Back in the gym!

Nice! A personal goals market with leagues/leaderboard implications! The next step is to make a bunch of derivative conditional markets to see what behaviors are most predictive of YES resolutions in this market. (@patrik had been considering operationalizing something like this over here Does this startup idea have potential? | Manifold)

It would be especially interesting to see if any conditional behaviors correlate with success across MULTIPLE options. Of course, the trouble with proposing conditional behaviors is that, well, they're conditional, so you might also want markets for whether or not you'll DO those behaviors to keep things a bit more grounded.

@Charlie Great idea! I've considered this already, but I have a couple of reservations:

• I've made some similar markets before: /NcyRocks/what-will-improve-my-mood-in-januar but they didn't get a tonne of activity. This market is getting around that via massive liquidity that I got for free from Manifold, so I'd have to provide it myself, and I'd want to have a really good market structure worked out before I committed to that.

• I'm not sure whether conditional markets should be per-answer (e.g. "will I submit my thesis if I go to the gym 3 times per week") or predicting the total number of YES resolutions ("what % of resolutions will I complete if I go to the gym 3 times per week"). The first would result in many more answers with liquidity spread thin, the second would be difficult to predict.

I suppose I could just make some very low-liquidity markets at first to see what works.

@NcyRocks Gotcha. Yeah, if you're not trying to throw any more mana at this, then you've gotta be a bit more discerning.

I think the default idea is to come up with conditionals for each answer, but you can definitely see how bundling everything together could surface the most high-value correlations with success. It might be harder to predict, but hypothetically ideas for individual answers could also be rolled up into this bundle. Not to mention, think of all the creative ideas could be surfaced by soliciting solutions that can also apply to more than one resolution. For example, "documenting your progress toward all these goals on your YouTube channel", or "hosting a speed dating party". There are some very interesting combinations that not only would move the needle on several goals but would also make for some very interesting activities this year! I feel like Claude could have a field day trying to overlap as many of these as possible.

All that said, I think unfortunately without serious liquidity, most of these personal goals markets really don't get enough action. That's why I'm excited about this one. But if you really think about the personal monetary value of moving the needle on these goals, you could probably make the case for even more liquidity. (Though if each resolution is not equally important, that might be a reason not to bundle them and put the liquidity toward only the most important ones.)

@NcyRocks why'd you settle on 20 when your batting average is <1?

@dlin007 Not gonna lie, there's an element of hopium in there, but there's also a sense that I haven't been trying nearly as hard as I can in my dating life, and I want to try to push myself. 20 seemed achievable, but only just, and only if I really really actually try.

@NcyRocks ah, i see. what's your strategy? pls don't do a date-me doc unless you get really desperate 😛

I now have a DIY iOS widget tracking this market

@NcyRocks Is this number public? If not what’s the current value?

@Bayesian https://substack.com/@ncyoung is what i'm aware of from other similar markets (although it may not always be perfectly up to date?)

N.C. Young | Substack

@Ziddletwix oh thanks, idk why the count didn't show up when i looked at it

mustve been looking at a slightly different page

ah there's the N.C. Young substack, made by N.C. Young, and those pages are different

@Bayesian yeah afaik that substack user/whatever page isn't directly linked to by the main substack itself, so it's a little harder to find

@NcyRocks Can you think of such a thing for 2024 (that you wuoldn't have predicted in 2023)?

@Bayesian I wouldn't have predicted that I would:

• Attend Manifest 2024

• Write a script for a musical

• Present an academic paper at a conference in-person

I'd at least have counted the first two.

placing a NO limit order to motivate myself to make a non-house bot more profitable than yours 😝