Which of these Possible Manifold Foci should be Manifold's primary focus?
10
19
Ṁ740
resolved Jun 27
48%46%
[LABOR] Pay for or get paid for research
12%11%
[FORUM] Pose questions, reach consensus
11%11%
[4CAST] Go-to place to see what the market thinks a la Metaforecast and ElectionBettingOdds
10%9%
[BMNDR] Commit and track reliability
9%9%
[PBOOK] Hone applied rationality a la PredictionBook
6%5%
[WAGER] Quantified disagreement a la LongBets and BIATOB
2%1.6%
[AGAPE] Charity prediction markets and EA
1%1.3%
[GAMBL] Compete with Betfair et al
6%Other
This question resolves mostly beauty-contest-style (close date extended until quiescence) to the things Manifold should be most focused on. I say "mostly beauty contest" because I'll veto anything I don't think belongs on the list. If a response is added that I agree should be on the list then I'll append it to the list below. So this resolves beauty-contest-style except anything not on this list will get a weight of 0% in the resolution. Of course these overlap a lot and all or most of them sound awesome but conventional startup wisdom is to have as narrow a focus as possible so probably Manifold should double down on at most a few and explicitly deprioritize others. List of Possible Manifold Foci: * [GAMBL] Be a trading exchange; compete with Betfair and PredictIt et al * [WAGER] Be a place to have quantified disagreements and see who's right; be a better version of BIATOB.com ("betting is a tax on bullshit") or LongBets.org * [AGAPE] Charity prediction markets and Effective Altruism! * [4CAST] Be the go-to place to see "what the market thinks" about topics in the news; compete with Metaforecast and ElectionBettingOdds * [FORUM] Be a community in which people pose questions and reach consensus; this implies a focus on the commenting system * [PBOOK] Be a tool to hone applied rationality skills a la PredictionBook.com; calibration graphs FTW! * [BMNDR] Be a place to commit to things and track your reliability a la Beeminder * [LABOR] Be a place to pay for or get paid for research, like how you can add liquidity to a market to incentivize participation
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@dreev I don't know if it falls under this label, but I want to see Manifold act as a news source by itself. Market activity seems like a better proxy for how newsworthy something is than whatever most news sites select for.
I think it would be amazing to bootstrap 4CAST via trading/arbitrage bots that keep Manifold prices in line with big real-money exchanges like Betfair on big questions in the news. I think bots like that would make a lot of mana right now, so there's built-in incentive to create them. If such bots ever *lost* mana, that would be much more amazing because it would mean Manifold had surpassed real-money markets in accuracy. In conclusion, arbitrage bots are very win-win-win: * Make mucho mana * Lose mana but prove that Manifold is the most accurate * Achieve the 4CAST goal either way: Nothing more accurate than Manifold on the big questions in the news
I don't know about being a focus but this is such a good use case and very much the kind of thing the current community is excited about. We've talked recently in the Discord about gamification ideas, most of which I personally don't like, but one that I love is a badge that shows off one's calibration graph.
@dreev I have a longer comment below under the 4CAST question, but I'll drop the main part of why I think the LABOR answer is quite misguided here: "I'm pretty skeptical that the community of people willing to treat Manifold as a real money market is anywhere close to large enough to make it actually feasible as an alternative to, you know..... real real money markets. In order [for Manifold questions] to be worth "paying for" real research time for difficult questions we'd have to see questions with liquidity (and bets) in the $M10,000 or so. And we just haven't seen that. Maybe we will, but until we do I don't think it makes any sense to talk about Manifold as anything approaching a real money market."
@MattP Repeating my reply in the other thread since it makes more sense here in the LABOR thread: I'm sometimes willing to dump in hundreds of dollars (tens of thousands of mana) of liquidity for a question I really care about. And if I could withdraw the liquidity again in case I failed to attract expertise on my question, then I'd view it as a no-brainer to add big subsidies to some of my markets.
bought Ṁ5
Good call on this option. I'm starting to think that incentivizing research is the primary benefit of prediction markets like Manifold, even moreso than accuracy (which isn't always great).
Repeating myself from a Discord discussion: I would genuinely love it if Manifold competed with Beeminder (I'm a cofounder of Beeminder and investor in Manifold -- conflicts galore!) but kinda agree with @Austin that it doesn't feel like it should be Manifold's top focus just yet. Still a super cool use case of course.
This one is probably my top candidate to explicitly de-emphasize, especially in light of the related WAGER and 4CAST and FORUM options.
@dreev agreed. The space is already crowded and becoming more so, especially with Kalshi.
Relevant quote from one of Scott Alexander's Mantic Monday posts on Astral Codex Ten: What I really wanted last year (and would have subsidized!) was a market about whether Alameda County, California, would permit indoor gatherings of 50 people on January 8th 2022 (ie would I be forced to cancel my wedding). But I also would have appreciated the ability to put a few questions to prediction markets before starting my psychiatry practice, or my grants program, or any of a dozen other things I did. [...] Maybe I have some question about whether a certain grant would succeed, I’m not sure who to ask, and even if someone gives me a “Bob Smith, Grant Evaluator” business card, I don’t know if he’s any good. A prediction market takes all the pain out of searching for information -- if I subsidize it enough, it’ll attract people with the relevant skill set who will solve my problem for me.
Ha, thanks, I'm pretty pleased with these identifiers. And I think they're genuinely useful here. Little concept handles, as Scott Alexander autologically dubbed them.
Really good comments! I tentatively disagree though. I guess this market is meant to help us resolve exactly this disagreement! What's exciting to me about Manifold is that, thanks to being able to buy more mana and being able to donate it to charity -- whether or not I even do, just that being an option! -- I can treat it as a real-money prediction market. If the Manifold community has enough other people like me then I can indeed meaningfully pay people to do research on questions I need answered (LABOR) or having meaningful wagers with people (WAGER). (But I also agree that 4CAST is a big deal.)
@dreev I guess I'm pretty skeptical that the community of people willing to treat Manifold as a real money market is anywhere close to large enough to make it actually feasible as an alternative to, you know..... real real money markets. Even if people are willing to "work" just to get money towards a charity, in order to be worth "paying for" real research time for difficult questions we'd have to see questions with liquidity (and bets) in the $M10,000 or so. And we just haven't seen that. Maybe we will, but until we do I don't think it makes any sense to talk about Manifold as anything approaching a real money market. It's a fun activity, but people are engaging in it primarily for fun - not primarily to make money for charity. With the amount of money you can actually make on this site right now, I would question the judgment (on market answers haha) of someone who thought they were doing this *primarily* for charity.
@MattP You're right but I think this can be solved! I'm sometimes willing to dump in hundreds of dollars (tens of thousands of mana) of liquidity for a question I really care about. And if I could withdraw the liquidity again in case I failed to attract expertise on my question, then I'd view it as a no-brainer to add big subsidies to some of my markets.
@dreev not voting for this but must say, I LOVE the name you chose.
bought Ṁ15
@dreev IMO this is the real strength of prediction markets, and the one most likely to be able to benefit from Manifold's unique draw, which is that it is free and it is easy to use. Many of the others, like LABOR or GAMBL basically fall apart with the inability to actually make money from betting. And, as nice as the idea is of donating mana to charity (AGAPE), this just isn't going to be a super effective route for that. Like, I'll just donate to charity instead of making Manifold the middleman. Even if I find out I'm actually really good at betting, the actual money you can win on Manifold isn't worth the time if the goal is to earn money for charity.
@MattP But you can buy as much mana as you like with real money, double that money on Manifold, and then donate it all! Or at least that will be more and more true as liquidity in Manifold's markets goes up, which I think should be Manifold's top priority.

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