Can you identify any reasons you opened the Manifold website today? Or in general? Or ever? Curious how today's site members feel about this question.
I think learning to assign % probabilities to events is a useful skill to train, and manifold helps me to train it - for free!
But that's more of an after-the-fact rationalization, I mainly find it fun to see number go up, and I enjoy being correct.
Being able to see raw prediction % for certain events is a genuinely new and novel concept. Polymarket is too serious, Manifold is friendlier and has more interesting markets.
Today: part habit, part curiosity, part line go up
In general: can also be if there's something in particular that I want to know about (especially re politics), or if I have a question I think would be interesting to create a market on
The main thing is that being able to predict the future is a useful skill. Improving my sense of when I can't is also useful.
Secondarily, Manifold also works as a supplementary news app. I have found out about events several times via an app notification that some market I bet on has had a big swing.
I started using it out of curiosity / for fun after reading about it on tpot. Stuck with it for about a month and won some mana but got bored and gave up on it for a while. Recently I’ve started using it again as a productivity/motivation tool.
Sometimes habit or see if new questions about a market I run were posted. Sometimes some upcoming event I wanna see predictions about or create a market about. Previously it was more for linegoup joy. Alas, line go up no more 😟
As far as I can tell, my #1 reason is I am hoping the site will let me ask a question and then tell me about something that hasn't happened yet.
The second one is I seem to have mostly followed along with the general argument like, "knowing things about the future is better than not knowing things about the future" so it seems like a good thing to put a little bit of energy into.