Yes, the Singaporean government has actually sent Manifold an email asking about that, see the Thursday standup meeting for more info.
Here's the email they received, according to Manifold (I suspect some parts are comments from Manifold, but I'm not too sure):
We are a team from Open Government Products (https://www.open.gov.sg/), a unit of the Singapore government that builds products for the public good.
We are trying to jumpstart prediction markets in Singapore and our goal is to find an initial, small-scale use case, prove its success, and gradually scale it up. We are doing this as part of our hackathon, during which our business-as-usual work is suspended for a month and we can explore new product ideas.
We hope to work with Manifold to demonstrate that Manifold markets is capable of accurately predicting answers to questions that Singaporean policymakers are interested in. The hope is, having done this, it would be easier to persuade agencies to deepen their involvement with us. My colleagues and I are willing to put up our own money for this proof of concept.
Specifically, we would like to check with Manifold:
How can we ensure that the questions we post will garner sufficient interest from the community?
How much money should we put up to achieve this and what are the exact mechanics to do so?
What would a reasonable timeline look like? (Our demo day is on 1 Feb, so ideally we would like to achieve some results before that)
Preliminarily, we have identified the following metrics as good candidates to create a market in:
Housing data
Resale flat prices (published daily): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/189/datasets/d_8b84c4ee58e3cfc0ece0d773c8ca6abc/view
Market rental rates of flats (published monthly): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/166/view
Property transactions records (published daily): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/55/view
COVID-related data (published weekly): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/522/view
We were advised that it's probably in bad taste to create a market on the number of COVID-19 deaths, but the rest should be fine.
Separately, I wonder if Manifold has tried building something closer to an actual futures market, where the "market price" reflects the best estimate of a continuous variable that the market is trying to predict (need not be price, could be e.g. total fertility rate or COVID numbers or housing transaction volumes). I understand this could be achieved somewhat right now by using multiple choice where the values are bucketed, but the idea is to have a headline figure that directly predicts what the most likely outcome and could fluctuate like stock prices — this seems most useful for decision-makers.
Resolves YES if there is evidence of markets being created before the closing date about Singapore on behalf of the organization referred to in this email.
1,000
3.00If this market closes with current info, I'll resolve NO, but @Bayesian made a market with a longer closing time that closes next month
@chrisjbillington I want to ask, if there's evidence that Manifold's talking with Singapore close to the close date, but Singapore hasn't made markets yet, would you object to me extending the close date instead of resolving NO?
The initial response was based on a prior that if it isn't done in 2 months, it's probably dead, but I'm not too sure now.
@bohaska To be fair to those who made a bet with the closing date in mind, you should create a new market with a longer close date instead of extending the close date
@footgun Thanks, but I skimmed the article and didn’t see anything about whether prediction markets count as gambling?
I doubt this will move beyond the POC stage. From the government perspective, giving legitimacy to prediction markets is a lot of liabilities and not much to gain.
Once become mainstream, there will be adversarial behaviours that are inconvenient for the authority. Scandal markets. Insider trading by civil servants. Even the various policy market can be portrayed as gaining entertainment from something serious. Not to mention potential sensitive election markets for 2025 election. If prediction market moves beyond its current niche, the gov will have to manage the PR very carefully for it not to backfire. All these works, for some datapoints that the government monitor closely anyway?
A site where anyone can create any market is not the best place to do this. It would better for them to gain insight from market but not associate with them in any official manner. Or have a private market among expertly panelists.
You know someone was jailed because they leaked and ask people to bet on COVID figure?
Zhao Zheng, a 37-year-old Singapore citizen, was sentenced to 18 weeks' jail on Tuesday (Feb 22). She pleaded guilty to 12 charges, mostly for wrongful communication of information under the Official Secrets Act. Another 12 charges were taken into consideration.
On some days, she played a "guessing game" with the members of the group chat. The members would guess how many confirmed COVID-19 cases there were that day, and Zhao would congratulate the person who came the closest to the correct figure. On some occasions, she sent the winner 1 yuan (S$0.21) as a "good luck" gift.
And, online gambling is also illegal in Singapore.
As thrilling as futarchy sounds, I doubt they will come. And if they do I will be pleasantly surprised.
@footgun Not going to lie, I think the Singapore government should consider Metaculus for a partnership. They're more serious, forecasty and authoritative than Manifold.
@bohaska Yes a tournament format on Metaculus would be more suitable, and probably with some restrictions such as forecasts are not public before resolution, fixed question sets, etc.
@footgun on the one hand, futarchy goes way beyond "some government agency uses prediction markets".
On the other hand, you're right that this probably won't move forward, and we can know this because prediction markets are generally Good and True, while a fascist regime like Singapore is Evil and Lying.
If this happens, the government will likely ask y'all to enforce its censorship policies; will you comply? Like, can my question https://manifold.markets/BrunoParga/what-human-rights-violations-other remain up or will you remove it?
@BrunoParga Austin, one of the cofounders of Manifold, is very pro free speech, so I don't think they'll let that happen.
Though I'll not be surprised if Manifold does something like hide it from related questions on markets made by Singapore government.
@bohaska thank you for your comment. To be clear, I don't want to disparage the character of anyone involved with the creation of management of Manifold (especially so long as they don't make the questionable decision to cooperate with a fascist regime rather than telling them to piss off).
What we can say right now is that Manifold is inherently a less serious market than Metaculus, because of the lack of moderation in market creation. Manifold is also more willing to try bold new things, which is not at all a problem per se but comes with an increased risk of f*cking up, and I think they are aware of all this.
I hope they'll do the right thing in the end and tell the fashies that they're free to create markets like anyone else, but that's it.