@chrisjbillington I don't know what "credibly thought" means. I can't immediately find experiments that test this at temperatures comparable to typical T_c. Could you post a link to them, or otherwise explain the resolution?
@ScottLawrence I don't know of any such experiments, and was defaulting to a NO resolution in their absence, similar to how you said your market on whether it was a high temperature superconductor (i.e. 77K) would resolve if we didn't hear anything further.
If you'd like to resolve differently, since you're active, I'll unresolve.
@chrisjbillington IIRC my (maybe private) reasoning on the high-Tc market was that, with strong incentives, absence of evidence was excellent evidence of absence. I don't think that's true here. I'd rather the market remain unresolved until there's some evidence independent of whatever our personal priors around "random material in X class is a superconductor" are.
@ScottLawrence what if that's indefinitely? The most likely outcome is that we'll never know - people are less likely to publish null results and interest in LK-99 is low.
Markets that stay open indefinitely are not great, especially in a post-loans world. They should resolve at some point, even if it's NA.
@chrisjbillington Interest in LK-99 is low, but interest in superconductors generally is high, and I expect theory to eventually advance enough to justify a resolution on the basis of a relatively cheap computation.
People who buy a position on a market are purchasing a package of uncertainty, one part of which is uncertainty about when the market will resolve. It shouldn't resolve early just because people incorrectly estimated when the answer would be known, any more than it should resolve "YES" just because people incorrectly thought the answer would be "NO".
I will make this commitment: if at any point I become convinced that the correct price on this market is known to within 0.1%, then I'll resolve. (That's roughly equivalent to needed to re-resolve one in one thousand markets, which doesn't seem too high to me. 1% would definitely be too high for me.)
@ScottLawrence I understand wanting to not risk resolving incorrectly, buts it's a bad idea to create a market in the first place without a deadline - people can't trade on something if one side of the market expects that if they're right it will never resolve. Better to operationalize the question in terms of what evidence will emerge on what timescale.
(And although closing dates don't officially mean anything, if you didn't intend to resolve near the close date, it would have been good to mention it in the criteria - unlike your other market, this one does not have a "this market resolves later than you'd like" warning).
For what it's worth, unless by "eventually" youre talking longer than either of us are likely to be around, I think you're quite miscalibrated in your expectations about theory advancing to the point of being able to do an ab initio calculation that tells you whether a given material is a superconductor. That's much harder than it sounds.
We don't have a comprehensive theory of superconductivity despite many decades of trying, and brute-force simulations of more than a few atoms, without a good theory telling you what parts of the simulation you can throw away (if any), are exponentially computationally prohibitive. And will continue to be until quantum computers make not just significant progress, but mature to the point of actual large scale and fast gate times - I think this is several decades away at the soonest, and I'd give an even more pessimistic estimate than that if not for current trends in AI.