My Market Correction Mana Grants program has now granted M$52,002 (3*12,500+2*7,000+500+2*1) to various Manifold users, of which M$21,701 (3*5,000+2*3,250+500+2*0.5) was funded by me. In the past, I also granted a friend M$1,000 for betting on political markets.
For this market, bounties, loans, deals, and mana given as sympathy for market criteria or as "moral referral bonuses" are not considered grants. (These are all reasons I've given people mana.)
Who Would I Grant?
Have you looked at a market probability recently and thought "That seems off, but I can’t afford to correct it"? Or maybe:
you have an idea for a worthwhile betting strategy that you’d implement or write a bot for!
you’ll do a bit more research than other bettors on markets in a certain category!
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!
I'd prefer 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 I'm probably not funding your strategy for winning self-resolving markets. You can convince me 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.
The Big Picture
In today's mana economy, I don't think there are as many users who fit this criteria and are super capital-constrained. But maybe there are some. If you feel like you might deserve a grant, feel free to post in the comments, and I'll consider it!
Note also that @MarcusAbramovitch has been willing to offer profit-share arrangements in the past, and he's an order of magnitude richer than me on Manifold right now.
Deadline for this market is 11:30 PT, just to make New Year's Eve slightly more interesting.
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
3.00This should’ve resolved a few days ago I think - 6000 to Tumbles, 500 to Saul, 1000 to strutheo, 750+800 to Nathan Scott, 300 for market creation bounty, 1000 to chooterbot, some other bounty stuff I don’t feel like tracking down since I’m already over the threshold
@Conflux tracking it would be cool.
Also surprised that I didn't receive any. I applied several times for the grant 🥺
@MarcusAbramovitch but isn’t it much more in the spirit of manifold to make random grants without thinking
Added a thing to my profile about how I’m willing to grant <10k for basically anything that seems reasonable, which I think is true these days (I have 40k sitting around right now and no idea for what to do with it). I hope people take me up on this!
I feel like I’ve also thrown around some more things that could be considered grants lately. I’ll do the accounting at the end of the year, or maybe someone else can by going through managram history (though I will have to make some judgements on what constitutes a grant)
granted M$500 to @saulmunn for fun and because he mentioned being mana-poor on /Conflux/will-nonadults-be-permitted-to-atte
you’ll do a bit more research than other bettors on markets in a certain category!
you have more expertise, better instincts, or a stronger record than the markets in a certain area!
I am a Russian and I've been living in the UK for the last 5 years. I consistently outperform "Russia-Ukraine war" and "Russian politics" markets. Check out my profit graph: once I started buying mana and making serious bets it's been consistently trending upwards, except for the big drop which came from betting "NO" on the infamous AI letter question. The initial red comes from betting on self-resolving markets.
When making bets on Russia-related markets I rely on three main things:
1. Personal experience of living in Russia and my understanding of how Russian politics works. To some degree I was a political activist and e.g. monitored elections.
2. Situation reports by Conflict Intelligence Team. CIT is a russia-originated independent pro-Ukrainian OSINT group. Here is their website for sitreps. I also watch videos by the Ruslan Leviev, the founder and the leader of CIT on youtube.
3. Independent Russian media like Meduza.
I rely on all sorts of other stuff too: from social media to maps like deepstatemap.live.
If I simplify my trading strategy it'd be: "the war is going to be long, gruesome and things will move slowly". There is a bunch of 'irrational' market behaviour because of:
1. Relying too much and updating too much on western media reports. I don't like Russian government and I don't support the war at all, but western media are often incentivised to produce anti-Russian stories rather than objective evaluation.
2. Updating too much on news even when news are reported objectively. Many manifold users just don't have enough Russian political context to evaluate the news properly and get swayed by news reports.
3. Some kind of wishful thinking / supporting Ukraine with their bets for emotional reasons. I don't have hard evidence for this one, but this is the vibe I'm getting from comments and profiles. I also suspect that this effects further exacerbated by gambling-like behaviour from people on 5%/95% markets: 20x returns from betting NO at 95% or YES at 5% look enticing
Since my trading strategy relies to some degree on status quo changing slowly than markets often anticipate, I consciously keep in mind Taleb's "Thanksgiving Turkey" graph. I don't have a particularly systematic way of doing so except assuming that "fat tails" probability distributions are common.
One mistake I made was not predicting Prigozhin's coup/mutiny. In retrospect, I could've predicted it better because one of the people I follow and respect predicted it in advance. My probabilities of Prigozhin dying and a coup were clearly too low given this information.
Examples of prediction markets that I think have wrong probabilities right now.
1. Will Vladimir Putin be the President of Russia at the end of 2024? I think this should be at 90+%. Putin is an authoritarian who has every government branch under his control and controls all major media in the country. His government routinely rigs the election and changes laws in their favour. I wouldn't bet much higher than 90% because there is inherent uncertainty with big events like this one and black swans happen, but given the current scenarios I think he'll just going to win.
Arguably, this is a pretty important market for which knowing true probabilities could be useful: from potential political instability in Russia could have important consequences outside of it.
I already have a pretty big stake and bought a lot of mana with my money, and betting on this market involves an opportunity cost (there are other markets I could bet on which resolve quicker).
2. Did the Russians deliberately blow up the Nova Kakhovka dam? (Resolves NO if it was negligence rather than sabotage). CIT (the OSINT group mentioned above) think that with 90% probability there was no explosion and there was no explosion. Their scenario seems internally consistent and plausible. However, the market is muddled by the resolution criteria being "by the consensus of American sources" and American media seems to have a sort of "lab leak is racist" bias here. So I'm undecided on how to bet on. The vast bulk of my uncertainty is whether American media would drop the bias eventually.
Note: these are just two most prominent examples I picked for illustration.
Consider this my application for a grant!
And CC-ing @MarcusAbramovitch — I am curious if you see any potential for a profit share scheme here. I feel like I have enough of my own mana bought with personal cash to pick up profits from short-term markets. But at the same time there are important medium-term and long-term market that I'd like to correct for which I don't have the extra mana and I could certainly use a Ṁ10k grant to do so — but what kind of opportunities are there for a profit share scheme?
@42irrationalist can you DM me on discord? I bet we can come up with something but as a minimum, i would give you a 0% interest loan to bet on those long term markets
@MarcusAbramovitch Sounds interesting! I think from you I'd prefer a profit share or an interest-free loan given that you weren't initially looking to grant money. I'll message you in the next few days!
PS:
> I bet
tempted to create a prediction market for this :-P
@42irrationalist Did you end up working out an arrangement with Marcus? I think that's logical, but if it didn't work out then maybe I can help
@Conflux I have yet to message him. Two main factors:
I've been a bit busy traveling
I have roughly 20k undistributed mana after the end of July to distribute. The Russia+Ukraine markets seem to attract less traders now, so it's a bit less straightforward. I am expecting to fully distribute it, but I also think distributing my free mana is a reasonable thing to do before working out an arrangement with Marcus.
@42irrationalist Yeah, for sure! Just wanted to check in, since you seemed like you had a solid proposal
@Conflux Marcus and I made a profit-sharing arrangement about a month ago and I've been successfully trading using the invested mana for the last month. Also, rather than merely correcting long-term Russia-related markets, he's investing in my overall trading — as this seemed simpler and better to me.
(Just remembered about this thread and realized I haven't posted an update. Fixing this now.)
PS: To people considering contacting Marcus about profit-sharing: his terms are pretty friendly (check out my managrams) and I recommend him!
@42irrationalist yea, i'd say things are going well. I'd further suggest that this arrangement is better than a typical loan for a few reasons
1. It's based on how much you make so the loan is proportional to your gain
2. You get to learn things from the person who loans you the money (they are incentivized to help you)
3. You can take risk. Usually, people take loans to place in much safer strategies. On profit share terms, you don't have to. In fact, I bare all the risk in most agreements.