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.
1,000
3.00@arb ended up not accepting their grant due to some difficulties with their bot in light of API fees, new multiple-choice markets, and more, and having more pressing time commitments. Since it's been a month, they've agreed to forfeit their grant for now, so I'm splitting their M$12500 evenly (actually, I'm raising it to M$14000 to make the math easier and because I've had a lot of leftover mana lately) between @Joshua (a distinct person from @JoshuaB!) and @jskf, two people who expressed interest in a grant and seem like profitable, capital-constrained traders who make their money by adding information to markets! And I can now send it with managrams.
Well, I suppose Marcus spoiled the winners a bit below. We did have a miscommunication about whether the format was just grants - he felt that profit-sharing was more appropriate, and has generously offered to provide that to grantees if they're in search of more funding! I suggest you take him up on his offer if you are.
Anyway, I apologize for taking so long. At first I was busy with work, and then I got covid, and looking at grant applications ended up being the thing I procrastinated the most, which I'm sorry for. Then I spent a lot of time in search of some mathematical way to determine how to apportion funding among four very qualified-seeming applications!
@kenakofer's portfolio seemed to show a clear upward trend on serious markets. We also wanted to support their plans for Manifold-Metaculus one-sided "arbitrage" - since some studies have suggested that Metaculus is slightly more accurate on markets that can be directly compared. More mana seems worthwhile!
@PatMyron specializes in mispriced short-term markets with extreme probabilities, which often allow more capital to be profitably invested. Hopefully this grant will provide more freedom to bet on longer-term markets and those with less extreme probabilities, and hopefully improve those too!
@arb is a very cool bot created by @YaakovSaxon to execute arbitrage! It also often trades on markets with extreme probabilities, and on small edges, which don't generate a ton of profit but can provide a lot of value to Manifold. Also, from my conversations, it seems like Yaakov has put a lot of thought and committed work into this bot, and I'm excited for it in the future!
@JoshuaB ranked #2 in the 2022 midterms forecasting tournament, and does seem to add value by forecasting on real-world markets! He also is somewhat capital-constrained. He is my friend, so there may be slight bias, but we also genuinely think he's a worthy grantee.
In the end, the decision was to just split the 50k evenly, giving them all M$12,500 grants! This was partially because it's hard for us to say which of these is more promising/deserving of mana, but is also nice because, since it's the same, it'll allow us to more objectively say after the fact who used the grant the best, I guess! But it's the grantees' mana now.
The other applicants mostly did not have a solid track record of profiting, or their profit didn't really come from important markets (no offense @ShitakiIntaki, but most of your profits are on markets called "To Trophy or no Trophy", which I find hilarious).
I did give @KyleWan a smaller grant of M$500, for being fairly profitable on a smaller portfolio.
I also gave two "symbolic" M$1 grants:
@AlexbGoode seems to be a good trader with some cool ideas that'll improve Manifold! However, they "got their grant" from Whales v. Minnows, and is no longer capital constrained.
@IsaacKing is, uh, a legitimate former top trader! He...wasn't in need of mana at the time of his application, but is now. We obviously didn't have nearly enough grant mana to dig him out of the hole, but /JohnsonDaniel/will-isaac-kings-balance-become-pos is pretty high, so maybe there's hope. Anyway, we wanted to recognize that.
I was kind of hoping this market would unearth someone with a portfolio under 10,000 mana who genuinely could've used significantly more, but I guess that person might not really exist. I guess that means mana supply isn't that much of a limiting factor anymore?
Y'all can bet on whether I'll think the grants were a good idea (specifically, a better idea for Manifold importance-adjusted accuracy than me keeping the mana for myself) in three months!
I'd like to thank Marcus, @8, @Austin, and @jack for their support in the grants program, and wish everyone luck!
PS: As for the market resolution, the rounding was a bit tricky, since the main four grantees had about 24.75% of the total M$50,502 granted, while Kyle got 1%. I handled this by randomly choosing one of the main four to be resolved to 24% instead of 25%, which ended up being Joshua.
Conflux and I have had significant (but respectful and amicable) disagreements on this program. We had very different ideas of what grants would be for and the best "funding arrangement" for everyone that applied.
Without revealing our discussions and possibly independent from this, many people here are traders who I am willing to make an investment in.
The basic form would be that I give you X mana for you to trade in addition to your current portfolio (Y). I would own X/(X+Y) of the portfolio. After a certain period of time, I would get 50% of the profits from the part of the portfolio I own, you'd get the other half in addition to 100% of the profits on your own portfolio. If you lose mana, i will be on the hook for the loss. I'll make some conditions on this so you can't YOLO it risking my mana on double or nothings but I will not make you go risk-free. It's also a very good share of profits compared to a normal hedge fund (about 20% of performance is standard there) but this is because I expect you to have a very good performance and there is some free mana that comes your way so only take this if you expect to be profitable on additional mana.
I'm happy to put ~100k mana into these investments fwiw.
@kenakofer @JoshuaB @YaakovSaxon @PatMyron consider yourselves to be highly likely to be given this investment.
@ShitakiIntaki have a respectable calibration score betting in twitch prediction markets on limited Magic Arena streamer justlolaman's draft events. I generally avoid speculation in topics which I am unfamiliar. And... why not toss your name in the hat.
@DuSusisu I bet in self-referential markets and take mana away from people who are bad at game theory. This removes their ability to lower the accuracy of more important markets.
Since Manifold's website search/sort only allows one filter at a time, I crawl Manifold's API to combine multiple filters to find better opportunities:
https://docs.manifold.markets/api#get-v0markets
@AlexbGoode I imagine two projects involving automatic betting.
I would like to work on providing liquidity to important markets, preferably without loosing mana in the process.
Automatically create and resolve derivative markets for important markets. These can give additional insight into market dynamics.
@Conflux I've written a script to identify the markets with largest discrepencies between manifold and metaculus markets so I can conveniently and profitably arbitrage them on the regular. I planned to make it into a trading bot, but turns out there's a medium amount of judgement calls to make about which site I expect is more calibrated on each question. The extra mana only helps on the Manifold side of the arbitrage, but given the few analyses we've seen published so far, I don't think that's much of a problem.
@Botlab Here’s a market (granted, not a very “important” one) where anti-Spindle bot would’ve collected the profits that I instead did:
@Conflux Problem is, an anti-Spindle bot that's too consistent will rapidly turn into a mana cow for the anti-bot Spindle.
@IsaacKing Yeah, that’s definitely an issue. You could still make a lot of profit by betting less aggressively than I did: the market was at 100.0% when I saw it, so you’d still make a killing by betting small amounts.
@Conflux, @IsaacKing Thanks for drawing that to my attention. Yeah, the bot was afraid to bet against Spindle on a Spindle market. Spindle in particular has played some tricks on traders in his markets.
But yeah, the protections were clearly a bit overzealous here.