[Linkpost] Will the US experience a constitutional crisis before 2030?

[jackva]

Manifold is now at ~ 3:1 odds expecting a constitutional crisis in the US before 2030, up from ~1.5:1 odds around Inauguration Day and ~ 1.2:1 odds after Election Day:

This is a very significant risk increase that is easy to underappreciate when perceiving the current Administration as close to its prior incarnation and/​or perceiving some of the early warnings as hyperbole.

[Larks]

This seems like one of many Manifold markets with terrible resolution criteria. Wikipedia is not an oracle; it is a website run by Trump’s political opponents, who are willing to use skullduggery to promote their political agendas. Even just looking at this page, it is a bizarre collection of events. It includes things like this:

In 2017, the eligibility of a number of Australian parliamentarians to sit in the Parliament of Australia was called into question because of their actual or possible dual citizenship. The issue arises from section 44 of the Constitution of Australia, which prohibits members of either house of the Parliament from having allegiance to a foreign power. Several MPs resigned in anticipation of being ruled ineligible, and five more were forced to resign after being ruled ineligible by the High Court of Australia, including National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. This became an ongoing political event referred to variously as a “constitutional crisis”^[34][35] or the “citizenship crisis”.

Inclusion of this sort of event suggests a very low bar for what constitutes a crisis. But then many objectively much more major events are simply totally omitted!

I can see why the market is trading above 50% - you can just look at the talk page to see people are leaning this way. Arguably this market should have already closed, because the wikipedia page did list it for a while (there was weasel language, but it clearly was ‘listed’, which was the resolution criteria), prior to the market’s rules being [clarified/​changed] to include a vague appeal to ‘broader consensus’. But I think this mainly tells us about wikipedia, rather than about reality.

[Rebecca]

you can just look at the talk page to see people are leaning this way

Some people are, but I’d say that the overall vibe of that thread is leaning against until at least when it stops being a live issue

[jackva]

It would be great if there was a better prediction market version of this question, unfortunately others I found are even worse.

Yet, I don’t think it’s worth dismissing entirely.

If criteria are stricter now, this should mean that an increase in the probability between November and today is underestimated by this question.

[Davidmanheim]

Given the resolution criteria, the question is in some ways more about Wikipedia policies than the US government...

[jackva]

Have Wikipedia policies changed recently, though? The key thing here is the time trend so unless Wikipedia policies have changed, it seems reasonable to interpret the change over time as reflecting the underlying substantive interest.

Clearly one needs some media source to define resolution criteria for a question like this.