One Manifold user has been charged with homicide so far that we know of. Will there be another before 2027?
Update 2025-06-26 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has confirmed that the first Manifold user charged with homicide, which serves as the premise for this market, is Luigi Mangione.
Update 2025-06-26 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has clarified that for the market to resolve to YES, two conditions must be met:
The creator or the Manifold community must become aware of the homicide charge.
The charge must be able to be linked to a specific Manifold user account.
Update 2025-06-27 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has provided examples of what would be considered sufficient evidence:
For the homicide charge: Media reports or court records.
For linking to the Manifold account: A matching username and/or avatar with a confirmed online account of the individual.
1,000Per https://manifold.markets/stats, Manifold currently has about 7499 active users. (This is probably a gross underestimate because there are a lot of inactive users, but I'll go with it for now.) The 2023 Global Study on Homicide suggests that the global homicide rate is 5.8 out of 100,000 per year (in other words, 5.8*10^-5). So if the probability that each active user goes on to commit a homicide is independent, and we also inflate by 1.51 to account for the fact that we still have the second half of 2025 left (and we're asking for the probability of something before 2027), the probability that there is no homicide is about (1 - 5.8*10^-5)^(1.51*7499) ~= 51.85%, which means that the probability that there is at least one homicide is about 48%.
NOTE: Homicide rates differ drastically by region. If there were more Manifold users from Latin America or Africa, which are statistically the biggest offenders, then I would expect the probability to be a lot higher. I don't think this is the case though because there are very few manifold.love profiles from either region, and even though this might be debatable, I think the geographic distribution of users on both websites is nearly identical. If everyone committed homicide at the European rate, which is 3.5e-5, then the probability of a homicide decreases to 32%. There are more Americans than Europeans on Manifold, though, and the U.S. rate is pretty close to the global rate, so I think using the global rate as a proxy is pretty safe though.
@duck_master a spanner in the works is that this question is operating off of charges. Under 60% of murders are ‘solved’.
There’s also the difficulty of finding out that there was a murder and linking it to a manifold account. Practically speaking, unless we know about it we can’t resolve YES.
@OP Huh, this actually flips the dynamics! The vast majority of murders in Europe are solved but only half of them are solved in the US. So the probability a Europe-based user commits a solved murder is about 3.5e-5 but the probability a US-based user commits a solved murder is 3.4e-5 (since the total US homicide rate is 6.8e-5). In other words, Europeans are slightly more likely to commit a solved homicide than Americans.