This is a story about a flawed Manifold market, about how easy it is to buy significant objective-sounding publicity for your preferred politics, and about why I've downgraded my respect for all but the largest prediction markets.

I've had a Manifold account for a while, but I didn't use it much until I saw and became irked by this market on the conditional probabilities of a Harris victory, split by VP pick.

The market quickly got cited by rat-adjacent folks on Twitter like Matt Yglesias, because the question it purports to answer is enormously important. But as you can infer from the above, it has a major issue that makes it nigh-useless: for a candidate whom you know won't be chosen, there is literally no way to come out ahead on mana (Manifold keeps [...]

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