Left-Wing or Right-Wing? Which person/character/concept will Manifold think are "Right-Wing" this week?
Basic
269
335k
Jul 7
51%
Alternative medicine
2%
Progress
11%
forced labor in the gulag
1.9%
the Holodomor
1.8%
Soviet imperialism
1.8%
Not realizing eastern bloc countries were victims of Soviet imperialism
2%
Max Stirner's defintion of a "spook."
80%
watching national competitions (world cups etc) instead of professiona club competitions/individual competitions (for instance, UEFA Eurocup (national representations) in football instead of UEFA Champions league (professional sport teams))
98.9%
thinking that the Eastern Bloc countries (until 1990) were indeed left wing
1.5%
thinking that the Eastern Bloc countries (until 1990) were actually right-wing and not communist countries
1.8%
Big data
3%
Emergence of social media in the internet/information age.
1.8%
Invention of the wheel.
1%
Invention of the phone.
3%
Invention of television.
99%
Fundamental (or absolute) morality
1.2%
Relative morality
2%
Touching grass
63%
Being attracted to overweight men
68%
Eating

Each answer contains a question: Do you think the person/character/concept is more Right-Wing (YES) or more Left-Wing (NO)? Bet YES, or NO, according to your opinion. 1 person = 1 vote (per answer), so having more shares does not make your vote count for more.

Heavily inspired from @Joshua's excellent market,

/Joshua/good-tweet-or-bad-tweet-which-contr

You can submit any person/character/concept (shortened to p/c/c for the rest of the description), as well as a link / short phrase to give traders some context. If other people trade on your submission, you'll get mana off of their transaction fees (edit may 29: currently not true, but I believe it is being implemented currently).

I may N/A options for quality control, or edit them to provide a more neutral summary.


As a trader, you should buy any amount of YES in p/c/c you think are Right-Wing, buy any amount of NO in p/c/c you think are Left-Wing. I will leave the definition of those terms up to you. The amount of shares doesn't matter for the resolution, one share of yes is one vote and one hundred shares of yes is also one vote.

If I think you are voting purely as a troll, such as buying no in every option, I may block you or disregard your votes. Please vote in good faith! But hey, I can't read your mind. Ultimately this market is on the honor system.

Note that market prices will be a bit strange here, because this is simultaneously a market and a poll. If you sell your shares, you are also removing your vote.

The market will close every every week; See the close date to know on what day. I will then check the positions tab on options that have been submitted.

If there is a clear majority of YES holders, the option resolves YES.

If there is a clear majority of NO holders, the option resolves NO.

If it's very close and votes are still coming in, the option will remain un-resolved.

The market will then re-open for new submissions, with a new close date the next week. This continues as long as I think the market is worth running.

It does not matter what % the market is at, and bots holding a position are also counted.

Some guidlines:

  • I encourage you not to bet options to extremes (1% or 99%) before a quite clear majority has been established. Otherwise, it prevents others from betting toward that extreme, and can bias the results.

I may update these exact criteria to better match the spirit of the question if anyone has any good suggestions, so please leave a comment if you do.

See:

Get Ṁ600 play money
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Alternative medicine
bought Ṁ5 Alternative medicine YES

Surprised this isn't trading higher given the right wing stereotypical tendency towards antivax, essential oils, homeopathy, ivermectin, drinking bleach because Trump said to etc

I thought essential oils and homeopathy were stereotypically left wing

Really? In my experience it's almost entirely focused in the section of the right that are super anti science conspiracy theorists, and are often pushed as alternatives to vaccination

I'm not surprised by this. Alternative medicine was associated with New Age, so it was very stereotypically left-wing before covid. Now that the right wing position is to reflexively reject medical science and embrace whatever wacky alternative there is, alt medicine has become right wing. The reason essential oils and homeopathy seem left wing to me is because I haven't heard anything about right-wingers using them specifically, so I still associate them with pre-covid alt med.

bought Ṁ5 Alternative medicine YES

Yeah this is definitely right-wing. There are still right-wing antivaxxers and antimaskers posting nonsense on social media 4 years later.

It's your left wing-right wing compass that needs adjustment, not the World around you.

You will be shocked when you find out Trump never told anyone to drink bleach or ingest any kind of disinfectant liquid.

It's the definition of "alternative medicine" that has changed. All of a sudden off-label prescriptions, a widespread practice in medicine for ages, became "right-wing, alt medicine craziness".

@tbird Thinking that neurotoxins can be used off-label as antivirals without any evidence is right-wing, alt medicine craziness.

One could say the same about completely novel vaccines developed and deployed to billions of people within a year. But your politics has blinded you to common sense.

@tbird You don't know anything about my politics or my relationship to the mRNA vaccines. Stop being brainwashed by the media into thinking that there are only two sides to every issue and that one side is right about everything.

You said wrongful use of off-label prescriptions is right-wing, which is why I mentioned your politics. It's a nonsensical thing to say.

Your mind-reading, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous and not based on anything I wrote.

If I recall correctly, when Scott Alexander did an informal review of the research into ivermectin, he eventually concluded that the reason some good studies showed it working was because, in developing nations with high prevelance of parasitic worm infections, taking it would kill the worms, so when people got given immunosuppressants to help them survive COVID the worms wouldn't get out of control and kill them

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted

I'm fairly sure the evidence for efficacy of vaccines is much more rigorous, replicated, and universally applicable

I don't disagree with any of that.

You're providing a good example of what I was getting at above -- you felt the need to respond as if I needed to be convinced about the inefectiveness of Ivermectin as a treatment or prophylactic for Covid, and about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in general.

All I said or implied is that you could make the same argument that deploying a completely new kind of vaccine, developed in record time, to billions of people is left-wing lunacy, and it would be equally ridiculous.

forced labor in the gulag

Y'all realise that it was the USSR that did the gulags right? It's not confederate slavery if that's what people are thinking

bought Ṁ50 forced labor in the ... NO

Seriously! "Right-wing" and "left-wing" are not synonyms for "things I dislike" and "things I like." Gulags were a soviet system of forced labor used by Stalin to imprison 18 and kill 1.6 million people, many for political reasons. Gulags are the left-wing complement to the right-wing of Nazi concentration camps.

bought Ṁ1 Answer #zfdk7rl72f YES

You think that just because something is associated with the USSR it must be left-wing?

@Snarflak are you joking?

bought Ṁ150 Alternative medicine NO

Horseshoe theory doesn’t mean that left wing governments are secretly right wing.

@TheAllMemeingEye No. Left-wing governments can do right-wing actions, and vice versa.

Imprisoning people because of their political ideology is neither inherently left- or right- wing. It is authoritarian. Fascists (right-wing authoritarians) locking up communists is right-wing. Communists (left-wing authoritarians) locking up people for not being sufficiently communist is left-wing. Gulags imprisoned people for not being left-wing enough. That is inherently left-wing. How could it be any other way?

@HoldingC Authoritarianism is right-wing though.

No. That is objectively wrong. The Soviet Union, PRC, Cuba—These are/were all left-wing authoritarian states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism

Touching grass
bought Ṁ2 Touching grass YES

Outdoors manual labour is much more common in rural areas, which are in turn much more likely to be right-leaning

Terminally online NEETs who never go outside are stereotypically Reddit leftists

I read this as leftists being the ones who go outside and live in reality while right-wingers spend all their time watching TV or in online echo chambers.

Big data
bought Ṁ2 Big data YES

Isn't this largely driven by capitalist tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg? Surprised it's at such low odds

You think Zuckerberg is right-wing?

bought Ṁ50 the Holodomor NO

Isn't he a capitalist tech billionaire with severe surveillance scandals? How is that left-wing?

The main evidence in the article seems to be that he donated to the Biden campaign, which I think most people would agree is the weakest imaginable indicator of "leftism"

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