Will numbers be unambiguous before 2045?
10
1kṀ645
2045
29%
chance

What number is "1,234"? Ask an American and they'll say it's 1,234, but talk to a European and they'll say it's 1,234.

That's already bad enough, but it gets worse! Ask an American what number "one billion" refers to and they'll say one billion, but a European will think it means one billion!

Randomly having 3+ orders-of-magnitude miscommunications is a really dumb way to run a civilization. We gotta pick one guys.

Market resolves based on whether one set of unambiguous methods of talking about numbers reaches at least 95% adoption among the relevant group of people. (That being everyone who uses Arabic numerals for the first issue, and all English speakers for the second issue.)

This market is about numbers only, not dates, systems of measurement, or other places where humanity has not yet gotten its act together. (It does however refer to any other serious numerical ambiguities that I didn't mention above.)

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bought Ṁ100 NO

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

This market odds should be very close to 0%.

Alternative markets might be:

  • will any country change from short to long scale, or from long to short, before x? (such as UK 1974)

  • will any country clarify officially their preferred scale by date x? (such as Italy 1994)

Apparently, for the English-Speaking Countries (Native Use) is fixed already.

The problem is for English speakers in other countries who learn English as a second language. For many of them, the word billion is a false friend, as it is very similar to the 10^12 word in their language.

After being instructed to read more carefully: I do think it's weird to say Europeans everywhere and then just limit it to English speakers in the criteria. Most Europeans do not speak English (natively).
If you are interested in English speakers, then I would include Australia, and if you are interested in Europe, then I would include non-English languages.

@rayman2000 I created a table with ChatGPT for Europe. Only for major official languages. The second table with regional recognized languages has more than 200 entries and it will take a bit longer to review.

Only for the major languages we have, for 10^12:

  • 19 entries starting with "b", and mostly similar to "billion"

  • 13 entries starting with "t", and mostly similar to "trillion"

  • 7 entries starting with equivalent to "t" in a different alphabet, and mostly similar to "trillion"

  • 2 other entries

In some languages, such as Spanish, "billón" has two meaning depending on the context. Local usage is 10^12. When in the US, or when our press reports on US data, "billón" means 10^9.

Both usages are accepeted by the language academy:

@MiguelLM Cool! It also doesn't really matter what the current state is, resolution is in 2045. I am complaining about the resolution criteria not really matching the title / remaining description.

@rayman2000 Sure, I wasn’t particularly concerned about the resolution. I just found the topic very interesting, so I spent some time looking into how these terms are actually used in different languages, and I shared the results purely out of curiosity.

@rayman2000 and @IsaacKing

When it comes to resolution,

  • Should the speakers of ~30 different languages try to convince the speakers of 3 languages to use something like “milliard” for 10^9?

  • Should the speakers of 3 languages (including English) try to convince the speakers of ~30 different languages to use something like “billion” for 10^9?

If we think of number of languages, we should go for the first option. If we consider the prevalence of English, the second option gets more weight.

@rayman2000 in Portuguese is different for Brazil and Portugal

Haven't Europeans given up and started using the American billion? In the UK, a billion is always 10^9

@Fion No! German is def still different

@rayman2000 but it mentions that point only being about english speakers

Hmm, maybe this one is already solved?

@IsaacKing *antisolved

@TheAllMemeingEye proving once again that I can't read!

@Fion it seems this is the case only for Maltese, Irish and English, but we have >30 other languages with a different word for 10^9

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-numbers-be-unambiguous-before#lj47wks9mh

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