On Metaculus, people have attempted to solve this problem by having moderators review each question before it goes live. The result has generally been that most vague questions require substantial re-editing before they can appear on the website.
Also, over time, users have become quite skilled at noticing when questions are likely to resolve ambiguously.
Even with this cultural difference between the sites, many questions still resolve ambiguously on Metaculus. It’s just really, really hard to say exactly what you mean when predicting the future.
I think Metaculus’s level of verbosity in resolution criteria is bad in that it makes questions longer to write and longer to understand (because it takes longer to read and because its more complex). Part of the goal of Manifold is to remove trivial inconveniences so that people actually forecast at all, and so that we get markets on literally everything. I think the synthesis here is to have a subset of high quality markets (clear resolution criteria, clear meta-resolution norms) but still have a fat tail of medium-quality questions.
On Metaculus, people have attempted to solve this problem by having moderators review each question before it goes live. The result has generally been that most vague questions require substantial re-editing before they can appear on the website.
Also, over time, users have become quite skilled at noticing when questions are likely to resolve ambiguously.
Even with this cultural difference between the sites, many questions still resolve ambiguously on Metaculus. It’s just really, really hard to say exactly what you mean when predicting the future.
I think Metaculus’s level of verbosity in resolution criteria is bad in that it makes questions longer to write and longer to understand (because it takes longer to read and because its more complex). Part of the goal of Manifold is to remove trivial inconveniences so that people actually forecast at all, and so that we get markets on literally everything.
I think the synthesis here is to have a subset of high quality markets (clear resolution criteria, clear meta-resolution norms) but still have a fat tail of medium-quality questions.