Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold

Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me:

These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”.

You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the smart money updated a lot on it.

A few smaller markets that Clay didn’t include: Manifold is only at 36% despite several dozen traders. I think they’re just wrong - but I’m not going to use any more of my limited supply of play money to correct it, thus fully explaining the wrongness. Futuur is at 47%, but also thinks there’s an 18% chance Russia invades Lithuania, so I’m going to count this as not really mature. Insight Prediction, a very new site I’ve never seen before, claims to have $93,000 invested and a probability of 22%, which is utterly bizarre; I’m too suspicious and confused to invest, and maybe everyone else is too.

(PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi all avoid this question. I think PredictIt has a regulatory agreement that limits them to politics. Polymarket and Kalshi might just not be interested, or they might be too PR-sensitive to want to look like they’re speculating on wars where thousands of people could die.)

What happens afterwards? Clay beats me again:

For context: