Have you looked at a probability on Manifold and thought, "That seems off, but I can’t afford to correct it"? Well, good news — I’m running a mana grant program so you’ll be able to! Currently there is M$50,000 of funding available (M$5k from me, donations of M$15k from @MarcusAbramovitch and M$5k from @8 (who have also volunteered to help judge), plus matching from Manifold (offered by @Austin up to M$100k)), and this may grow further if additional funders emerge!

About This Market

This market resolves to the names of the users who receive mana grants, in proportion to their grant sizes! 

This is a free-response market, so payouts are not fixed; therefore, I will avoid betting, and try to avoid specifically commenting on how likely I am to give any specific user a grant until the market closes. Other judges have also agreed to this.

Deadline

This market will close at the end of April, Pacific Time. I hope to have decisions out within a couple weeks! Maybe before that if most of the applications come in earlier, giving us more time to think about how strong they are.

How Will We Decide Who to Grant?

The goal is to use the mana to most efficiently increase the importance-adjusted accuracy of markets on Manifold. Because of how prediction markets are structured, increasing the accuracy of markets usually looks like profiting! 

We may give a grant to someone who just puts their name if they seem sufficiently deserving! However, we’re more likely to give you a grant if you explain some ideas you have for how to use it. You can do this in the comments below, or privately if you’d prefer: Discord (Conflux#3493) and email (jacobcohen4761@gmail.com) both work.

Maybe you convince us…

• you have an idea for a worthwhile betting strategy that you’d implement or write a bot for!

• you’ll implement or write a bot that implements one of my betting strategy ideas well! (NO on many personal goals, more time decay, betting based on calibration graphs of users, anti-Spindle, ...)

• you’ll do a bit more research than other bettors on markets in a certain category! (Maybe those GiveWell grant ones with a ton of liquidity but not that many bettors because they’re a bit more boring to research!)

• you’ll correct markets faster or more thoroughly after news events!

• you have more expertise, better instincts, or a stronger record than the markets in a certain area!

• you just have a good-looking portfolio graph — remember, it’s okay if you lost big bets as long as they could’ve been positive expected value!

• you have another cool idea or rationale!

Or any combination of these!

It must also be clear that you’re limited by mana: we’d love a high-impact opportunity where a few thousand mana would really help you implement your plan.

Don't be too intimidated: the grant mana's gotta go to someone. And not all of these strategies require creativity!

How Are We Adjusting for Importance?

Not that much! But our goal is to fund proposals that focus on markets where knowing the probabilities add value. This can include personal markets as well as those about world affairs! But we’re probably not funding your strategy for winning self-resolving markets. You can convince us why the markets you’ll focus on are important — why it’s helpful for people to know their probabilities, but it’s also totally fine to have a general purpose strategy that will improve the accuracy of markets in general.

I may make small modifications to these criteria within the next few days if people have good suggestions. But they should remain philosophically the same!

Success Criteria

I have another market that depends on this, so: I will consider my grant program a success if, three months after the grants are awarded, I feel that grantees used my mana to contribute more toward importance-adjusted accuracy of markets than if I had kept and invested it all myself. Let’s do this!

General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.