. On Manifold, there are a lot of market creators who write ambiguous resolution criteria or they even change the resolution criteria after people have placed bets. The resolution criteria often describe something quite different than what the question is literally asking. For example, there was a question that straightforwardly asked whether Israel blew up a certain hospital in Gaza, and then when it turned out the hospital hadn't been blown up at all and that the bomb had exploded in the parking lot, the question was changed to whether Israel was responsible for the explosion.
It has become common to resolve in favour of some nebulous, undefined "spirit" of the question, rather than the actual meaning of the question that was asked. A lot of markets become mainly bets on how the creator will decide to resolve it rather than on what the question is purportedly about.
On Polymarket, the resolution mechanism for disputed questions relies on a Keynesian beauty contest that has settled on an equilibrium where everyone assumes the simplest and stupidest possible interpretation, and now people are even contesting uncontroversial resolutions in order to take advantage of this broken system. There will be a question that resolves and everyone agrees that it was resolved correctly, but then the resolution will be contested and everyone knows the vote will go in favour of some hypothetical interpretation that would only work if everyone was retarded, so they vote that way. No one agrees with the interpretation, but everyone is incentivized to vote how they think everyone else will vote. And everyone knows the winning vote is expected to be the one that doesn't involve reading the full resolution description and doesn't involve using any sort of complex thought.
Glassnoser
1d ago
I think the same instinct drove people to attack mask wearers in the early COVID days. It's also why people are intolerant of cultural practices which don't obviously affect them, like women wearing hijabs. It's harder for something to become mandatory if it remains rare.
Glassnoser
2d ago
I'm not sure if I believe they really have that preference. Imagine a woman running into a hear in the woods. She's probably going to freak out. Now imagine her running in to a random man. She's probably going to feel relieved and ask him for help. Just, intuitively it seems obvious that women are not nearly as scared of men as they are of bears. I think the framing of the question causes people to think about how men can be dangerous and to answer in a way that doesn't actually comport with their true beliefs.
Scott Sumner has a whole series of posts about this phenomenon. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/05/theres_no_such_2.html
Glassnoser
3d ago
I'm guessing the first post is all real people and the second one is bots copying it. All the comments in the second post were posted within a very short period of time on a new post by accounts with usernames typically used by bots.
The movie explains so little about the war that it isn't really about civil war. It's more about photography.
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