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Final numbers as of market close

manifund $4,405.00

donations $315,918.10

total $320,323.10

unfortunately it seems donations for mana are still technically open, and it's not clear when (if?) they will be disabled, at this point though I give up and will not extend the market anymore.

thank you to market traders, hope you had fun predicting and are not too upset about the confusion with the criteria.

manifund $4,285.00

donations $289,354.31

total $293,639.31

@Odoacre IIUC, this resolves based on the title, "before it is no longer possible to donate mana". not "before may 15th", right? (It's up to 304k, excluding manifund)

@Ziddletwix No, there are also answers that were labeled "before May 1" and resolved accordingly. The market description should have been clearer for sure though.

@jack agree - the remaining answers specifically say "before May 15"

@jack ok i'll sell out at a further loss to avoid confusion. but very confusing, because the title is pretty explicit (& the comments clarify that these options were added to reflect the donation extension, and the donation extension was always going to allow donations on may 15th).

@Ziddletwix lol looks like there was earlier confusion about the original set of deadlines anyways so i'll just stay clear

@Ziddletwix even that's been up in the air because the framing in the announcement and the charity site were in conflict.

and yesterday in Discord James said the change would happen later in the day (on the 14th) and then later Sinclair said it would probably be sometime today because they're traveling lol

unfortunately the options should have been updated to remove the date (or new dateless ones should have been added) but imo if it specifies "before May 15" people are betting on a definite that doesn't include today or any time after... that's my personal take

@shankypanky @Ziddletwix @jack the market will resolve to the value at close time. I extended it yesterday by a few hours because Sinclair said the change would happen on may 15 afternoon.

@Odoacre ok well then clearly the current probabilities are wrong, but i feel weird trading on that given that the conclusion of the convo above was that it should follow the text of "before may 15th". could N/A given all this back & forth, or who knows. i give up on this one.

@Ziddletwix I thought the description+ title were clear enough. We are measuring the mana donated. If manifold can't stick to their deadlines why are you getting angry with me?

I'm not going to extend it further though. Once we reach market close I'll record the final amounts and resolve all.

@Odoacre the title is clear, but contradicts the answer text which contains specific dates. When the donation deadline was extended previously, the deadline for existing answers stood and new answers were introduced. The new answers specifically had dates in them, so it looked like you were planning to follow the same practice if Manifold's deadline were extended further.

By including dates you created a contradiction with the title and people concluded that the more specific information trumped the less specific.

In future if you want to have resolution depend on a yet-unknown date, do not also include specific dates, or if you do, disclaim that they can change and are not part of the resolution criteria.

@Odoacre I’m not angry lol. Don’t care much either way. Just feels weird for me to take advantage of that new info when the consensus an hour ago was the opposite, so I won’t trade further

(And fwiw it’s not true the description is consistent, there are 3 types of options, “before may 1st”, “before may 15th” and no date listed. It seems that "before may 1st" is meant to be taken literally (some resolved NO), while the "before may 15th" is meant to be ignored, & treated the identically to the options that don't list a date. not a huge deal, small amounts so who cares, but there's no way to figure any of that out by reading the description, which is out of date)

@Ziddletwix I take that point, I should have updated the description to make it consistent.

It was clear in my mind but re reading it I can see that there's issues.

🤷 anyway It will be over in a few hours

@chrisjbillington

In future if you want to have resolution depend on a yet-unknown date, do not also include specific dates, or if you do, disclaim that they can change and are not part of the resolution criteria.

that's fair. Will keep that in mind, in my defense the dates were not yet-unknown but they were moved on me. Still I guess I could have forseen that, especially the second time.

If you think that any of AI, nuclear, pandemic/biological, or other large-scale risks are important, I highly recommend the https://manifold.markets/charity/long-term-future-fund (which despite the name benefits us in the short to medium-term future too!)

(Also, I'll probably buy some more mana post-pivot. Compared to not donating, it's kind of like a 10:1 donation match.)

manifund $3518.00

donations $277,165.14

total $280,683.14

manifund $2,228.00

donations $275,276.86

total $277,504.86

$259,288.83 via donation page

$2,211.00 via manifund

$261,499.83 total so far

Remaining "before May" options resolve NO @Odoacre

The charity page is broken but you can count donations up to end of April Pacific time like this if you have curl and jq:

curl -s 'https://pxidrgkatumlvfqaxcll.supabase.co/rest/v1/txns?apikey=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJzdXBhYmFzZSIsInJlZiI6InB4aWRyZ2thdHVtbHZmcWF4Y2xsIiwicm9sZSI6ImFub24iLCJpYXQiOjE2Njg5OTUzOTgsImV4cCI6MTk4NDU3MTM5OH0.d_yYtASLzAoIIGdXUBIgRAGLBnNow7JG2SoaNMQ8ySg&select=amount&limit=10000&category=eq.CHARITY&created_time=lt.2024-05-01T07:00:00' | jq '[.[] | .amount] | add'
23734048

$237,340.48, plus $1,676.00 to Manifund since market creation (why are we only counting since market creation, but all-time for the regular charity donations?), sums to $239,016.48.

@chrisjbillington thank you for the db query, it will be useful!

To answer your question the market has always been about mana donated since market creation. The options report totals because I thought it would be easier for traders to compare the number in the donation page without needing to subtract the initial ~180k.

Now with the manifund thing we are stuck doing math anyway, so I considered renaming the options to match, but I thought that would be even worse.

@Odoacre fyi looks like you wrote “May” but meant “April” in your updated description

@Tyler31 updated, thanks

I just realized donations to manifund are not being tracked via the donation page. I think these should still count towards the total.

So far 167100 mana has been donated to manifund after market creation, equivalent to $1671.00

@Odoacre it's a small amount so probably won't make much of a difference, but upon realising that I'd have explicitly said it didn't count, since people will not have been considering it up to now and the market description did point to the charity page. Definitely seemed to be about the charity number only.

@chrisjbillington Yes It is unfortunate that I will have to manually compute the manifund donation sum going forward.

Manifold is allowing donations to manifund for their loan program, so I think it just makes sense to count it. I also don't see that it makes a real difference where the mana goes as long as it's donated.

@Odoacre It makes sense and I don't mind in practice. I mind in principle though, because having expectations for how a market resolve change after lots of bets have been placed is quite bad, and should be avoided unless it's really necessary. Traders need certainty! Being told they were trading on something that is no longer what resolution depends on shakes their confidence in creators.

In this case since it is unlikely to make much of a difference, the better clarification would be not to count it - that way you avoid surprising traders.

There are some creators who make little changes all the time to their criteria, and I find I just have to not trade on their markets. Creators should really value having a reputation for not doing that.

Again in this case it's not a big deal, I'm just taking the opportunity to mention the general point - though I do think that for the sake of their own reputations as creators, this should be a principle creators try to adhere to even when stakes are low.

@chrisjbillington The point of the market was to measure outflows of mana/dollars from Manifold as a reaction to the pivot/rate change. I believe including the manifund mana in the metric is going to give a more accurate result. Luckily we caught it while the number is still small.

I would be sad to lose you as a trader over this, and a litte bit surprised as well, since in the past you have called yourself a "spiritualist" rather than a "literalist".

@Odoacre I think where it is material N/A might be the least unfair outcome?

@Jason I'm not going to NA over this, but if some large scale error was found in the future I would definitely consider it as an option.

@Odoacre Fully support your reasoning here.

@chrisjbillington I appreciate the essence of what you’re saying but it doesn’t seem appropriately applied here.

This is how I have perceived it, which all seems very reasonable:

1. The essence of the question has been as clear as possible from the start

2. The description suggested using that specific page as a resolution criteria but it was even explicit, which made it implicitly very clear to me that he’d resolve based on essence of question in any corner case that arose (eg if the page came down or stopped updating)

3. It is impractical to think he could have foreseen and been explicit about this and every other similar corner case in advance.

4. Once the edge case was known, he dealt with it swiftly, transparently, and imo in the way most consistent with the essence.

@Odoacre It's a minor issue so I'm not going anywhere, don't worry. I just think it's something people should pay more attention to.

I'm a spiritualist because I think everyone's a spiritualist, though I do think once you decide to operationalise a question one way, you should stick to it. What you shouldn't do is allow markets to resolve counter to

For example, a market with title"will SpaceX be successful in 2024?" → criteria "will resolve YES if they launch more than X mass to orbit this year"

if it turns out upmass is a poor metric of success, I'm not enough of a spiritualist to change the resolution criteria of a market like that. In fact, it should just be entitled "will they do >X upmass" to remove that possibility from people's minds.

There was once a market like (paraphrasing to avoid dunking by name) "will the LK-99 researchers achieve X level of recognition", and they indeed did achieve this. However the creator toyed with the idea of not counting it, because in their mind the market was a proxy for whether LK-99 was legit or not, and so the "spirit" of the question was not met. That creator is too much of a spiritualist for me (they did resolve YES in the end but jeez, don't do that to traders).

Whereas I think my go-to example of not being a literalist is when I had a market on SpaceX launches, and defined "launch" as hold-down clamps releasing after engine ignition. It turns out SpaceX release the hold-down clamps for starship long before engine ignition. So rather than resolve these markets NO, I adjusted the definition of "launch" to no longer refer to hold-down clamps.

With this market, the problem is that you linked a specific resolution source in the description, giving people the impression that resolution was very specific to that, like a market that links to FRED for economic data. I would support changing the link if Manifold moves the page, and not resolving to "zero" because the page shows zero due to bugs, that's the sort of literalist I am not. And if you hadn't linked the specific source, it would be less bad to clarify that you'd include manifund. The link gives the appearance of a completely objective market, which means it comes as a surprise when other data is involved. it's good to minimise surprise, and I guess the ways I want to prioritise spirit over letter are usually in the service of avoiding surprise.

Other forms of donation may appear as well that aren't covered by either manifund or the charity page, might you include them? It would be better to declare you won't, because it creates clearer criteria than if people are trying to guess what else might happen and whether it will count.

@chrisjbillington Thanks, insightful examples and elaboration (though in this case I didn’t interpret the description as being as explicit about the resolution source as you did).

Other forms of donation may appear as well that aren't covered by either manifund or the charity page, might you include them? It would be better to declare you won't, because it creates clearer criteria than if people are trying to guess what else might happen and whether it will count.

As I said above, if further donation streams came to light, my inclination would be to include those as well. If it was a very substantial amount however and I thought the market was wrecked then I'd consider NA .