https://manifold.markets/bohaska/how-many-copies-of-yudkowsky-and-so-hARCct09A9

Made a version of this market which has 500k as the max and not 5mil

I don't really know what any of this is about, but the market is claiming that some random book I've never heard of will sell 480,000 copies, can someone fix it by dividing by 10?

@Eliza my guess is that number is the mean, which is skewed by the options above 1,000,000. As unlikely as those are, nobody is going to have an incentive to bet them all down to 1%, and even if they did, it would still say well above 100,000 copies. It might be better to not have this "expected amount" for markets that vary by order of magnitude.

@Eliza Unfortunately the market structure kind of doesn’t really work with the calculation. People aren’t going to bet the higher options below 2-4% for the normal reasons (rate of return is too low), even ignoring people who actually believe those. That means that the predicted number can’t be below ~250k even if the rest of the probability space is in the 20k bucket.

First year means within one year of publication so by September 2026?

30,000-100,000 according to Gemini.

Base rates:

• Nate Soares has independently published another book, Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way. It has 253 ratings on Goodreads. This doesn't map clearly to book sales, but most estimates are a factor of 1:10 or 1:20. Let's say 1:20 to be generous, giving 5000 total sales (but I'd guess that that's an overestimate, since rationalists are much more likely to review a book than the average reader, and the rationalist community is something of a built-in market for initial sales).

  • However, this book will be published by a traditional publisher, Little, Brown and Company.

• Similar books by similar authors, Life 3.0 by Tegmark and Superintelligence by Bostrom both had around 50k-100k sales in the first year

@Gabrielle Eliezer's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has... whoah, 17,937 ratings on goodreads.

And a similar question, assuming that Yudkowsky and Soares can provide the numbers separately, is this looking only at physical sales, or at ebook + audiobook + physical? What if they do something like making the ebook free, or giving away mass copies?

The book releases September 16, 2025. Is this market about just 2025 sales, sales before September 16, 2026, sales before a year after this market was created (the current close date), or some other criteria?

@Gabrielle It would be very surprising to me if it meant something other than "sales before [ReleaseDate] + 1Y" (currently, September 16th, 2026). I agree the current close date being may 14th is a bit odd, but that seems most easily explained by Nathan just clicking the 'put the expiration 1 year out' button and forgetting to push it the extra few months.

@RobertCousineau I agree, but it's good to have it clarified before it becomes relevant.

@DaveK Betting NO hoping yes