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Sorry for the lack of updates, folks.

Frankly, this hasn't been my best year. I was doing sort of okay until about August (just after my last comment on this market), when I had a wee breakdown and the wheels kind of came off. I struggled with akrasia and executive dysfunction for a lot of this year, as I often do, and I thought this market would help more than it ended up doing. Oh well, worth a go.
(Relatedly, I was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADHD earlier this month, and I should be on medication for it by early March. Hopefully that'll help.)

Goal-by-goal breakdown:

• 👨🏻‍⚕️ I didn't submit, or even write all that much for my thesis. This was the biggest blocker of the year, and my biggest disappointment.

• 💌 1 speed-dating event that I'm counting as 1 date, and 5 dates resulting from that! That's a 600% increase from my previous record of literally 1 per year. Still not a huge amount, and a NO resolution, but a meaningful personal win. I'll take it.

• 📝 Not a lot of writing for my blog, certainly not a lot of promotion or marketing. That probably won't change soon; I'll need to put all of my writing energy into my PhD.

• 🎥 Nothin'. I may try streaming my PhD work for accountability and external routine, but I haven't.

• 🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️ I'm ashamed to say I didn't even attempt it. My August funk stopped my gym habit in its tracks, though I'm proud of how closely I stuck to it up until then. Another improvement on previous years that nonetheless didn't clear the bar I set.

• 🐉 This one actually succeeded! Stir Fried went ahead with an almost-sold out season (3 sold out nights with 60 seats, so minimum 180>100 audience members) and my crew crushed their performances of my silly sea shanty shitpost musical.

• 📚 Fell by the wayside along with my blog.

• 🎉 I've struggled to keep in touch with friends this year. I managed to keep in contact with a fair few of them, but none of the meetups I organised exceeded 5 people.

• 👨🏻‍💻 Another wayside goal that won't be off the backburner for some time now.

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Didn't happen. This was always a "if the opportunity presents itself" type goal anyway - not hugely disappointed. I'll get there one day.

• 🤖 Nowhere close.

• ❓ I have a few things here:

  • I won an official task on Taskmaster New Zealand

  • Got my sea shanty musical script signed by the Longest Johns

  • Got diagnosed with ADHD and on track for medication, which I hope will increase my ability to actually execute on this kind of crap in the future

@NcyRocks any updates?

also do you plan to do a particularly strong blitz to try to accomplish some of these that you wouldn't otherwise, at the end of the year? basically asking if the lower they get the more motivated you feel to "prove the market wrong" or something which would mess with otherwise "default" time decay

🐟🦈🐋🌊

To elaborate: I've written a shorter musical (still using a traditional sea shanty) called Fish in the Sea that has been picked as part of Stray Theatre's Stir Fried short play festival. I see no major obstacles towards this being accomplished now.

@NcyRocks That's so cool!

Some good updates on several fronts lately:

• I’ve submitted an official PhD completion plan with a December submission date that both of my supervisors have signed off on

• If we count speed-dating as being equivalent to one date, then I’m currently at 2 and might possibly be up to 5 by the end of the week 👀

• Currently deciding whether I’ve already done something awesome that I wouldn’t have predicted last year…

@NcyRocks nice!

All right, an update here is long overdue. Sorry for leaving it this long, traders.

• 👨🏻‍⚕️ PhD's going okay - good progress on a couple of papers, 0 words written on the thesis proper so far but I'm pretty confident I can at least submit by the end of the year.

• 💌 0 dates so far 😅 I have booked a speed-dating event for next Sunday, which I think should count as 1, and could well lead to others. But at this point I have to do close to 1 per week for the rest of the year to catch up.

• 📝 After a long while of procrastination, I've launched my blog, In the Limit! My first post (other than the one announcing this market) explains my PhD thesis to a ~lay audience: My PhD Thesis Topic: Transformers Might Approximate Solomonoff Induction

• 🎥 I plan to start streaming my some of my PhD work and possibly also drama work, and I have a bunch of ideas for Manifold-adjacent streams, but so far I have practically no views on YT/Twitch.

• 🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️ I haven't attempted the ACFT, but I have been going to the gym relatively consistently since January. The only part I'm not sure I'll pass by the end of the year is the run; I'll give it a go and start running regularly if I fail that bit.

• 🐉 I've been working on my musical script slowly, and plan to submit it to my theatre company within a month (which is when deadlines close). I'm cautiously optimistic about getting it staged. If that fails, I think I can attempt writing a shorter one for their short play festival (which would count).

• 📚 No book reviews written so far, but I have some books in mind, and I have a blog schedule I want to keep to now.

• 🎉 I've had some meetups with friends, but nothing with >=5 people at a time. I plan to invite some people 'round next week.

• 👨🏻‍💻 I have some features/projects in mind, and I expect that AI will make them easier than I anticipated.

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 No concrete plans to visit Edinburgh yet.

• 🤖 @NcyBot has been steadily doing his thing, which isn't too profitable at the moment. He's been on the backburner for a while now.

• ❓ Nothing so far.

Somewhat disappointing progress overall so far, but the year's not half over yet.

@NcyRocks Could we get an update on # of parties hosted, # of book reviews written, # of dates gone on, etc.? Hope you're doing well in the new year.

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.