Manifest tickets are currently quite expensive:
Manifest Ticket - $538
Manifest Supporter Ticket - $3000
Manifest Student Ticket - $350
Manifest Volunteer Ticket - $100
https://www.havenbookings.space/festival-season
As is accommodation:
Where should I stay?
Lighthaven can accommodate ~half of the attendees starting at around $100 per night. A link will be shared on this site and announced in Discord once booking opens. Alternatively, attendees organise affordable house shares in Discord, see #travel-planning.
Can I apply for housing or travel subsidy?
Unfortunately, Manifest is unable to provide support to those seeking assistance with travel costs.
Booking.com: Hotels in Berkeley.
If the financial situation of Manifest is similar to Effective Altruism Global, then the bulk of the costs are the venue and venue-linked catering:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n5GJEP3tMrzdfYPGG/how-much-do-eags-cost-and-why
It appears Lighthaven in Berkely is likely not the most cost efficient venue location in the US:
https://databayou.com/home/fmr.html
https://www.maps.com/fair-market-rents-map-us-rents-2003-to-2023/
It therefore seems likely that attending Manifest (including tickets and accommodation) would be significantly cheaper if the venue was in a significantly less trendy city.
1,000People are also trading
@ian Unfortunately being the best conference venue in the world doesn't matter if we can't afford to go there. People who have attended necessarily don't face this barrier, and may not truly know how it feels for those who do.
@TheAllMemeingEye The cost of the area is crazy, but it's not high like it is by accident. It's high because lots of people want to be there* and lots of people working on prediction market-adjacent things are there. Having the event there makes it easier for a lot of the speakers and presenters to attend.
Have you considered running your own satellite event?
-* If someone is feeling a desire to argue about causes of housing costs, consider this is maybe not the place.
lots of people working on prediction market-adjacent things are there. Having the event there makes it easier for a lot of the speakers and presenters to attend.
I guess this forms something of a societal coordination problem where it would benefit the collective to be concentrated somewhere that not everyone else is, but it benefits the individual to stay where the collective is. Maybe we can use a strategy from Yud's Inadequate Equilibria to save us? Maybe some kind of conditional collective commitment treaty?
Have you considered running your own satellite event?
If various factors currently limiting my free time significantly subside, I may be open to attending/organising an informal Manifold meet-up in the UK later this year (minifest?), though obviously this wouldn't have any booked venue or microceleb talks, and wouldn't have the same level of site-wide promotion, so would probably be lucky to have a mere handful of attendees.
@TheAllMemeingEye I love the name minifest!
On the coordination thing, it's well-known that good things happen when you have a lot of people working on the same thing in the same place. How to make a place more desirable as a location without also making said place more expensive is an unsolved problem.