I have many thoughts about this!

I run a chatbot that helps folks set reasonable bedtime goals over at emile.chat, so naturally I'm very inclined to think about what motivates people to stick to their goals!

My experience with commitment markets on Manifold
I started creating weekly commitment markets related to my weekly exercise and sleep goals as well as my weekly "hack" day work sessions. At first, they got very little activity, but I didn't mind because I was already getting a benefit by putting my goals out there. More recently, some of them have seen more activity, which has been quite fun. The most recent hack day had me striving for 29 pomodoros of work in one day. I didn't bet a lot on YES because I wasn't very confident I'd get it, but it attracted M$9,576 in bets and Manifold actually saw I was likely to get the goal before I did! Pretty wild to realize that there was almost $100USD of others' hard-earned Mana on the line for my personal goal!

Verification/Authentication is overrated
I think you're overthinking the need for verification. Some folks will bet without needing any 3rd party verification that you did or did not meet your goal. You might get more bettors with verification, but the whole point here is for you to keep doing this, and if requiring yourself to provide verification makes you even 1% less likely to create the market/goal in the first place I'd say it's not worth it. If you create the markets consistently, and seem to be resolving honestly, I think you will attract more bettors. Of course, in the long-term, the more data you can give folks to adjust their bets off of, the better. I just don't think it's a prerequisite. Now that commenting is available via the API, I do aspire for both my Emile goal markets as well as my Apple Watch markets to post daily updates.

Automating commitment market creation
I was less confident that I would get my health goals last week, and it caused me to actually not create a market for that week. That ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy since I failed my health goals. It was also a warning sign that I should try to automate market creation or else the whole system could die. Now I have a zapier zap that runs every Monday morning to create my Apple Watch goal commitment market, and I'm working on a zap that will automatically create a market when I set my weekly bedtime goal on Emile.

Experiments vs. Systems
Most goals are one-off experiments, they only become behavior-changing systems when you have an algorithm in place that can adjust to success/failure. When we first built Emile, we noticed quickly that folks were way too optimistic about their goals, and we had to create an algorithm that would suggest goals based on their actual progress. Manifold is a great control for this because you can ideally get the wisdom of the crowd's opinion of how reasonable your goal is. In my experience, if Manifold isn't giving you at least ~75% chance of success on your goal, your next goal should probably be easier.

Next steps for me
- I want to officially launch automated Emile <> Manifold commitment markets to my handful of Emile users. I'm not sure I'll have any takers, but I've seen personally that creating markets for my goals makes me more engaged in them so that's what I'll tell them!
- For my personal markets, I think the automated market creation is going to be clutch for keeping me from falling out of a system that is quite useful for me! As mentioned, I also want to be able to add realtime automated updates via the comment API.
- I want to add more commitment markets for some of my other goals. These commitment markets have really gamified my self-improvement while also giving me realistic info about my likelihood of success. It's also been a healthy way to channel my obvious Manifold addiction ;).

@Charlie has been doing a bunch of these. e.g.

https://manifold.markets/Charlie/will-i-do-at-least-12-more-hack-day

https://manifold.markets/Charlie/starting-thursday-will-i-do-at-leas

https://manifold.markets/Charlie/will-i-get-to-bed-by-1140pm-at-leas

I also did a couple:

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-i-say-anything-online-that-i-r-d616f135d1b1

@IsaacKing What 3rd party integrations do you think might be useful? I saw someone had strava. Maybe some other personal fitness apps that could integrate well with the manifold API

you are an idiot

@LewisLibbyWatt The biggest.

I've been using a prediction market to motivate myself, too! I think people are just trusting me not to lie about having written more than I did, though.

It relies so much on the resolutions of the market to be tied to some authentication. It might be fun to structure a few more life goals like writing around manifold's infrastructure. . .

I have one going of these going on:

@howtodowtle I was actually using your market as inspiration as my own. Your comments and timeline are fair and you are a runner yourself.

Part of proving authenticity is being able to accurately "predict" things. Professionalism in any field requires tests and reliability. Authenticity in a prediction market is defined by gains, wins, and proper resolutions for market makers.

Perhaps a bot could be a good "Bridge" between other methods of authenticity, like professional societies and such. A bot that could poll experts or groups to aggregate their opinions into trades.

This is a cool idea. I tried to do something similar with this market:

https://manifold.markets/LachlanMunro/will-i-deadlift-200kg-by-the-end-of

Not a lot of activity but the idea was if you have a goal then posting each training session should move the market up, and missing one or going quiet should move it down giving you concrete feedback on how close you are.