Eliezer, this is what you get for not writing up the planecrash threat lecture thread.  We'll keep bothering you with things like this until you give in to our threats and write it.

Splitting out 'eating out' and 'food at home' is good, but not the whole story due to the rise of delivery.

I believe the snarky phrasing is "Inflation is bad?  Or you ordered a private taxi for your burrito?"

I don't actually think 'Alice gets half the money' is the fair allocation in your example.

Imagine Alice and Bob splitting a pile of 100 tokens, which either of them can exchange for $10M each.  It seems obvious that the fair split here involves each of them ending up with $500M.

To say that the fair split in your example is for each player to end up with $500M is to place literally zero value on 'token-exchange rate', which seems unlikely to be the right resolution.

Update: the market has resolved to Edmundo Gonzales (not to Maduro).  If you think this is not the right resolution given the wording, I agree with you.  But if you think the wording was clear and unambiguous to being with, I think this should suggest otherwise.

So the original devs have all long since left the firm, and as I'm sure you've discovered the documentation is far from complete.

With that said, it sounds like you haven't read the original requirements doc, and so you've misunderstood what DEMOCRACY was built for.  It's not a control subsystem, it's a sacrificial sandbox environment to partition attackers away from the rest of the system and limit the damage they can do to vital components like ECONOMY and HUMAN_RIGHTS.

The 'Constitution.doc' file specifies the parameters of the sandboxed environment, and is supposed to ensure that the rest of the system can continue functioning whatever goes on in here.  It's on protected drive space to be hard for attackers to edit: on a quick review, though, it looks like there have been some attacks on the logic used to read and parse it from disk.

The Shadow Cabinet backup system is implementing industry-best-practice STATIONARY_BANDIT algorithms to align attackers with the system.

We still have a lot of issues with (CR|K)OOK-class viruses, but since DEMOCRACY was implemented we've avoided having any outages to the FOOD system, which is better than any of our competitors.

Give me a call if you have more questions: my team doesn't own this code, but we've had to interface with it in the past and we're familiar with some of its nuances.

(Non-expert opinion).

For a robot to pass the Turing Test turned out to be less a question about the robot and more a question about the human.

Against expert judges, I still think LLMs fail the Turing Test.  I don't think current AI can pretend to be a competent human in an extended conversation with another competent human.

Again non-expert judges, I think the Turing Test was technically passed long long before LLMs: didn't some of the users of ELIZA think and act like it was human?  And how does that make you feel?

I agree that that would probably be the reasonable thing to do at this point.  However, that's not actually what the Polymarket market has done - it's still Disputed, and in fact Maduro has traded down to 81%.

And I think a large portion of the reason why this has happened is poor decision-making in how the question was initially worded.

Edited to add: Maduro is now down to 63% in the market, probably because the US government announced that it thinks his opponent won? No, that's not an official Venezuelan source. But it seems to have moved the market anyway. 

My sense is this security would be fine? Is there a big issue with this being a security? 

In the sense that it would find a market-clearing price, it's fine.  But in the sense of its price movements being informative...well.  Say the price of that security has just dropped by 10%.  

Is the market reflecting that bad news about Google's new AI model is likely to reflect poor long-term prospects?  Is it indicating that increased regulatory scrutiny is likely to be bad for Google's profitability?

Or is Sundar Pichai going bald?

I agree that most markets resolve successfully, but think we might not be on the same page on how big a deal it is for 5% of markets to end up ambiguous.

If someone offered you a security with 95% odds to track Google stock performance and 5% odds to instead track how many hairs were on Sundar Pichai's head, this would not be a great security!  A stock market that worked like that would not be a great stock market!

In particular:

1. I think this ambiguity is a massive blow to arbitrage strategies (which are a big part of the financial infrastructure we're hoping will make prediction markets accurate).  There are already a lot of barriers in the way of profiting from a situation where e.g. one market says 70% and one market says 80%: if there's a chance that the two will resolve some ambiguity differently, that adds a very big risk to anyone attempting to arbitrage that difference.^[1]
2. I think this ambiguity is very dangerous to the hopes of prediction markets as a trustworthy canonical source on controversial events.  If Maduro says "See, everyone, I won the election fair and square, the prediction markets agree!"^[2], I think it's very important that the prediction markets be perfectly clear on what they are tracking and what they are not tracking, and I don't think that's currently the case.
3. Related to #2, I think that this ambiguity is vastly more likely to occur in the case of the controversial events where it's most valuable to have a trustworthy and canonical source.  The cases where markets resolve cleanly are exactly the cases where non-prediction-market mechanisms already reach a canonical consensus on their own.

1. ^{^}

   This also makes Manifold's preferred strategy of dealing with ambiguity by N/A-ing a market less valuable: that's an acceptable resolution for someone who just did buy-and-hold on that one market, but can be very bad for someone who was trading actively across multiple markets some of which N/A-ed and some of which did not.

2. ^{^}

   This imagines a world where prediction markets are major enough and mainstream enough for people to be looking at them and talking about them: but that's exactly what prediction market advocates want! 

I don't think 'official information from Venezuela' is fully unambiguous.  What should happen if the CNE declares Maduro the winner, but Venezuela's National Assembly refuses to acknowledge Maduro's win and appoints someone else to the presidency?  This is not a pure hypothetical, this literally happened in 2018!  Do we need to wait on resolving the market until we see whether that happens again?

I agree that resolving that market to Maduro is probably the right approach right now.  But I don't actually think the market description is entirely clear even now, and I think it would be very easy for things to have turned out much much worse.

Edited to add: it also seems that many people on Polymarket don't find it unambiguous in that way.  The market is trading currently at 84% for Maduro with noticeable recent activity, which does not seem like what should happen if everyone is clear on the resolution: