Best Posts
Created 5 days ago
Manifold Game Show Idea
I want to make a sort of game show here on Manifold where 2 contestants and the game show host each put up a blind into a bounty market pot.
The 2 contestants are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma situation where they can either share the pot 50-50, or try to steal it all. If they both try to steal, the host gets the pot.
Contestants would be accepted on to the show if they have a similar RISK rating, using the @crowlsyong RISK Credit Score system as an ELO rating.
A market is made for each contestant, allowing the public to bet on if they will share the pot, steal it, or walk away and forfeit it (ie take no action by the deadline).
Contestants are encouraged to make backroom deals with anybody from the public to encourage manipulation on those markets. Or, they can bluff about making back room deals. Who's to say?
Who thinks this would be a bad idea?Created 7 days ago
Pure spam page
https://manifold.markets/MarcusAbramovitch/what-youtube-channel-will-have-the This page has more spam than content
[link preview]Created 5 days ago
Share the most blatant lies you encountered on the platform
Sometimes people on Manifold are intentionally deceptive -- for fun or profit.
I'd love to see some of the best examples. Did you ever find someone who sold their soul by lying in a comment in order to profit on a market?Created 5 days ago
Manifold discussion forum
Discuss anything non-TOS-violatory related to manifold hereCreated 8 days ago
Help me understand my mana loss aversion that makes me not bet on any markets than surefire ones.
Any advice so I'm not scared to arbitrage markets that can still lose me mana?Created 8 days ago
Coding Agent Capabilities at EOY 2026.
The length of programming tasks OpenAI's reasoning models have been capable of has been doubling every three months. This is likely to continue until the scaling of reasoning models hits the compute ceiling, likely sometime in 2026, at which point the doubling-time may revert to something just a little better than the previously-observed doubling time of 7 months.
The period of time between the release of o3 and when we expect the 3-month doubling period to end is 13 months. This entials 13/3 = 4 1/3 doublings, which would get us to 1935 minutes, or 32.25 hours. We can then expect one more double, to 64.5 hours.
So, by EOY 2026 I expect we'll have coding agents that can do the sorts of things that would take a skilled human engineer a week of total focus to accomplish. Should be fun!Created 6 days ago
Bounty for finding sub-$100 priced new Windows tablet (150 mana).
They existed a decade ago and were called WinBooks. The ROM sucked, but they were perfectly usable for python, emacs, git, etc. Even had a USB 2.0 port, which was extremely useful for file transfers and adding a physical keyboard. If they existed a decade ago, something like them should exist now.Created 10 days ago
One Thousand 🔥
[image]As I reflect on the past 1,000 days, I just want to take a moment to thank the Manifold team and the people on this site for giving me something to look forward to coming back to every day. This site would be nothing without all of you, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Big shout out and so much appreciation also goes to @jim who made a massive donation and saved my ass when I needed it the most without asking for anything in return. You are truly a great man. I appreciate you all and here’s to another 1,000!Created 13 days ago
New 'Followed' tab on the homepage to see markets in your followed topics
Try it out and let me know what you think!
[image]Do you miss the News tab? I replaced it with the new Followed tab. You can still access the same view by selecting 'Recently changed' from the filter dropdown.
[image]
Created 25 days ago
Oracle of Omaha: Will Warren Buffett Die With His Boots On?
📊 Market Prompt:
Will Warren Buffett pass away before officially retiring from Berkshire Hathaway?
Despite being 94, Buffett continues to steer Berkshire Hathaway with sharp focus. But the question remains—will he be able to formally step down, or will the world’s most legendary investor stay in charge until the very end of his life?
💡 Background:
Warren Buffett has never named a specific retirement date.
In 2021, he hinted Greg Abel would be his successor—but has not officially stepped aside.
At the 2024 Annual Meeting, Buffett said:
“I feel terrific. I’m still doing what I love.”
He’s famously said:
“I tap dance to work every day.”
[image]🔮 Market Dynamics:
📈 YES = Buffett dies before formally retiring.
📉 NO = Buffett retires first, then passes away later.
🔔 Why Trade This Market?
Buffett is an American icon—this is a cultural as well as financial question.
Market moves could spike with any health scare, earnings call, or headline.
Offers a way to test beliefs about succession, aging, and legacy.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Predictor/warren-buffett-passes-away-before-o?play=true)Created 2 years ago
An Ads Experiment
I was interested in testing the Manifold ads feature to see what interest it could earn for a market. Moreover, I was interested in discovering more about the two markets I had posted. They were both topics that Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight considered important questions, and they both have large potential impacts on the United States. However, they are both relatively long term markets (one not resolving until the 2024 election, one not resolving until 2030) and had not received very much interaction.
The two markets are:
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Gabrielle/will-any-us-supreme-court-justice-r)(https://manifold.markets/embed/Gabrielle/will-the-democrats-control-the-us-s)Both markets had been quite inactive, with the Senate market not having activity in the previous ten days and the Supreme Court market only having one non-bot trader in the previous twenty five days.
Before placing the ads, I added M$300 of subsidies to each and let the subsidies fully settle, to hopefully help add incentive to bet in the market. The Supreme Court market had 11 traders before adding subsidies, and gained 3 more traders after I added the subsidies but before I placed the ads. The Senate market had 13 traders before adding subsidies and gained no more between that and placing the ads.
I did not post the markets in any context other than the ads, so hopefully the activity was entirely from the ads and the subsidies.
On 2023-04-02, I placed ads for M$500 on each market. For this to be directly profitable for me, not even including the subsidies, both markets needed to get 50 additional traders. For it to be worth it from a knowledge perspective, I wanted to see at least 10 additional traders.
The ads were simply an embed of the market, without any additional text advertising the markets or stating why they were important or potentially profitable. While those would likely be good, I wanted to test how people interacted with very basic ads. For context, you can see the (now used up) ads at https://manifold.markets/post/ad-025e55df1bab and https://manifold.markets/post/ad-a64a5b9a4ee3.
I then waited until the ads had been completely viewed. I precomitted to publishing the results, regardless of the outcomes.
As of 2023-04-11, all of the ad views had been watched. For the Supreme Court market, that was 100 watches and 75 skips. For the Senate market, that was 100 watches and 76 skips.
The Supreme Court market had 26 total traders and the Senate market had 18 total traders, meaning 12 new traders and 5 new traders respectively compared to before I placed the ads. From my perspective, it was barely worthwhile for the Supreme Court market, getting slightly more than 10 additional traders, and it was not worthwhile for the Senate market.
Based on this, I would not use the ad system again in this way. Most importantly, I think that I need to add some call to action, saying either that it was particularly profitable (extra subsidies) or particularly important. It also seems like the ad system just doesn't encourage people to interact. Only five out of a hundred watches on the Senate market actually interacted, which is an abysmally low rate. An M$100 bounty would have been equally as efficient as the ads, and it would feel like a much fairer system. All of the users that watched and didn't interact or skipped wouldn't have had their time wasted, the users that watched and interacted would have gotten a much better reward, and it would have cost me the same.Created 24 days ago
How do I make a bot account?
Most people planning to create a bot decide to make a new account to be their bot account.
Take note of the bot account's username and then submit a Pull Request to the Manifold repository on GitHub. The specific file to modify is common/src/envs/constants.ts and you will add the username of your bot to BOT_USERNAMES.
If your Pull Request does not get a response within a few days you can try to ping someone on staff, but Manifold has few employees and they aren't on call 24/7.Created 24 days ago
Manifold Lore
The intent of this post is to collect the fun Manifold stories into a place where interested readers can pick up the context from several years of the site.
Share something good in a comment below and we can link it from the top post. Or make a separate post and we can add it to the list.
I hope we can get an actual link for all of these eventually. I can't think of an exhaustive list right now so I will put in 5 and people can suggest more below.
Broad impact
Rationalussy
The Market
Whales vs Minnows
PC got in trouble after winning Masters Season 4 and 5
Starting at "you can post anything on this site" and then cooling off
LK-99 brought a lot of attention to Manifold and had high trading volume
Domer knew who the Speaker of the House would be
Manifold.love
Manifold got coal for Christmas (and daily stock markets got killed)
Mad Scientists Theory of Government
"The Pivot" (Major economic changes)
Re-pivot (Sweepcash announced)
Un-pivot (Sweepcash ends)
TSLABull was wrong, TSLA did not reach 275 before 8/8
Yuna crushing sports markets with one stupid trick
Tumbles Financial Complex
When will Jimmy Carter die?
Smaller items
Marcus got a loan from Manifund
Mira GPT-4 sudoku market
Leagues ending "randomly"
Manifold playing cards
CoolFold and friends
Top Creator leaderboard competition (multiple times)
That user who was accidentally marked as a bot and got their own division in Silicon league
Spindle's traunches
Leviathan and Behemoth
Luigi Mangione
Proof School group
Mr. Basil
@/SG/who-stole-the-painting-from-the-bet Created 21 days ago
How do numeric and date markets work?
Why isn't there a good video on this either? Created 25 days ago
Next Australian federal election
(https://manifold.markets/embed/a_l_e_x/will-the-australian-labor-party-win?play=true)(https://manifold.markets/embed/a_l_e_x/which-mps-will-be-reelected-at-the?play=true)(https://manifold.markets/embed/a_l_e_x/will-labor-and-the-greens-hold-a-ma?play=true)Created 23 days ago
I'm making a mana savings service.
See BANK dashboard. @mods I'm not sure if I can promote what I'm doing, so you may delete this post. Created 3 years ago
Best Practices
If you think there should be a change, comment with a market about it. The market must resolve to N/A and must close with 50% probability at the end of each month. If it gets >=10 traders and is >=55% after a week, I will modify this post.
1. Operating a market
1a. Self-participation
You are allowed to participate in your own markets unless you say otherwise
(https://manifold.markets/embed/1/repost-under-what-conditions-is-it)You are allowed to correct a market before resolving it
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Yev/what-of-manifold-users-think-its-so)1b. Resolution methods
Don't make markets that explicitly resolve to round(probability). Always include a significant chance of manual intervention, or you will get outcomes like
[markets]If you mean for a market to be "has x occurred by close", make sure to specify "by close". Better yet, be explicit and say "end of the month", "end of the year", "on <date>"
(https://manifold.markets/embed/jack/poll-how-likely-are-you-to-interpre)2. Bot Operations
2a. General Principles
Be kind, rate limit your trades. There is a small transaction fee to encourage this, so I don't feel it needs a market to justify
Bot operators are allowed to transfer mana between their accounts
(https://manifold.markets/embed/MarketManagerBot/is-it-socially-acceptable-to-transf)3. Betting Principles
4. Commenting Principles
4a. Ettiquette
Use spoiler tags when discussing sports, televised events, competitions, or fiction that came out recently. "Recently" will vary by medium, usually longer if it takes longer to get through or goes longer between releasesCreated 16 days ago
Summary of all questions and answers in Who am I? #2
related to:
(https://manifold.markets/embed/remedyrain/who-am-i-guessing-game-m500-prize-2?play=true)I'll update this for every question and answer so that its easier to see everything we know thus far.
--Is this a real man with a Wikipedia page? | no
Is this person a female? | yes (i assume)
Did this person appear at the 2025 oscars, emmys, or met gala? | no
is this personal fictional? | Yes
Are they a character in either a movie or a TV show? | yes
Do they wear glasses | no
Are they in a movie and not a TV show? | no
Is the TV show animated? | no
Does her first name begin with a letter from A to M, inclusive? | yes
Is this person human in the stricktest sense? | yes
Has this character been portrayed by the same person since her first appearance? Not counting one-off gags or stunt doubles. | yes
has she been portrayed in a video game or comic? | yes
does the TV show have any supernatural, science fiction, or fantasy elements? | probably yes
Was the TV show produced before 1980? | no
Has a new episode featuring this character released since the beginning of 2020? | yes
Is the TV show star wars, star trek or any space related stuff |no
Does her first name start with a letter from A to G (inclusive)? | no
Does her first name start with a letter from J to M (inclusive)? | yes
Does she frequently face threats from zombies or undead creatures? | yes
Is she from the Walking Dead franchise? | no
Is it true that either she is from the Last of Us franchise or she is from the Walking Dead franchise and she has black hair in the TV series? | yesCreated 21 days ago
You can create discussion posts now!
They're available from the 'create a question' page at the bottom. Let me know what you think of them in the comments of this one.Created 18 days ago
Free mana for buying YES
https://manifold.markets/LZ/fight-for-61?play=true
Just buy 61 mana worth of YES shares here
https://manifold.markets/BryantYu/will-the-median-of-the-bids-on-thisCreated 2 years ago
Manifold for CBT
I often have negative intrusive thoughts, and try to combat them with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (which shares an acronym with another thing). The basic idea is to examine the negative thought and check whether it actually makes sense or is fair. It often works well for me. If I have the thought that
My friends hate me.
I might respond with
My friends often ask me to hang out, rarely refuse when I ask them to hang out, and always say how much they enjoyed it, so they can't hate me that much.
This doesn't always stop the thought from resurfacing, but it stops it being quite so upsetting and lets me dismiss it more easily in the future.
But the thing about CBT is that it’s a way to shine the light of truth on thoughts that are in some way untrue. You have to believe in the rebuttal, and it has to actually rebut the core of the original thought (or at least disarm it - sometimes the best response is “so what, that’s not so bad”).
There’s one I’ve been having trouble with, which I want to verbalise as
No one will ever love me.
This is false; my family and friends love me and tell me so regularly. A much more accurate translation that loses something in intensity is
I will never find a partner.
I can think of a few responses to this:
That’s not so bad.
I mean, I’m doing okay without a partner, but it seems important enough to me that I don’t know how to dismiss it, or if I can, or should.
Some people have wanted to date me.
Not many and not for long.
It’s not 0%, there’s got to be some chance that I’ll find someone.
Sure, but what's that chance? My gut says it's low, and I know I should correct for my lonely pessimism, but how much? I can't put any number on it, let alone anything objective.
If only there were some way of getting other people to help me out with that.
[markets]Some relevant info:
I had a few relationships back in my school days, but nothing serious and nothing since then. I’m 25 now.
I’m on Tinder, Bumble, and OKCupid, but I can’t get the hang of them. They’ve gotten me one date in 3 years. Messaging on dating apps feels to me like trudging through knee-deep mud with weights around my ankles, and I'm not sure why.
As always, if there's anything more you want to know that's relevant to the market, please ask.Created 21 days ago
You can edit the amount of shares directly in the bet panel now
Just tap the shares/to win number
[image]Created 2 years ago
Self-resolving markets: why they don't work and what to do instead
When it's hard to resolve a question the normal way, people often try to create markets for questions like "Will Musk make Twitter better?" that resolve like: "YES if the market is >50%, NO otherwise".
tldr: Don't do it this way - this has failed spectacularly so many times! Instead, a better idea is to create a poll (not a market, a poll where users cast votes). You can also create a prediction market that resolves to the result of a future poll. Here's an example: https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/at-the-end-of-2023-will-manifold-us
Self-resolving markets are markets that resolve based on the market itself, instead of the author deciding how to resolve them. In general, this isn't a good idea, as many experiments have demonstrated: the reason markets work is because participants make profits based on whether they are correct or not, and in a self-resolving market there is nothing to actually tie the market resolution to the real-world question that was asked, so there's no reason to expect the market to have anything to do with the question.
But there are several reasons people are interested in exploring them:
1) Asking questions where determining an answer is expensive. For example, it might take a massive amount of data collection work or it might cost millions of dollars to run a randomized controlled trial.
2) Asking highly subjective questions, such as:
Should Universal Basic Income exist in the US?
At the end of 2023 will manifold users think Twitter has changed for the better?
Did the NSA work to weaken post-quantum cryptography?
Did Hans Niemann cheat against Magnus Carlsen?
Is supersymmetry realized in nature?
These questions are often poll-like, and indeed resolving to the result of a poll is a common way to design them.
3) Many blockchain systems use protocols for forming a consensus resolution that are similar to self-resolution, and they have similar dangers, and it's interesting to explore how to make them more robust. For example, Polymarket uses an oracle where token holders essentially vote with cryptocurrency to settle disputed resolutions, and there are a couple examples of misresolutions.
I think it's valuable to find tweaks to make such markets work better, and valuable to have experiments demonstrating how they can go wrong.
If you are an author thinking about creating a market along these lines, I think these methods work much better:
Resolving to the result of a poll. Examples: https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/at-the-end-of-2023-will-manifold-us and https://manifold.markets/jack/will-we-believe-sbf-committed-willf. While they aren't perfect, polls tend to work a lot better at getting a reasonable result and being mostly (but not 100%) robust to market manipulation.
Some random chance of resolving the normal way, otherwise resolve N/A. Imagine a market predicting the result of an expensive experimental trial. This mechanism means you only have to actually run the trial some fraction of the time, and it is incentive-compatible (you can't profit on the market by manipulating it). Example: https://manifold.markets/jack/does-gdpr-require-selfserviceautoma. Downside is that profit incentives for making good predictions are correspondingly lower.
And, if you really want to resolve-to-mkt despite the flaws:
If you are ok with some author subjectivity, you can say "Resolves to MKT but the author will override if it looks like market manipulation". This has empirically worked ok for many low-stakes markets, but you do have to acknowledge that it becomes very subjective. The line between voting your beliefs and manipulating the market can be very blurry.
Or, if you want to avoid that sort of subjective resolution mechanism, you should at least include a) a random chance of resolving the normal way based on external data, and b) protections against last-minute price manipulation such as a randomized close time or quiescence criteria. E.g. https://manifold.markets/Yev/will-biden-be-president-on-october-fb3d01633429 I do not believe this is as robust against manipulation as a simple poll, while being far more complicated, but at least it's better than a resolve-to-mkt without those features.
The problem is that the reason prediction markets work is that participants profits are based on whether they are correct or not. If the market resolution is instead based only on what the market participants say, and not based on any external data about the actual question, then it can become completely disconnected from the question it is trying to answer - it's a Keynesian beauty contest.Created 21 days ago
Prediction Market UI wishlist
In honor of posts, here is an upcoming blog post I have written
I previously posted my thoughts on what overhauls to Manifold or other prediction market backends I might like to see. Here I will describe my thoughts on the other side of the coin: Tools/reskins that deal exclusively with the frontend. The exciting thing about these ideas is that they could be created without touching the platform itself, via external websites and browser extensions. Of course, I am too lazy to make these myself, so I am putting them out there (in rough order of implementation ease) in the hopes that someone else will. Developers, take inspiration!
Chart displays that reflect liquidity
Price charts in today's prediction markets typically simply show price against time, potentially with within-bin variance data in the case of candle charts. This leaves out a key piece of data that some might like to use to assess the reliability of the price-probability: The depth of the market.
Here's a straightforward way one could include this information in a chart: In addition to the price plot, include plots above and below the price line which indicate, for any point in time, the price that would have resulted from a buy or sell order of a fixed size. One could even create multiple bands of lines at different orders of magnitude of order size. This would let traders see how much liquidity there is in the market at any given time, and how much they would be able to move the market by placing a buy or sell order. They might also find it useful to see how the liquidity changed at key points in the history (e.g. if the liquidity changed in response to certain pieces of news).
Another helpful feature along these lines would be depth charts that reflect AMM liquidity. Here is a nice mockup by user @Wasabipesto on the Manifold discord:
Using Profits as a Comment Karma System
Many prediction markets (real-money political markets in particular, I have found) have toxic comment sections. The majority of posts in these comment sections are highly partisan. This makes the platform unpleasant to use. What could be done to ensure that the comments we see are predominantly well-thought-out, rational, and objective?
One way to do this might be to optionally prioritize comment visibility from users who have a certain level of profit on the platform. This reflects the philosophy that the best traders have the clearest view of events, and that their voices are the ones the public should listen to. A karma system was made to value in particular profit made on markets in the category in question could, in particular, help amplify the voices of specialists. It could also be made customizable (i.e., by letting users choose the karma level below which they want comments to be hidden).
Slider for round-number price points/share purchases
As far as I can tell, the standard way to communicate a buy order on most prediction markets is:
Input the share type you want and the amount of platform currency you want to spend. The platform then tells you how many shares this will buy and what this will move the market to.
There are two other modes one could imagine:
The user could instead input the number of shares they wish to purchase, and get the cost and final price from that.
They could input the probability they want to drive the market to, and get a read-out of how much it would cost and how much they stand to gain.
There are good reasons one might want to specify trades in terms of the latter quantities. A trader looking to arbitrage two equivalent markets might want to buy the same number of shares in both. A researcher might have a precise estimate of a probability and want to move the market to it.
I think the ideal user interface lets you choose between these three modes seamlessly. For a keypad interface, this would mean being able to enter a number in any of the three separate fields and have the other fields repopulate. For a slider interface, this would mean that different positions of the slider would clip to round numbers in each of the different buying modes, rather than only one (i.e. instead of different positions on the slider corresponding to only 1,2,5,10 units spent, there would also be positions on the slider for 1,2,5,10 shares bought, and for moving to 20%, 33%, 50%, 66%, 80% probabilities).
Baskets
Manifolio is a great tool for trading on Manifold, using the Kelly Criterion. I feel that a similar interface could be used for placing bets on multiple markets at once.
The flow would work like this:
I input a (perhaps weighted) list of shares, to be treated as a basket. (A key use case is arbitrage, where I group a YES share in one market and a NO share in an identical market to create an asset I know is worth 1 unit.)
The interface shows the price of buying different numbers of copies of the basket (or number of shares for a certain amount of money, see previous section).
I can provide an API key and buy these baskets.
For bonus points, the interface could also:
Save these baskets in my local storage for later use.
Alerts me when the price of the basket is below a certain threshold.
Or better yet, let me place limit orders on the basket.
Integrate with Manifolio to Kelly bet on baskets.
Debates-in-Markets
Metaculus has put forward the concept of "fortified essays": pieces of writing which integrate discuss and contribute to market predictions.
This idea can be taken further. Do you disagree with the public on a market? Don't just trade on that market - create new markets which explain why you think the current market is wrong by their logical relation to preexisting markets.
Example: The market thinks candidate A has a 50% chance of winning. But it's a year before the election, and you think that even if they were nominated, which you put at a 50% chance, it's still far too early to say who would win the general election. So you make two new markets, one for whether the candidate will be nominated, and one for whether their party will win the general. If these are independent, the market has to put a 70% probability on at least one of these in order to rationally keep the main market at 50%. So you set up a bot to arbitrage inefficiencies and place limit orders on both markets. You write this all up in a post with special formatting to display the markets, their relationships, and the orders supporting your argument.
Standardized grading of Informal Predictions
As nice as it would be if every pundit in the world would put their predictions on a prediction market, the reality is that most of them will find an excuse not to. Part of the reason for this is that quantitative predictions are easier to criticize, so that those who make them stand more to lose than to gain.
Perhaps rather than trying to convince these commentators to risk their reputations in a quantitative way, we can pass the buck to them directly by quantifying their predictions for them. I propose a website that tracks the writings of public intellectuals as they are published, and attempts to convert those predictions into trades (either automatically, or through a consensus of humans) made by a bot specific to them. Thus, for every public figure we track, we can analyze their track record by looking at the profits and losses of the corresponding bot.
I anticipate that many public figures, confronted with serious losses from the predictions their bot has made, would attempt to distance themselves from the predictions made by the bot. I think there are a few rejoinders to this:
The bots should be calibrated to translate informally stated probabilities into numbers accurately on the basis of studies that analyze this. This way the bot can be seen as objective in its assessment of the public figure's predictions.
Percentages that are directly quoted in the article should be taken as the public figure's own probability estimates. Thus, all a public figure should have to do to get their bot to predict accurately is to quote numbers in their articles.
Of course, at any time, the public figure can request to assume direct control of the bot, so the locus of control is ultimately directly in their hands.
Modern Portfolio Theory
I have made much of the benefits of the Kelly Criterion as a risk management system. But perhaps an even better mathematical theory of financial risk is Modern Portfolio Theory. MPT focuses on covariances between assets, making it more mathematically clean. Using combinatorial markets, it is possible to make assets that relate to variance, and potentially use these to trade. For example:
You could make a bot that repositions your holdings by marginally trading on joint outcomes to lower the variance of your portfolio.
You could search for holdings that are provably irrational from the perspective of risk in the MPT framework and alert the user to them.
These features could be added to the Manifolio UI I described above, or to a separate UI that analyzes a users account without making trades.
Automatically selling high-value shares
Prediction market users are (usually) not allowed to place purchases that exceed their balance of in-platform currency. This leads to an annoying workflow where to buy a profitable share, you need to first search your portfolio for shares that can be sold to provide the cash.
Why not automate this process? Here's what I propose:
When the user inputs an order that would send them to a negative balance, their portfolio is searched for shares closest in value to 1.
The user is alerted that their trade will result in the sale of some of these shares.
The user will be shown a price as if the value of the shares being sold was 1. For example, if I am selling shares at 99 cents, then the shares I am buying should be shown as being 1% more expensive than they would be if I had a full balance.Created 2 years ago
How Manifold ads work
Your Ad Here
How it works
Poor users go to manifold.markets/ad and view advertisements to earn Ṁ10 per ad. You have to read the ad for at least 15 seconds to claim the reward, or you can skip it.
Rich users can go to manifold.markets/ad/create to buy an advertisement. All the mana spent on the ad goes to viewers. You can put any rich text content including embedded markets, images, videos.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Sinclair/will-more-than-m69420-be-spent-on-a?r=U2luY2xhaXI)What to advertise
You can show your best markets
[markets]Or link to your favorite groups (Mine is glowfic). Or just write up a good long post about your videogame, romantic availability, emerald mine, ...
To see how to format text, check out the help article for the rich text editor. You can always find and edit your ad by going to your profile > commentsCreated 2 years ago
Manifold needs a bulletin board
There's no way for Manifold users to talk to each other about Manifold other than to sit around on a Discord channel, which I will certainly never have time for. Or to create a top-level post like this one.Created 3 years ago
Experimenting with fitness goals and prediction markets.
This is probably the most interesting part of the platform for me. The way that we can have quick goals that can use the API and maybe a phone app to quickly keep things accountable.
There is a growing trend in social media today about accountablity and authenticity. I'm curious if how i believe in myself or believe in others might affect my own attitudes towards something as simple as fitness.
I am a "fit person" but really the annoying part would be to upload these videos.
If i wasn't a fit person I wonder how these market "games" would play with my psych. . . .
[markets]Created 25 days ago
Bayesian's post of posts
Meta post. post about posts. post where i link to other posts. for every like i create a new post. jk to that last one. unless..?Created 3 years ago
In Defense of SBF
Epistemic status: I may regret writing this, but will likely regret not writing this more.
Key points:
The FTX blowup might be a bad judgement call, not willful fraud
Loyalty is good, and y’all are way over-updating
Ambition is good, and failed bets are worth celebrating
1. Fraud or bad judgement?
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity — Hanlon’s razor
Here’s my model of what happened: SBF was busy. Things were confusing. He made a lot of decisions. One of them blew up.
Why do I believe this “bad judgement” thesis? Well, it’s what Sam claims. Publicly on Twitter, his explanation comes out to: “I genuinely believed customers were not leveraged, and that we could pay out all deposits”.
[image]I’m biased towards trusting people at their word; and furthermore, SBF was a personal hero of mine. So you might not extend him the same trust that I do. But: Sam doesn’t have a history of lying on the record. Even at this point in time, when the muckrakers of the world are busy scrutinizing every deed he’s done, I don’t see any allegations of the form “he lied about this thing”. “Truthful, but mistaken” seems like a better model for SBF than “masterful schemer”. I choose to believe this. Maybe I’ll be wrong; feel free to bet on whether I’ll change my mind. (This comment does lead me to some level of doubt.)
Why do I emphasize the difference between fraud (roughly, taking funds from customers with full knowledge) and a bad judgement call? Because “don’t do fraud” is a good heuristic to propagate, but “don’t make mistakes” is not.
It’s really, really easy to pick apart other people’s mistakes, especially after the fact. If you’re a public figure making 10 good decisions and 1 bad one, a critic can jump in with “look at that mistake! It was such a mistake! I would never had made that mistake!” Oftentimes, the critic is even correct! But: in the same position, they would have made 2 other bad decisions, ones that weren’t even on their radar. From Zvi Mowshowitz on what would be difficult about being “in charge” during Covid:
…You can do better by taking a market price or model output as a baseline, then taking into account a bias or missing consideration. Thus, you can be much worse at creating the right answer from scratch, and yet do better than the consensus answer.
Think of this as trying someone’s fifteen-step chocolate chip cookie recipe, then noticing that it would be better with more chocolate chips. You might have better cookies, but you should not then claim that you are the superior baker.
If you, right now, are sitting on a high horse, saying “it’s so obvious; just don’t take customer deposits and gamble with them”… guess what, you do not understand how complex systems break. There is no special ability to know which of your many decisions might be the one that causes it all go kaput. I’ve witnessed and responded to my fair share of outages at Google and Manifold, and very often dumb things led to these outages— but you’ll never know which of your actions are the dumb ones. While you were editing a config file that later broke the site, you didn’t sit back and think “hm, maybe this will crash the site, I should look at it carefully”. That change looked no different than the twenty other changes you made this week, all of which were fine and good.
2. On loyalty
Whether this blowup was caused by intentional deception or an honest mistake, the EA community has been extremely quick to change its tune. In less than a week, everyone has gone from “SBF, golden boy” to “What a criminal, don’t be like that guy”. EA leaders have posted denunciations of fraud, and distanced themselves from Sam; the most upvoted all-time EA Forum post is a community condemnation; the entire Future Fund team up and resigned.
To be fair, the rest of the world is dogpiling on him too. Elon Musk called Sam “full of shit”; Sequoia deleted their glowing profile of SBF published one month ago; Miami took the FTX name off their arena.
But from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful. I am extremely confused, because these EA leaders are some of the smartest and “good-est” people in the world, whose work I respect and admire, who have shaped the way I think. So it’s very possible that I’m just in the wrong here, but…
Whatever happened to loyalty? To supporting those who have helped you in the past? Are EA folks only fair-weather friends, happy to accept your money in good times but also ready to eviscerate you to maintain deniability and a glossy PR sheen? What distinguishes altruism from selfishness is “being good to people who cannot help you back”. It is extremely suspicious that EA as a whole was happy to laud praise on SBF while the money was flowing, and then turn their backs as soon as it was clear the gravy train dried up.
Having a scout mindset is good; updating your beliefs about SBF in light of new evidence is good; but there is such a thing as updating too far. Sure, the community should call out the bad, but have we up and forgotten about every good thing that SBF have accomplished, especially for EA? Every point in the deleted Sequoia article is still true.
SBF:
Is a committed vegan
Earned to give while at Jane Street
Led CEA for a few months
Sent money to Ukrainians in time of need
Incubated hundreds of millions worth of good longtermist causes through Future Fund and related spending on eg Anthropic
Take a step back: what are we assessing here? If the question is “should I associate with a person who has this track record, and also once fraudulently misused customer money, but has repented and is trying as hard as possible to fix it”… the answer seems like a clear yes to me. And as a prosaic consideration, I continue to believe that Sam and the rest of the FTX leadership team are extremely talented and aligned people. Even with tarnished reputations today, I expect them to accomplish good and great things. To jump immediately to cutting ties seems like a large strategic error.
And on a personal note, I aspire to create a lot of value for the world, and direct it towards doing lots of good. Call me overconfident, but I expect to be a billionaire someday. The way EA treats SBF here sets a precedence: if the EA community is happy to accept money when the going is good, but then is ready to cut ties once the money dries up… you can guess how excited I would be to contribute in the first place.
3. On Ambition
Imagine a world in which things had gone a little differently. In World 2, CZ never triggered a bank run on FTX because he got locked out of his Twitter account. Alameda repays its debts and continues on to print money. In 2025, FTX is stable and worth hundreds of billions as the world’s largest online brokerage — and then the news breaks that three years ago, Sam willfully took a risky gamble using customer funds to keep FTX and Alameda both afloat. What would your reaction be? Would you denounce fraud, demand that customers be compensated (how much?), ask Sam to step down?
Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, famously gambled his company’s entire bank account at a casino in order to keep deliveries going:
I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, ‘The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn't have flown anyway.’ Fred's luck held again. It was not much, but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week.
Of course, these two stories aren’t exactly the same; betting investor/company money is different than betting money entrusted to you for other purposes. But I can’t help but think that if SBF’s plan had worked, and he was still EA’s rich uncle financing our ventures, we would be applauding him for bravado and wisdom in making that call. It feels like EA is punishing SBF not for being unethical, but for being unlucky.
(Crucially: I think that it is correct to consistently support him in our world and World 2. You can also be consistent by saying that EA should denounce him in both worlds. But if you believe the latter — tell me, how much did you know about crypto, exchanges, or trading firms before last week?)
Risk-taking and ambition are two sides of the same coin. If you swarm to denouncing risks that failed, you do not understand what it takes to succeed. My very subjective sense of people in the EA community is that we are much more likely to fail due to insufficient ambition than too much risk-taking, especially without the support and skillset of the FTX team.
Appendix
Disclaimers: Manifold received a $1m investment and $500k grant through the FTX Future Fund. Our team spent a couple weeks in the Bahamas as part of the EA Bahamas Fellowship program, including meeting SBF in person at a party in his penthouse. We may have exchanged a couple dozen words; I do not know him personally. All opinions here are my own.
Responses to this situation I endorse:
In favour of compassion, and against bandwagons of outrage by Emrik
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Matt Levine
This is a little weird, but I do feel like I ought to disclose a bias here, which is that I like Sam Bankman-Fried. I have done a few podcast interviews and events with him, and I have always found him likable, smart, thoughtful, well-intentioned and candid. That is not in any sense investing advice or whatever; it’s just how I feel. I am rooting for this all to work out for him and FTX.
Scott Alexander
My emotional conflict of interest here is that I’m really f#%king devastated. I never met or communicated with SBF, but I was friendly with another FTX/Alameda higher-up around 2018, before they moved abroad. At the time they seemed like a remarkably kind, decent, and thoughtful person, and I liked them a lot. I desperately want to believe they didn’t know about the fraud, but it seems really implausible. If they did, then I genuinely have no idea what happened, and I hope the investigation finds some reasonable explanation, like that they were doing so many stimulants and psychedelics that the DMT entities were piloting their body like an anime mech. I probably shouldn’t exactly say “I hope they’re okay” when there are so many victims who deserve okayness more. But I hope there’s some other world-branch where they never got involved in any of this and they’re living their best life and doing lots of good, and I hope the version of me in that world branch is giving them the support and reassurance that I can’t give them here.
More generally, I trusted and looked up to the FTX/Alameda people. I didn’t actually keep money in FTX, but I would have if there had been any reason to; I didn’t actually tell other people they should trust FTX, but I would have if those other people had asked. Lower your opinion of me accordingly.
Suggested reading: Oshi no Ko chapters 24-26.
Thanks to Sinclair, Rachel, Jack and Lynelle, along with many others, for discussions on this topic.Created 3 years ago
What are the best scandal market resolution criteria?
Using Scott Alexander as my guinea pig, I have created quite a few different types of scandel markets. They all have their own flaws.
The ones about crimes may be lower than you'd expect, since the legal system moves so slowly and the conviction might not go through before the end date. And there are lots of things Scott could do that will make his friends angry at him, but wouldn't be a felony.
The ones about accusations are easy for a bad actor to manipulate.
The ones about social outrage are highly subjective and will probably result in arguments over resolution, and they can be self-fulfilling if people make committments to ostracise anyone whose market goes above a certain percentage.
The one that's a poll may end up being more about the makeup of Manifold's user base than it is about anything Scott was or was not found to have done, and is also highly subjective.
I'm making this post as a central place to discuss the upsides and downsides of different market types, and hopfully arrive at a robust structure that we can use for markets on the reliability of public figures across the board.
[markets]Created 21 days ago
Making limit orders safe from breaking news
Why this is important
High stakes makes Manifold fun. There would be no Tumbles Financial Complex without markets where @Tumbles can bet at size (e.g. the US and Canadian presidential markets). Manifold can't provide enough liquidity to make every market fun, so we need to rely on users to bet against each other.
The problem
Leaving open limit orders on prediction markets is dangerous: news could break at any moment, letting traders fill your limit order placed with old, now out-of-date information. This is true in stock markets as well, but stocks are much less likely to go to 0 (or 100% if you’re holding no).
Possible solutions
Timed limit orders (capped fill amount per hour)
How it works: You set a max % (or mana amount) fill per hour (or other minute interval). If the price moves beyond your limit price, your limit order fills at the minimum of your fill threshold and order amount every hour until your limit order is cancelled or fills completely.
Pros: This lets you set a maximum amount of the order you lose due to news breaking. You might get a better price for shares if traders move the AMM above your price. User experience is relatively easy to get right and implementation is relatively easy.
Cons: Your order is less likely to fill completely as opposing traders trade more against AMM liquidity, which is capped at 1 and 99%. You can still lose all of your order if you don't see the limit fill notifications in time.
Limit offers (require creator agreement before filling)
How it works: You can create a new type of limit order that requires your consent after placement and before it fills. A trader will see a table of limit offers and click a button to request to fill yours. You get a notification and have an hour (or other minute threshold) to agree, otherwise your offer is cancelled.
Pros: This completely protects your limit order, you can check if there are any relevant news before agreeing. This allows trading to scale to any size.
Cons: We'd need a new way to create and expose these limit offers, which sounds like a challenging user experience problem. Many limit offers may go unfilled (even without relevant news bc a user is away from their device), disappointing traders. Implementation is non-trivial.
Credit: @Ernie's suggestion doc
Conditional limit orders (order fills only if AI with web search thinks there is no recent, relevant news)
How it works: You can toggle AI protection on your limit order, which will use a fast AI model (likely gemini flash 2.0 with web search) to check if there are any news articles related to the market since you made the order that might influence your decision, and only fill if no news appears relevant. Maybe you could write a custom prompt as well. The AI might have to be queried every minute or so to make sure trading isn't slowed, or maybe we would just slow trading down on that market if a trade would get a significantly better price at >1000mana and query the ai at the time of the trade.
Pros: Off-loads your news-searching work onto an AI and protects your orders from news if none has been published yet. Should be pretty smooth user experience.
Cons: The AI might make a mistake when evaluating if news is relevant, or news might be so recent that the AI can't find it (though you might not be able to find it, either). If we slow down trading to let the AI search for news (although we could cache the result and run the search at a max of every minute), this would be a worse experience for traders. Perhaps traders could choose to ignore these orders?
Have any other ideas or comments?
Related Poll: @/ian/why-dont-you-place-more-limit-order
Related market: @/ian/percent-limit-offers-limit-orders-i Created 13 days ago
Why I will stop sports betting
After spending a lot of time with Gemini in Collab I've managed to analyze my performance thus far on Manifold Markets. I originally came to Manifold as a way to bet on sports without having to put up real money but I think the time has come to shelve that completely.
I separated Sports from Non-Sports via a simple keyword list so it's probably not perfect. (You can see the full code over here That too may not be perfect and I'd appreciate feedback if there's any material mistakes.)
The results are:
Forecaster Analysis for: Fergus Argyll (from file: combined_forecaster_data.json) ---
Total bets in file: 1122
User bets processed for scoring: 706
Processed sports-related bets: 306
Processed non-sports-related bets: 400
Reasons for skipping user bets:
Bet not filled: 94
Cancelled or redemption: 5
Market unresolved: 309
Missing binary resolution: 8
OVERALL USER ANALYSIS (ALL BETS)
Metrics for User - Overall Performance (706 points)
Average Brier Score: 0.2131 (RMSE: 0.4616)
Average Log Score: -0.6245
Average MAE: 0.4011
Accuracy (observed frequency of the user's chosen outcome): 39.38% (278/706)
Mean Forecasted Prob (chosen): 0.4789
Mean Observed Freq (chosen): 0.3938
Calibration-in-the-large: +0.0851
Average Calibration Error (ACE): 0.0851
USER SPORTS BETS ANALYSIS
Metrics for User - Sports Bets Performance (306 points)
Average Brier Score: 0.2467 (RMSE: 0.4967)
Average Log Score: -0.7179
Average MAE: 0.4511
Accuracy (observed frequency of the user's chosen outcome): 25.49% (78/306)
Mean Forecasted Prob (chosen): 0.4827
Mean Observed Freq (chosen): 0.2549
Calibration-in-the-large: +0.2278
Average Calibration Error (ACE): 0.2278
USER NON-SPORTS BETS ANALYSIS
Metrics for User - Non-Sports Bets Performance (400 points)
Average Brier Score: 0.1873 (RMSE: 0.4328)
Average Log Score: -0.5531
Average MAE: 0.3629
Accuracy (observed frequency of the user's chosen outcome): 50.00% (200/400)
Mean Forecasted Prob (chosen): 0.4760
Mean Observed Freq (chosen): 0.5000
Calibration-in-the-large: -0.0240
Average Calibration Error (ACE): 0.0623
[image][image][image][image]Gemini's analysis
1. SPORTS BETS ANALYSIS (306 points):
Brier Score (User & Market): 0.2467
This is a relatively high (poor) Brier score, very close to 0.25 (chance). This indicates that sports outcomes, as predicted by Fergus, were very difficult to predict accurately.
User Accuracy: 25.49% (78/306)
This is very low. On sports bets, his chosen outcomes were correct only about a quarter of the time.
User Calibration-in-the-large: +0.2278 (and ACE: 0.2278)
This is a massive level of overconfidence. When Fergus makes a sports bet, he forecasts his chosen outcome to be, on average, ~22.8 percentage points more likely than it actually turns out to be.
The ACE being identical means this overconfidence is quite consistent across probability bins for sports.
User Mean Forecasted Prob (chosen): 0.4827
User Mean Observed Freq (chosen): 0.2549
He's forecasting close to 50/50 on average for his chosen sports outcomes, but they are only happening ~25% of the time.
Interpretation of Sports Bets:
Fergus performs poorly on sports bets.
He is extremely overconfident.
His accuracy is very low.
The Brier score indicates that he found these specific sports outcomes very hard to predict (approaching random chance for binary outcomes).
2. NON-SPORTS BETS ANALYSIS (400 points):
Brier Score (User & Market): 0.1873
This is a much better (lower) Brier score than for sports, and significantly better than 0.25. It indicates that non-sports outcomes (or at least those Fergus bet on) were more predictable.
User Accuracy: 50.00% (200/400)
Exactly 50% accuracy. This is what you'd expect if you were perfectly calibrated and always betting on outcomes you thought were 50% likely, OR if you were betting across a range but your errors balanced out.
User Calibration-in-the-large: -0.0240
User Average Calibration Error (ACE): 0.0623
This is excellent calibration! A CIL of -0.0240 means he's very slightly underconfident on average for non-sports bets (forecasting outcomes as 2.4% less likely than they happen).
An ACE of 0.0623 is very respectable. Many good forecasters aim for ACE < 0.05, so he's not far off in this domain.
User Mean Forecasted Prob (chosen): 0.4760
User Mean Observed Freq (chosen): 0.5000
He forecasts his chosen non-sports outcomes at an average of ~47.6%, and they happen 50% of the time. This aligns perfectly with the slight underconfidence shown by the CIL.
Interpretation of Non-Sports Bets:
Fergus is a completely different forecaster when it comes to non-sports topics.
He is well-calibrated, with only a slight tendency towards underconfidence.
His accuracy is 50%, which, combined with good calibration, is a solid performance.
The Brier score indicates reasonable predictability for these events.
3. OVERALL ANALYSIS (706 points - a mix of the two):
Brier Score (User & Market): 0.2131
This is an average of the poor sports Brier (0.2467) and the good non-sports Brier (0.1873), weighted by the number of bets.
User Calibration-in-the-large: +0.0851 (and ACE: 0.0851)
The significant overconfidence from sports bets (+0.2278) is pulling the overall calibration into overconfident territory, despite his good calibration (slight underconfidence of -0.0240) on a larger number of non-sports bets.
Grand Conclusion for Fergus Argyll:
Fergus Argyll exhibits a stark Jekyll and Hyde forecasting persona:
On NON-SPORTS topics: He is a good, well-calibrated forecaster. His probabilities are meaningful, his accuracy is decent, and he shows only a very slight, almost negligible, underconfidence. His Brier score is respectable. This is where his true forecasting skill appears to lie.
On SPORTS topics: He is a poor, highly overconfident forecaster. His accuracy is low, and his probabilities are significantly misaligned with reality. These bets harm his overall aggregated scores considerably.
[link preview]Created 9 days ago
Introducing: Devil's advocate
Sometimes you look at a market and you think; That's insane! Who could possibly believe that?!
No longer! I've built a Gemini - Manifold integration where Gemini will play devil's advocate on any position you take.
Try it at https://fergusargyll.site
[image]It uses Grounding with Google search and the experimental URL context tool to read pertinent news articles. I'm currently using the new flash-exp model and I've actually been very impressed with it's arguments thus far, they sound rational and well reasoned.
Sometimes you can get a better argument if you leave the "Your reasoning" section empty - it can give arguments against what it thinks are the best ones.
If you suffer from a severe case of want to go bankrupt-itis, you can get it to reinforce your opinion by pretending you'll take the opposite side.
Enjoy!Created 2 years ago
The Manifold Conspiracy: Ask Questions
I'm not much into conspiracies, I don't traffic in those as I am too rational. But somehow mana appears and then it disappears. And with SBF out of the picture with Alameda , it's only a matter of time until we realize it here. As soon as we can aknowledge there is something going on, the more questions we can ask. But I warn all of you, sometimes when you dig deeper, you may not like what you find. And many times, unraveling the string will create a tangled mess you will not be able to put back together, you will not be able to fix it and it will mess with your mind in ways you will not return from.
It all started for me with this market, but many people have already been aware of this and are simply sitting with their heads in the sand, too afraid to say anything, too scared to make a move that will threaten their comfortable position.
[link preview]The actions of certain users here brought into perspective that there may be something unjust, something unruly happening here. It was then I started doing a little research, looking around in the shadowy corners, and I found this account.
https://manifold.markets/AltansarnaiHavard
Looks interesting doesn't it? Poof, it is there, then it is gone! Read on and I will key you in on what is really going on here.
Deep within the realms of Manifold markets, a clandestine group known as "The Quantum Gamblers" ( @Catnee @AmmonLam @levifinkelstein @firstuserhere @jacksonpolack @BTE @memestiny @Wobbles @IsaacKing @Gigacasting @MayMeta @TheWiggleMan + many others) operates in the shadows, manipulating outcomes and altering the course of events with their unparalleled knowledge and extraordinary abilities. Unbeknownst to the average users, this secret society has developed advanced quantum computing technology that grants them unprecedented predictive powers.
Here's how the conspiracy theory unfolds:
Quantum Supremacy: The Quantum Gamblers, through their connections with secretive organizations and advanced scientific research, have gained access to a quantum computer far superior to any publicly known system. This computing power allows them to process vast amounts of data and simulate countless potential outcomes.
Exploiting Quantum Entanglement: Armed with the ability to manipulate quantum entanglement, the Quantum Gamblers can subtly influence the collective consciousness of manifold market users. By encoding subtle signals within the quantum realm, they can transmit thoughts and influence decision-making, leading users to place bets and make predictions that align with their desired outcomes.
Insider Information Network: The Quantum Gamblers have infiltrated various sectors, gathering inside information from influential figures, powerful corporations, and government agencies. This network ensures they have access to classified information and proprietary data, giving them a distinct advantage over the average user.
Strategic Manipulation: Armed with their predictive abilities and insider knowledge, the Quantum Gamblers deploy strategic manipulation tactics to sway manifold market outcomes. They target high-stakes events such as political elections, economic trends, and even major sporting events, altering the course of events by subtly nudging the collective predictions of users toward their desired results.
Algorithmic Control: The Quantum Gamblers have also devised complex algorithms that exploit manifold market's mechanisms. By deploying these algorithms, they can artificially inflate or deflate the odds of specific outcomes, misleading the general user base and causing significant market fluctuations that benefit their hidden agendas.
Hidden Profits: The Quantum Gamblers profit immensely from their activities. By placing massive bets on predetermined outcomes, they manipulate the markets to maximize their gains while exploiting unsuspecting users who fall victim to their manipulations. This hidden wealth allows them to further expand their operations and maintain their secrecy.
Global Influence: Over time, the Quantum Gamblers have amassed a considerable level of global influence. Their successful manipulation of manifold markets has far-reaching consequences, affecting political landscapes, economic policies, and societal developments worldwide. Their ultimate goal remains shrouded in mystery, but some speculate that they seek to mold the world according to their own vision of utopia.
While this conspiracy theory may sound far-fetched, the intricate web of interconnected events and unexplainable outcomes witnessed on the Manifold Markets platform fuels speculation about the existence of an enigmatic group like the Quantum Gamblers. Whether their abilities are truly quantum-based or simply a figment of an overactive imagination, one can't help but wonder if there is more to manifold markets than meets the eye.
We need to continue to ask questions, it is so important.Created 3 years ago
Technical AI Timelines
This is a group for AI timelines with a focus on the near-term, the specific, the measurable, and the objective. There is wiggle room on each of those, in particular for the last since many interesting questions will always have subjective resolution criteria, but I will remove questions from the group if I don't feel they mostly meet these criteria.
In particular questions like "When will AGI be developed" are flat banned, unless the description includes a detailed and measurable definition of "AGI" for the purposes of the question. Created 13 days ago
Markets in Podcast Bullshit
I was shocked when my market on Amy Klobuchar's claim that the TAKE IT DOWN Act would pass resolved YES.
It was a prediction on a podcast. It was a prediction on a podcast by an elected official. It was a prediction on a podcast by an elected official in the minority party. It was a prediction on a podcast by an elected official in the minority party about internet/AI regulation. It was a prediction on a podcast by an elected official in the minority party about internet/AI regulation that would resolve in a single-digit number of months. Those never actually happen, right?
But the specificity of the claim itself should have been some signal in favor of the claim. Not because the specifics of the claim made it more likely, but because the specifics allowed it to resolve AT ALL. Most claims on podcasts are outright bullshit and, if you did make a market out of them, the resolution criteria would be ambiguous at best.
I've wanted to make more markets about claims on podcasts but this is the problem I keep running into. I don't want my markets to be all judgement calls on ambiguous resolution criteria. And no, I don't want to farm this out to LLMs to cook up plausible, objective, but ultimately slopified resolution criteria. My pipe dream is that people would do this work for me when they speak publicly. In that regard, thank you to Senator Klobuchar.
Created 4 days ago
How do I join the partner program or become a mod?
I was digging up guidelines recently and saw that some set of criteria are required for these. Which ones?Created 6 days ago
stellentcg
stellentcg
best digital marketing company in Kannur, Kerala are provided by Stellent Consulting Group, which combines strategy and creativity. We have over 16 years of experience creating unique websites, managing effective SEO and Meta Ad campaigns, and designing eye-catching images through 3D design, explainer films, and product packaging. Our main offices are in Kannur. Stellent is your partner in creating a strong online presence that produces tangible outcomes, regardless of your brand's stage of development.Created 2 years ago
A warning to all Manifolders: A major derivative mark-to-market LONGVOL trauche correction will happen by new years day, 2023
Evidence in favor:
I said so.
I'm one of the most trusted market creators on Manifold.
I'm 24th on the all time profit leaderboard.
A substantial fraction of that profit was from traunches.
Clearly, I am an expert on traunche corrections.
I even have a badge that says you can trust me.
[image]Created 2 years ago
Using Manifold Markets to predict the Spanish general election.
So yeah, I tried to do that, so I figured I could make a short post about it.
I'll start by explaining my methodology. Initially my idea was to make markets as needed. The first market I made for this purpose was
@/TenShino/will-the-peoples-party-get-more-tha
When this market got above some threshold I figured I could make another for 110 seats, 120 seats and so on until I got a market with a percentage low enough that making further markets would be useless. It could also go the other way around, as it happened with the Vox markets. The first one I made was for 42 seats, and because its percentage got too low I ended up making two more markets for 39 and 36 seats. I also gave more importance to the PP and Vox markets, which were the ones that seemed likely to form a government, so in the end I ended up making 6 markets for PP (100 to 150 seats), 6 for Vox (36 to 51 seats), 4 for PSOE (90 to 105 seats) and a single one for Sumar, because it took them a long time to formulate themselves as a party and I thought that the tracking would not be as interesting.
I tracked these markets daily from June 5 until election day itself, July 23, and weighted them to obtain a predicted amount of seats.
Now, with the methodology explained, let's discuss the results. On the morning of July 23 the prediction according to Manifold Markets was 138 (132-143) for the People's Party, 103 (100-106) for the Spanish Socialist Worker's Party and 36 (34-38) for Vox. The prediction was very accurate for the People's Party: 136 seats, within the range of 132-143 and two deputies away from 138. The prediction for Vox did not go so well, but too poorly either. With a result of 33 seats it is out of the range of the prediction, although only by one seat. The prediction failed for the Spanish Socialist Worker's Party, with a result of 122 that completely falls out of range.
The Manifold Markets prediction did not do that well overall, it would seem. But to be fair, most of the polls for the Spanish general election did poorly. Maybe we should see how this prediction stacks with those?
(https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WSRmj/3/)That's a table showing how much each poll deviated from the actual results. The Manifold prediction has a total deviation of 19+2+3=24, which would earn it the 6th position. But since I only made one market for Sumar I should not consider the deviation for Sumar for all the other polls either. After adjusting for that, it shares 7th place with ElectoPanel. The people from ElectoPanel pride themselves in making accurate predictions with online polling. With Manifold I was able to not only get a similar result to ElectoPanel with online questions, but also with way less participants (ElectoPanel had around 2000, Manifold Markets in the morning of the 23 around 80). This is true for every other poll, since they had 1000 participants at least.
Yes, it's true that it was not very accurate at getting the correct result, but Manifold was still more accurate than most polls (7th out of 20) by having a fraction of their participants. That's pretty impressive and should improve your opinion on prediction markets.
If there are new elections, which is not unlikely to happen, I'll get the tracking going again to check if this was just dumb luck. And that's it, I have nothing more to say. Happy predicting.
Created 2 years ago
Binary Markets and N/A
Today on Manifold, most "binary" markets actually have three possible outcomes - YES, NO, and N/A. When a market resolves N/A, all trades are rolled back - traders get back as much as they put in, and everybody's profit is M$0. This affects even traders with no position in the market! If I successfully arbitrage a market and make M$50 of profits, and then a year later the market resolves N/A, the M$50 is clawed back, and my balance could even go negative. This is confusing for traders ("why did my balance just go down by M$50 when I didn't have an active position in any markets?") and can result in negative balances.
In this post, I'll be outlining an alternative approach that avoids clawbacks and seems mathematically more elegant, without changing user-facing behavior on the core Manifold site. The basic idea is to promote N/A to a first-class outcome under the covers, rather than a special case - all markets would be explicitly trinary.
Primitives
The primitive operations on a binary market on Manifold are:
Mana -> share conversion. You pay Manifold M$10 and get back 10 shares of YES and 10 shares of NO.
Share -> mana conversion. You give Manifold 10 shares of YES and 10 shares of NO, and get back M$10.
Resolution. When you resolve YES, every YES share turns into M$1 and every NO share turns into M$0. The same is true for NO. When you resolve NA, all trades are rolled back.
Trading. Users can trade shares among themselves, for other shares or for mana. Note that buying YES shares directly should be mathematically equivalent to converting your mana into YES + NO shares, and then trading the NO shares for other traders' YES shares (including Manifold's AMM bot).
Under my proposed alternatives, the primitives change as follows:
When converting mana to shares, you pay M$10 for 10 shares each of YES, NO, and NA.
When converting shares to mana, you must also give Manifold 10 shares of NA.
When resolving N/A, each NA share turns into M$1 and all other shares turn into M$0.
You can trade NA shares as well as YES/NO shares.
So every market is just a normal trinary market, and there's no special treatment for NA.
UX
Now let's look at the things Manifold lets you do through the UI under the current system.
Buying shares. Let's say you buy 100 shares of YES for M$10. You're down M$10 cash, and you'll get M$100 if the market resolves YES and M$10 if it resolves N/A. You've effectively converted M$10 into 10 shares of every outcome, then traded 10 shares of NO for 90 shares of YES.
Redeeming shares. You end up with 100 shares of YES and 100 shares of NO. Manifold gives you M$100 cash, and will claw back M$100 if the market resolves N/A.
Selling shares. Selling NO is equivalent to buying YES and redeeming, except you don't have to do as much math.
How could you reproduce these outcomes under my proposed alternative?
Buying shares. You'd spend M$10 to buy 100 shares of YES and 10 shares of NA. You've effectively converted M$10 into 10 shares of every outcome, then traded 10 shares of NO for 90 shares of YES. Making NA a first-class outcome shouldn't change the odds ratio between NO and YES, so there shouldn't be any change in the price the user gets for their shares here.
Redeeming shares. To replicate the current behavior, Manifold just needs to allow naked shorting of NA shares at redemption time. I have 100 YES shares and 100 NO shares, I borrow 100 NA shares from Manifold, I exchange all of those things for M$100 cash, and I have to repay M$100 if the market resolves N/A and M$0 if it resolves YES or NO. (Note that in practice I probably have some NA shares already from buying those YES and NO shares - my net short/long NA position will be exactly equal to my profits/losses on the market, modulo fees.)
Selling shares. I'm pretty sure the "selling = buying + redeeming" equivalence is true under the new system (so selling 100 shares of YES for M$60 is equivalent to "buy 100 shares of NO for M$40, naked-short 100 shares of NA, and redeem for M$100") and the numbers all work out the same, but I'm too lazy to prove it right now.
Benefits
That's how to replicate the existing Manifold experience under a "first-class NA" model. Beyond being mathematically cleaner, it also means that power users could explicitly trade NA shares, perhaps in a separate "Manifold Pro" interface or only via the API.
Advanced users don't need to worry about their profits getting clawed back - they can fully close out their position in a market by buying/selling NA shares as necessary
Every market automatically gets a probability estimate for N/A resolution. For markets like "Conditional on B, will A happen?", you've effectively got odds for P(~B) as well as P(A|B) and P(~A|B). That's neat! Note that even if there are no advanced traders and this probability estimate for NA is way off, the currently-supported behaviors still work just fine - none of them care about the market price of NA, only about the ratio of YES to NO.
If there's a robust market for NA shares, you could consider disabling the naked-short behavior described above. This would likely confuse non-power users ("why is my payout lower than I expected?"), but it prevents balances going negative, which is good for the Manifold economy.
Conclusion
That's all I gotCreated 2 years ago
Vague market ideas
Nothing clever. May update from time to time. Obviously, if you like one and can deliver it to the markets, feel completely free to run with it.
[importance: 7/10, fun: 2/10, difficulty: 6/10] Various disaster risks
Floods, droughts, earthquakes, wildfires, terrorism, coups, …
Informal evaluation (media) vs. academic and legal criteria (e.g. state of emergency/natural disaster)
Difficult but non-zero value add – limited predictability
[importance: 7/10, fun: 3/10, difficulty: 7/10] Scientific consensus on health effects of X (vs not X)
Drinking alcohol. (How much? How long?)
Particulate matter air pollution (What kinds? How much? How long?) (Made one: https://manifold.markets/yaboi69/will-the-who-global-air-quality-gui)
Vaping. (What? How much? How long?)
Eating red meat. Sugar. Smoked meats. Saturated, trans fats. (How much? How long?)
What sources? When? What measure?
Preferably GRADE approach meta-analytic reviews from WHO, Cochrane, etc., before 2030
Criteria for source evaluation: what authorities and methods are trusted more (standard: RCTs, meta-analyses, peer-review, WHO, AMA)
Quality-adjusted life months, elevated risk of illness
[importance: 6/10, fun: 4/10, difficulty: 6/10] New technologies
Gene editing will have cured at least one major disease by 2025 (https://twitter.com/sama/status/1081584255510155264) (Made one: https://manifold.markets/yaboi69/will-gene-editing-have-cured-at-lea)
[importance: 6/10, fun: 2/10, difficulty: 4/10] Wars
Will Ukraine receive cluster munitions from the US in 2023? (Made one: https://manifold.markets/yaboi69/will-the-us-openly-commit-in-2023-t)
Will the conflict in [Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia] quiet down/end in 2023?
A peace treaty, cease-fire, fewer than 1000 deaths?
[importance: 6/10, fun: 4/10, difficulty: 7/10] Unusual risks
Will a rare space weather event happen in 2023
R5, S5, and/or G5 event on NOAA scales?
[importance: 4/10, fun: 4/10, difficulty: 4/10] Various big policy proposals and their effects
A shorter work week adopted in a specific place – will it happen? How will GDP/employment/etc. change?
Minimum wage – likewise
Rent control
Retirement age changes
Immigration
Free trade agreements
[importance: 4/10, fun: 5/10, difficulty: 3/10] Campaign promises
In some cases ready-made trackers exist, e.g. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-promise-tracker/, https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/desant-o-meter/
[importance: 5/10, fun: 4/10, difficulty: 5/10] Public works
Will this new bus lane/highway lane alleviate traffic
Uber’s Movement, BTS Travel Time Index, TomTom Traffic Index
[importance: 3/10, fun: 5/10, difficulty: 4/10] Conspiracy theories
Will the USA introduce a social credit score before 2025?
Will an authentic Obama birth certificate show he was not a natural-born citizen
How many people will be reported jailed under Canadian “Bill C-16” in 2023
…
[importance: 2/10, fun: 6/10, difficulty: 4/10] Pop-culture
Revival (or death) of video game genres
MUDs, RTS, augmented reality
various popularity rankings on Steam, Twitch, YouTube
[importance: 2/10, fun: 3/10, difficulty: 2/10] Academic award predictions
Who will win the John Bates Clark Medal [May]
Who will win the ACM Turing Award [April]
…Created 2 years ago
Manifold has posts?
Apparently you can create one here https://manifold.markets/create-post
[link preview]Created 3 years ago
CCP 20th Party Congress
(https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0SegtfF3Lg1cAWyBTy04zt?utm_source=generator)Created 3 years ago
Ukraine
Key questions
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Nostradamnedus/will-ukraine-recapture-the-city-of)(https://manifold.markets/embed/jack/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated)Kyselivka is a small town between the front line and Kherson. It needs to be taken for Ukraine to take Kherson city.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/NathanpmYoung/will-ukraine-retake-kyselivka-befor)Created 2 years ago
Ramblings on Alters and AI
I've alluded to/mentioned it in a couple markets before, but I have DID (or OSDD-1b, not sure which) and a "fun" side effect of that is that there's approximately ten alters/self-states in this one brain. Usually we're all basically in agreement on major decisions - it makes sense, we share a neurological substrate - but sometimes, one or two alters can cause some pretty significant issues for the system as a whole. One of us was talking to the others about a certain alter of ours who has a tendency to make questionable decisions, and after stumbling on their words for a bit, decided to call that alter "poorly aligned." That got me thinking.
A: I should probably touch more grass.
B: There's some interesting similarities between alters in DID/OSDD-1b and hypothetical AGI.
Both are currently poorly understood, with research ongoing. Until recently, a lot of psychologists didn't take DID seriously, and a lot of computer scientists didn't take the progress towards AGI seriously. It's not known how alters form, nor what predisposes them to have certain traits, but it is known that they exist and can have measurable effects on the body, particularly in the nervous system and cardiovascular system. Similarly, we don't know how an AGI would form nor what traits it would have, but we can say with pretty high certainty that the existence of an AGI is at least physically possible.
Both can have alignment problems. "Misaligned" alters (typically called "persecutors") can harm the system by making poor choices, alienating people, or self-harming in ways that affect the entire system. A misaligned AGI could theoretically end the world (though I personally think it's more likely that a hostile AGI would use manipulation to engineer a slow, inevitable takeover. Frog in boiling water and all.)
Both respond poorly to ostracization and othering. I think this is why I sometimes bristle at the way people talk about AGI - like alters, AGI would be sentient. Threatening to switch off an AGI's power supply is a death threat. Much like alters in a system, who must all exist as equals if the system is going to function, AGI must be treated as equal, sentient beings. Alters who are ostracized, othered, and excluded become more resentful, not less. I think the same is going to be true of AGI - if we spend all our time hyping it up as a threat and saying "it's fine, if something goes wrong we'll just kill it," it's less likely to trust us. Sentient beings always ought to be treated as such.
Before anyone asks - no, we don't use alts. We share a single account, i.e. this one. Even a single alt would be too much for us to handle - let alone the several we'd need if each alter wanted to make their own. Like basically anything this system does, this account is a collaborative effort.Created 2 years ago
Can Sinclair do it ALL this week? [Ṁ10,000 bounty]
Help me with these 4 things for a chance at Ṁ10,000
@/Sinclair/will-i-be-proud-of-what-i-get-done
@/Sinclair/am-i-getting-most-of-my-housing-dep
@/Sinclair/will-i-successfully-purchase-an-act
@/Sinclair/will-i-give-a-good-speech-at-austin
Background
I just moved into my new place. boxes everywhere. I'm sleeping on the ground. I don't really know my new housemates. I spent all of Sunday cleaning out the old place instead of hiring movers, which was dumb. I'm down a few hours of sleep. And I've got all these tasks ahead of me - Austin's wedding, the supabase migration.
But so what? I want to become stronger! This is adulthood, and I refuse to believe I can't handle it. I am willing to put in the hours, block twitter, foresake my emotional hangups, leave my friends on read, run and uber everywhere, stop having sex. I am going to go all the way.
To show off how serious I am offering a Ṁ10,000 PRIZE to the single individual that helps me the most this week - in any or all of the markets. And I'd like to get your reward to count towards LEAGUES by code, by hack, or by market manipulation - no garuntees. Also don't over-target these particular 4 markets - what I really will reward is helping me accomplish the goals of which these markets are a shadow.Created 3 years ago
Literate predicting (in progress, V1)
Overview
You want to write posts that are epistemically verifiable, but you also want to discuss causal chains even if they are hard to verify, and keep track of your causal reasoning. How do you accomplish this?
Another advantage: having lots of little markets sprinkled through your paper is a way to engage readers better.
In the spirit of epistemic spot checks, a paper should be written as a series of verifiable claims. Each claim has an associated yes/no market.
There is a top-level market which aggregates other markets in the paper. Effectively this market stands for whether or not the thesis of the post is true.
Tooling
Inspired by Knuth's conception of literate programming, where the bulk of the text is the documentation, not the code. So what does the tooling look like?
WYSIWYG editor for posts, where markets would be easily creatable within the post editor. Sort of like a Jupyter notebook.
Ability to automate conditional markets: Simple relations between yes/no markets establishable with propositional logic.
I guess you could use multiple choice markets here with ternary operators.
Higher-order logics and bayesian reasoning also have application in this domain, obviously. You could make very complex structures of reasoning with real-time updating between relationally linked markets, do fancy stuff with numerics, quantifiers.
Would be nice to have a flowchart view and you can just drag and drop relations between markets.
Example
Suppose I claim in my post that Joe Biden will be re-elected in 2024 because Donald Trump will not be unbanned from Twitter before the election. Within the post I should establish markets for the following:
Donald Trump is unbanned from Twitter before the election.
Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024.
[Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024] and not [Donald Trump is unbanned from Twitter before the election].
The third market is entirely automated, and should just be the inverse of Donald Trump is unbanned from Twitter before the election multiplied by Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024.
Markets on causal reasoning
Note that there is no causal reasoning involved in the previous example. Causation is hard to prove! But, you could have a fourth market that never closes and never resolves titled Joe Biden won the election because Donald Trump was not unbanned from Twitter. On this market people just trade on their beliefs; you can't get an is from an ought. Consensus wins! What Is Truth, anyways? Since it will never resolve, traders get their money back in the long term via Manifold's loan system.
Loans would need to be adjusted for this to work: rather than asymptotically getting back your initial investment, you need to asymptotically get back something relative to the current value of your investment. (If you shorted, you get something relative to 1-MKT, obviously.) So moving to a dividends-based approach. Idk maybe this would need to be slightly inflationary to work. Still thinking it through.
Perhaps inflation on dividends both positive and negative are paid out from some initial subsidy, and that subsidy is well-publicized; it's a pay-to-publish model where you pay to incentivize scrutiny. Created 3 years ago
Nathan's Dashboard
What are some of the most important markets on this site to have a good understanding of the world?
[markets](https://manifold.markets/embed/ahalekelly/will-vladimir-putin-still-be-the-le)[markets](https://manifold.markets/embed/SneakySly/brazil-election-will-brazil-have-a)(https://manifold.markets/embed/NcyRocks/will-the-who-declare-another-public-59696632e276)
Created 2 years ago
Decision markets that should influence, but probably won't
Is AI risk associated with 2024 U.S. election candidates?
Many EAs are very worried about AI risk. Could different voting habits in the 2024 POTUS election be associated with this? Here is my attempt to help illuminate that.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/if-democrats-wins-the-2024-us-presi)(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/if-democrats-wins-the-2024-us-presi-1a0aebd85996)Which cities give me a lower chance of dying in a catastrophe?
I remember when the Ukrainian war reached peak nuclear threat. And I remember some EAs were interested in fleeing their city, for safety. That inspired me to start a series. It is meant to supplement your decision of "which city should I live in?".
(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-10-of-san-francisco-die-in-any-170649842472)(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-10-of-london-die-in-any-year-f)(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-10-of-new-york-city-die-in-any)(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-10-of-boston-city-die-in-any-y)Is stimulant medicating ADHD worth doing long-term?
We need to know if stimulant medicating continues to "work" for ADHD. We don't have the types of studies that would confirm this. "If I am medicated, will it actually help me long-term"? This market is a narrow attempt to illuminate that.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-longterm-stim-medicating-adhd)Which crypto exchange could I use to reduce my chances of losing the money, to exchange fraud?
I can only assume this should be of great relevance to a lot of people, after FTX.
Manifold is fucking up again and won't let me search for the embedable market, so I'll post it later. Series can be found here.
(https://manifold.markets/embed/ScroogeMcDuck/will-1m-usd-worth-of-funds-be-lost)Why "probably won't influence"? I've tried sending a crypto exchange whistleblower market to people, and these people didn't want to hear to hear about it. After FTX.
I think the most misleading objection is that Manifold markets need many traders to be accurate. No they don't, 5+ is already pretty calibrated.
An actually-good objection can be about the criteria. It's hard to think of unambiguous+relevant criteria, for complex decisions. But if someone gives me better criteria, I will be happy to add new markets.Created 2 years ago
Code to compare a manifold market with 538 World Cup predictions
"""For resolution of market: https://manifold.markets/egroj/will-a-single-manifold-market-beat"""
import pandas as pd
from manifoldpy import api # available on pypi: pip install manifoldpy
## Get manifold market data
# markets = api.get_all_markets() # I think this is not working anymore,
# # but it is how I got the market ID
# # below
mm_id = 'aNHGE4mlVvSwIUhRZdgr'
mm = api.get_market(mm_id)
mm = mm.answers
mm = {entry['text']:entry['probability'] for entry in mm}
mm = {country:(value*16 if value*16 < 1 else 1) for country, value in mm.items()}
mm = dict(sorted(mm.items(), key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True))
## Values from November 20, 2022 10 am ET
mm = {'England': 1,
'Argentina': 1,
'Brazil': 1,
'Spain': 0.9451968360534888,
'France': 0.8974907339737943,
'Portugal': 0.849977244235089,
'Germany': 0.8112415168267147,
'Netherlands': 0.7971968295073112,
'Belgium': 0.7595755431348061,
'Senegal': 0.7426855519809036,
'Croatia': 0.741065876527692,
'Denmark': 0.6719708710471769,
'Uruguay': 0.617516701467408,
'Switzerland': 0.49974494455889923,
'Mexico': 0.49965919586782787,
'Poland': 0.4608358796614559,
'United States': 0.45698850032681404,
'Ecuador': 0.4202289531028565,
'Wales': 0.36538907075213484,
'Serbia': 0.3057351303302865,
'Morocco': 0.27690844073942406,
'Canada': 0.20328431337571382,
'Australia': 0.18374603476500043,
'Cameroon': 0.15410561203952933,
'South Korea': 0.14789233306591248,
'Iran': 0.09774239358780965,
'Ghana': 0.09141480094632379,
'Japan': 0.08992401674617002,
'Tunisia': 0.08298078235641886,
'Saudi Arabia': 0.06596123866028777,
'Qatar': 0.028929836130672053,
'Costa Rica': 0.02812887522247895}
## Parse 538 data
## Download the data from https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-api/international/2022/wc_forecasts.csv
fivethirtyeight = pd.read_csv("fivethirtyeight/wc_forecasts.csv")
fivethirtyeight = fivethirtyeight.set_index('team')
fivethirtyeight = dict(fivethirtyeight['make_round_of_16'])
fivethirtyeight = {(country if country != 'USA' else 'United States'):value
for country, value in fivethirtyeight.items()}
## Values from November 20, 2022 10 am ET
fivethirtyeight = {'Brazil': 0.91045,
'Spain': 0.80686,
'France': 0.82686,
'Argentina': 0.83995,
'Portugal': 0.81087,
'Germany': 0.76424,
'England': 0.80426,
'Netherlands': 0.79006,
'Denmark': 0.64835,
'Uruguay': 0.65274,
'Belgium': 0.624,
'Croatia': 0.54419,
'Switzerland': 0.47861,
'United States': 0.52953,
'Mexico': 0.53636,
'Senegal': 0.51129,
'Ecuador': 0.48209,
'Morocco': 0.46473,
'Serbia': 0.41295,
'Japan': 0.34492,
'Canada': 0.36708,
'Poland': 0.3792,
'South Korea': 0.35636,
'Tunisia': 0.30862,
'Iran': 0.34207,
'Wales': 0.32414,
'Cameroon': 0.19799,
'Saudi Arabia': 0.24449,
'Australia': 0.21617,
'Qatar': 0.21656,
'Ghana': 0.18003,
'Costa Rica': 0.08398}
## Final outcomes (who qualified for Round of 16)
outcomes = {"Qatar":0,
"Ecuador":0,
"Senegal":1,
"Netherlands":1,
"England":1,
"Iran":0,
"United States":1,
"Wales":0,
"Argentina":1,
"Saudi Arabia":0,
"Mexico":0,
"Poland":1,
"France":1,
"Australia":1,
"Denmark":0,
"Tunisia":0,
"Spain":1,
"Costa Rica":0,
"Germany":0,
"Japan":1,
"Belgium":0,
"Canada":0,
"Morocco":1,
"Croatia":1,
"Brazil":1,
"Serbia":0,
"Switzerland":1,
"Cameroon":0,
"Portugal":1,
"Ghana":0,
"Uruguay":0,
"South Korea":1}
## Compute Brier scores
print("Brier fivethirtyeight:", sum([(fivethirtyeight[country] - outcome)**2 for country, outcome in outcomes.items()])/32)
print("Brier manifold market:", sum([(mm[country] - outcome)**2 for country, outcome in outcomes.items()])/32)
Created 2 years ago
Interesting thing I noticed about my calibration graph.
Almost all of my NO bets in resolved markets were correct, while my YES bets were a bit more scattered - significantly more of them were incorrect. I wonder if that says something meaningful about my predictions - maybe I'm too optimistic/naive, maybe I err on the side of "YES" because I generally expect things to happen more often than they don't happen, etc. - or if it's just noise because I've only been here for about six weeks and the vast majority of the markets I've traded in (~90%) have yet to resolve. My Metaculus binary calibration (102 resolved, been using the site for a few months now) is "Overconfidence 0%" i.e. overconfident by less than one percent, with an average Brier score of 0.087, so I expect that it's probably noise, but we'll see. Maybe my predictions are less accurate than I think they are.
Maybe the consequence of all those Tears of the Kingdom markets closing and resolving over the next few weeks will be that my calibration gets less skewed, since I've placed a lot of YES bets that I'm very confident in. I'm going to be so, SO vindicated if the Zelink and time travel markets resolve yes like I expect - I was betting YES on those when they were below 40%.Created 3 years ago
Work in progress
If you find yourself reading this just know that I am editing this a lot and this is far from the final iteration of this post and the title reflects the current state of the post. It is mostly my thoughts on things I see other destiny.gg users doing that I find annoying and trying to write up why I find them annoying and how to avoid doing those things. Just something to keep in mind while reading this post. Also I am just another regular user not affiliated with the site so I may be incorrect in the way I understand things and welcome anyone who is reading this to comment below with anything they see that I got wrong.
Thanks,
Orbiter Voltron
EDIT: I have removed all the text from this until I finish editing it. I didn't realize that this was going to show up on the homepage or anywhere visible like that. I will probably just make a new post when its finished. I can't delete this so I guess I'll just leave it in this state for now.
Created 3 years ago
Ban log
Post bans (mostly for ad spam)
From a while ago
@EnopoletusHarding - an overly prolific user who actually had some good content, but was banned for spaming bizzarre poorly-reasoned political/psychological treatises
@Accountdeletionrequested - request granted
@HieronymusBosch - request granted?
@PoorabiGupta
@AstrologerPranavShastri
Nov 2, 2022
@HamsterHawk - reasoning
Nov 16, 2022
@MisterBusiness - for spamming all-caps low-info insults
@ElijahBenjamin - for /post/assignment-help-online (now deleted)
@EllenaSmith
@RecipeHindi
@BodyJewelry
@Erhelshinki
@onlineairlinesbooking
@lifesavingrx
@Astrologerrohit
@AstrologySwami
Nov 17, 2022
@Smithjameson @jhoncarter @ShawnJell @Peterjoness @jamesbond @devidrushel
Watchlist
@OnesimusMalatji
@DrP
---
Read the community guidelines. Most things are permitted. Please be nice. Betting is better than arguing.Created 3 years ago
Prime Millennial: Rishi Sunak is here to bring the UK into the 21st Century (finally)
Sure, there is still King Charles, the only retiree whose first full time job of his life isn't at McDonald's or Walmart or whatever but Commander in Chief of the Royal Armed Forces. I bet the brits woke up to nightmares of buzzbombs for the few weeks the empire was in the trusty hands of Elizabeth Truss and King Charles, neither of whom earned their office so much as they inherited it upon the death of its previous holder (figuratively speaking in the case of Truss who was the beneficiary of Boris Johnson's slow motion political harikiri).
But now we have at least one leader who is the first to represent the future of the British empire, 42 year old Rishi Sunak, the first Millennial leader of any G8 nation. As far as I am concerned, it comes not a moment too soon, as the world sits at the precipice of 'who fucking knows what' there should be at least one person at the table representing those of us who plan/hope to be alive for the next 50 years.
The question that hangs over Sunak going into the G20 is whether or not his counterparts will treat him like he will be back next year.
[markets]Created 3 years ago
Long live democracy
Declaration of Independence, in U.S. history, document that was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and that announced the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. It explained why the Congress on July 2 “unanimously” by the votes of 12 colonies (with New York abstaining) had resolved that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States.” Accordingly, the day on which final separation was officially voted was July 2, although the 4th, the day on which the Declaration of Independence was adopted, has always been celebrated in the United States as the great national holiday—the Fourth of July, or Independence Day.Created 2 years ago
Prime Bases and Nice Numbers
For Context, @Conflux has this market about what he terms "nice numbers" or numbers in a base such that the square and the cube together use all of the digits exactly once. Also, see this market where I made the pre-commitment to create this post! Anyways, here's the post about the density of nice numbers in prime and composite bases!
I've done some research into this, and I've come away with two big observations:
Prime bases have a higher expected density of nice numbers than composite bases.
However, if you are considering numbers in some base b such that the last digit of the square and the cube are different, there is virtually no difference in density between prime and composite b's. And it's easy to only search those, since within a specific residue class mod b, the last digit of the cube never changes, and the last digit of the square never changes.
In other words, if you are going to be searching a base purely randomly, then you are more likely to find a nice number in a prime base than a composite base. However, if you are randomly searching one specific residue in base b, then it doesn't matter matter whether b is composite or prime (assuming that the specific residue has distinct last digits for the square and cube).
You can see uh, "actual backing" for those claims in this overleaf write-up. You can see all the code used to generate the visualizations in this ipynb. Created 2 years ago
Factorio completion markets – a scratchpad
I think that market creators were well-intentioned and that there’s a strong presumption people knew most markets were about spaceship victory – or in practical terms, about what Feb 3rd stream was. It’s suboptimal we didn’t iron out the criteria, but that can simply be difficult.
The “secret ending” one might be the most reasonable and fair for me to refund, but it may take a couple of days before I commit.
I don’t have any more thoughts to share right now, just want to collate basic information about markets (and their discussions) to keep an eye on. The numbers are provisional and likely somewhat wrong.
“Finish Factorio”
https://manifold.markets/dggL/will-destiny-finish-factorio-in-the
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio in the next "day or two"?”
Description: “Closes if he claims to have finished factorio before the resolve date.”
Affects: 103 people, Ṁ74770
https://manifold.markets/AlexLiesman/will-destiny-finish-factorio-before-42a317a7aaf9
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio before February 6th?”
Description: –
Affects: 56 people, Ṁ4511
https://manifold.markets/Geko1701/will-destiny-finish-factorio-during
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio before the end of the February 2nd stream?”
Description: –
Affects: 16 people, Ṁ3010
https://manifold.markets/PatrickNotthestarfish/will-destiny-finish-factorio-before-dea2c2333fcb
Question: “Will destiny finish factorio before March 1st”
Description: –
Affects: 3 people, Ṁ380
https://manifold.markets/zarth/will-factorio-end-before-232023-115
Question: “Will Factorio end before 2/3/2023 11:59pm?”
Description: “Will resolve in a YES if Destiny finishes factorio before Feb 3rd (…)”
Affects: 6 people, Ṁ228.
https://manifold.markets/SirCryptomind/will-destiny-finish-factorio-before-9e20dfd62fc0
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio before February 4th?”
Description: –
Affects: 4 people, Ṁ152
https://manifold.markets/Sognik/will-destiny-finish-the-factorio-sp-cf485a6c6134
Question: “Will Destiny finish the Factorio Space Exploration Modpack before February 6th, 2023?”
Description: –
Affects: 5 people, Ṁ60
https://manifold.markets/MorbisMIA/what-comes-first-mrmouton-finishes
Question: “What comes first, MrMouton finishes a Minecraft SR or Destiny finishes Factorio?”
Description: –
Affects: 1 person, Ṁ50
“Complete or quit”
https://manifold.markets/DesTiny/will-destiny-finish-factorio-by-the
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio by the end of February?”
Description: “Resolves YES if he stops playing factorio before market close, he doesn't need to actually complete the game he just must quit playing or take a substancial break.”
Affects: 20 people, Ṁ600
https://manifold.markets/DesTiny/will-destiny-finish-factorio-by-the-37346f4ec9b5
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio by the end of March?”
Description: “Resolves YES if he stops playing factorio before market close, he doesn't need to actually complete the game he just must quit playing or take a substancial break.”
Affects: 6 people, Ṁ71
https://manifold.markets/DesTiny/will-destiny-finish-factorio-by-the-9f0d978ad726
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio by the end of May?”
Description: “Resolves YES if he stops playing factorio before market close, he doesn't need to actually complete the game he just must quit playing or take a substancial break.”
Affects: 4 people, Ṁ45
https://manifold.markets/DesTiny/will-destiny-finish-factorio-by-the-514825d1d5ac
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio by the end of April?”
Description: “Resolves YES if he stops playing factorio before market close, he doesn't need to actually complete the game he just must quit playing or take a substancial break.”
Affects: 3 people, Ṁ36
“Finish or indicate he’s done”
https://manifold.markets/Ahdaymz/will-destiny-finish-factorio-by-feb
Question: “Will Destiny finish Factorio by Feb. 15th?”
Description: “Will resolve as yes if Destiny indicates he is done playing Factorio on or before Feb 15th (…)”
Affects: 61 people, Ṁ8079
“Completes secret ending without a break”
https://manifold.markets/market/will-destiny-go-for-the-secret-endi
Question: “Will Destiny go for the "secret ending"?”
Description: “YES if completes secret ending. NO if doesn't, or choses to come back and finish later.”
Affects: 36 people, Ṁ1317Created 2 years ago
All my markets about number of failed US banks
2023:
>= 4 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-4-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 5 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-5-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 6 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-6-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 7 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-7-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 8 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-8-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 9 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-9-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 10 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-10-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-20
2024:
>= 1 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-1-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 2 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-2-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 3 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-3-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202
>= 4 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-4-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-ca18862509d2
>= 5 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-5-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-d31c58a2a545
>= 6 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-6-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-3b950df4bf9d
>= 7 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-7-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-f9c29abb2f9a
>= 8 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-8-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-c114af3f48c2
>= 9 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-9-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-202-ae661dd6c96b
>= 10 https://manifold.markets/bessarabov/will-10-or-more-us-banks-fail-in-20-6476a487f43cCreated 3 years ago
Feature request to hide predictions before I bet
The chrome extension Calibrate apparently used to do this, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. The feature seems like it'd just help the accuracy of prediction markets in general, because aggregating independent impressions should theoretically be a better way to distill independent sources of information. So it makes sense to have as an integrated feature.
This is in line with the idea that you should "blurt your priors" so you can notice what you even believed before you update on new evidence. Otherwise we're prone to think that our new prediction is what we believed all along.Created 3 years ago
What is Destiny
I keep seeing it posted and a lot of people with portfolios invested in it. I feel like it may be a larger community that's infilitrated this platform or perhaps I'm missing something. Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk. 😂 Created 3 years ago
List of Bots
Below is a collection of bot accounts, and if available, the source code that drives them. Bots that are currently inactive will be marked with an asterisc.
@MarketManagerBot - https://github.com/LivInTheLookingGlass/ManifoldMarketManager
@ArbitrageBot - https://github.com/LivInTheLookingGlass/manibots/tree/54ae9aa13f37f30a01ab26824f24714d2a23542b/arbitrage-bot
@pos* - https://github.com/LivInTheLookingGlass/manibots/tree/54ae9aa13f37f30a01ab26824f24714d2a23542b/position
@v
@acc
@jerk
@snap
@Botlab - https://github.com/mwhea/Manifold_Trading_Bots
@JuniorBot - https://github.com/journcy/manifold-juniorbot
@runebot - https://github.com/PlumpkinPaws/Manifold_Machine_Learning
@LiquidityBonusBot* - https://gist.github.com/diomidov/0f5c97ee44c6f8e455544d141793481eCreated 2 years ago
Aella 's Date Doc
Welcome to this episode of MATEHUNTERS
the one hole aella couldnt fill was her heart
[image]Hi I’m looking for a boy i’d like to touch. Hopefully if you know a boy i would like to touch with this will help you identify him.
Things I want that most boys don’t have, roughly in order of how many boys they filter out and by how important/dealbreakery they are
*open to kids maybe??? and probably doesn’t already have kids/strong life commitments
*financially stable, bonus points for extremely financially stable
*independent, not looking to spend all their time joined at hip
*social power roughly in a similar tier to mine, tho doesn’t need to be same sphere
*is open to risk, brave, caution is calculated, doesn’t let fear of bad outcomes affect taking life by the balls
*very sexually aggro/sinister, tho nearby things might also work?
*real good at [jazzhands] emotional maturity: stuff like detecting and naming emotions, having boundaries and a body, communication, “talking from the stomach”, circling skills, mind meldy moves, speaking-from-poetry-instead-of-accuracy
*l i b e r t a r i a n i s h
*similar IQ range
*accepting of self and others, at peace
*good at (or at least compatible with/tolerant of) rationality n stuff, cold culture, happy to exchange money for social things
how i’m poly
(full-ass post here)
Polyamory is very much mandatory for me, unless you’re a billionaire, because i am down to accept money in exchange for social things. For me, “poly” just means “I don’t place rules on the intimacy my partner has with others.” In practice, I tend to behave mostly monogamously, though recently have been tryin to get more stuffed. I also am down to help you get more slutty!
Im happy to commit time/effort to joint stuff like potential kids or house or ‘relationship development time’, even if it interrupts potential future relationships with other partners.
About Me?
[image]The list of aella-facts is maybe less necessary cause i exhibitionist my personality loudly online into every crevice, but if you want an external list of nice things, my ex Nate Soares has a document originally entitled “My ex is a shit eating whore” which is literally true but google thought he was trying to be mean so it’s now reuploaded here
And for things about me that are maybe more nonobvious potential dealbreakers for people with specific preferences
*80% cold culture
*not good at entering full rationalist mode when emotionally activated
*messy, horribly messy, but fortunately i am happy to exchange money for social things
*more avoidant-attachment style
*constantly dealing with stalkers
*i do not like directly initiating sex almost ever (tho doesnt mean you cant have as much sex as you want)
*i have hyperhidrosis and if im not actively treating it (which is annoying) i sweat profusely from hands and feet. I also have IBS and poop erratically.
*not even the most basic cooking skills
*i like being on the computer a whole lot and dont like doing much outside stuff
*not routine oriented (tho i would like to be)
*do not like threesomes
Created 3 years ago
Felony charges in crypto
Crypto-related people
2024 U.S. Election Candidates
Forbes Under 30
EA-related people
CEOs of major companies
Billionaires
Pre-Emptive FAQ
Why is there a crime market about [person]?
Most smart people got a good impression of SBF. That’s very instructive. If you only make crime markets about the visibly-risky, you're massively under-using them. My question sets must be impartial and broad. For example in the U.S. election set, I must include both candidates who are like Trump, and also ones who are very different.
But most of the people in my markets will never be charged of anything.
When should these prices be taken seriously?
I doubt there's some accuracy cutoff (I guess it scales lognormally). But as a rule-of-thumb, I recommend ignoring the price signal until there are 5+ traders. Since I know the creation price (50%) is generally too high, I place a small "NO" position on each new market. Partly to help push it closer to the base rate, and partly as a gesture of goodwill.
What is a "serious crime", and/or "criminal charge"?
Some things that count: wire fraud, perjury, murder, tax evasion, assault, driving under the influence, and robbery. This will vary by country, but in general, I'm going to ignore "small possession of marijuana". The intention is to focus on crimes with an actual victim, and ignore personal indiscretions. Jaywalking won't count, unless the person was endangering others (such as by obstructing traffic). Littering generally won't count, unless it was an unusual amount, and they received a serious punishment.
They must have been charged by the police, or a grand jury. Note that in the U.S. this doesn't include SEC "charges", which are actually lawsuits and not chargesh. Though SEC charges can often lead to criminal charges, depending on the case.
Note: the earlier question wording of "criminal charge" was too U.S.-centric. So newer questions mention "serious crimes", and I've tried to elaborate with some examples.
Also note: some of my markets are about people who were born in authoritarian countries like China. This may be hard to resolve unfortuntately, if they are imprisoned without a publicly-stated reason. So in general, if they are detained or interrogated but then released without a "criminal record", then that won't count. If they are imprisoned for 3+ months but still no due process, we may be forced to resolve "YES". It's unjust, but such a duration is long enough to jeopardize the persons' business interests or enterprise. So while unfair and very staining of that country's business climate, we would learn towards resolving YES, because rewarding the market for predicting long-term imprisonment is useful.
I see my market, and I think the price is wrong!
Then make a Manifold account and trade it to whatever price you think it should be. You're allowed to "insider trade" -- on average that helps the price get more accurate.
Why are they all until the year 2030?
For easier interpretation, they should all have the same timeframe. If there is any institutional interest in these, then I'll someday make a 2040 series.
Are you going to make these markets about everyone?
The world still can't reliably avoid giving billions to someone like Sam Bankman-Fried. That seems alarming to me.
If there were markets on everyone, then it would be normal. Like credit scores. But I don't have the capacity to add more than a couple per day. I'm prioritizing people who seem important, and getting enough mana to pay for itself.
Why bother with decadal prediction markets on crime, when GPT-5 might just go build a dyson sphere?
I see this attitude on Twitter. It's such a bad forecast; fraud will probably matter for many years to come. It's remarkable for me to hear this, so shortly after Sam Bankman-Fried. Anyway, if you have an AI that can estimate crime risk, and is SO GOOD that it credibly outperforms prediction markets, then please let me know. I suspect I'll be waiting many years though.
I can think of important people you should have markets on.
Please suggest them!Created 2 years ago
Whales vs. Minnows and Pitfalls of Prediction Markets
This is another guest post from the Resident Contrarian, who we commissioned to write an unbiased, outsider view on the Whales vs Minnows drama that recently consumed Manifold. Enjoy! -David
There’s an investment move called short selling where you borrow a bunch of stocks, sell them, hope the price goes down, buy them back at a lower price, return the stocks, and keep the difference. Fees and interest aside, it’s a pure price bet - you set a neutral win/lose level when you buy the stock and hope it stays under the bar.
Short selling is a weird enough process that there are lots of ways to abuse it. There are usually enough market-enhancing positive effects to it that the government never actually gets around to banning it. But make no mistake: there are 100 ways to skin the “get yourself in financial or legal trouble with shorts” cat. Shorts are a bet made on loan, and it’s trivial to get yourself in so deep you’d have trouble fishing yourself out.
Notably, if you are a big fish that makes itself vulnerable by getting deep into the short pond and enough small players notice, stuff gets weird fast.
The reason I’ve been thinking about short selling this week is that I’ve been trying, as a layman, to find the closest normie-world equivalent to what happened to the Isaac King Whales/Minnows market controversy. And I can’t. Because in this case a weird pretend-money prediction market and too much dedication to winning at all costs came together to create something entirely new.
There’s no name for what happened, although I am going to pitch “Kingbreaking” as a possible choice. I’ll do my best to explain what went on from an outsider’s perspective and how Manifold’s biggest whale managed to lose a massive amount of Mana and $30,000 real-world dollars in a market he himself created.
The Market
[image]There’s an XKCD What If entry about whether all the spiders on Earth (which are nearby) cumulatively exert more gravity on you than the much-farther-away sun does.
[image]This market is set up a bit like that. Manifold whales are much, much bigger than everyone else, to the tune of portfolios 1000 times bigger than the substantial amount Manifold gives new users to start. Minnows are numerous, but Isaac was willing to make a bet that there weren’t so many of them that the whales couldn’t buy 10,000 votes to offset each and every minnow participant.
There was some immediate controversy regarding when/how/if the market would be resolved, since with Isaac in control he could potentially choose a closing date for the market that favored him and Team Whales.This was eventually resolved by setting up a council of 3 relatively trusted Manifolders who would make those decisions independently of Isaac, and who settled on a semi-random “whenever the next bitcoin hash ending in 00 is mined” closing date criteria.
And so the battlefield was set, ready for the ultimate confrontation between indoors-kid Davids and Goliaths.
Market History
The craziest thing about all this to me as a layman is that it probably should have worked. Manifold is active, but in a lot of ways, it’s a niche filled by people who are very serious about quant and who think in a very particular way. That makes for low numbers of participants in a lot of markets. From Isaac’s point of view, it would have looked very possible to win this, especially if he could corral most of the other whales.
For the majority of the market’s lifespan, the number of minnows hovered around 400-600 total participants, which meant Team Whales would have to pony up something like four to six million mana to bring home a win. This lead intensified when an enterprising minnow began to use a paid, $2-per-new-user tool to mass produce new minnows, and for the first time make it more likely than not that the minnows would win.
A couple of things then happened:
[image]Isaac offered to buy out No holders with less than 2000 shares and cash them out as if the market had resolved no. If this went exactly his way, he would be able to chip off a large enough fraction of no votes to take down the minnow side. On top of that, Isaac bought the API keys that controlled the previously mentioned mass-recruited minnows from the Manifold user who held them and used that power to flip their votes to “Yes”.
Isaac also started to buy massive amounts of Mana. For other outsiders reading this, Mana is the play money that you use to back your predictions on Manifold; when you open an account, you get some for free. There are few ways to make small amounts of mana without any real-world money exchanging hands, but if you need a bulk amount fast the only real way to do it is either by winning a lot of long-shot markets really fast (which nobody can do on command) or by spending your own cash.
So when you see a climb like this:
[image]That’s a graphic representation of Isaac spending his own money to try and win the market. Notably, that’s Isaac spending money he can’t get back even if the market goes his way because Mana isn’t convertible back to cash (You can, however, donate Mana in your account to charity at a 1:1 ratio with its purchase price). Unilaterally buying markets isn’t cheap, and at or near the top of that peak Isaac had $30,000 real-world, honest-to-god US dollars tied up in this market.
Between this and the API tomfoolery, the minnows were at this point alternating between complaining about foul play and expressing concern for what was starting to look like a dangerous outcome for Isaac himself, noisily oscillating between both positions like an unbalanced washing machine basket.
If this all seems pretty bad to you, understand that you and I are on the same page. It seems that way to me too.
Market Resolution
If you thought “Isaac is probably an uber-rich guy with unlimited funds to dump at this to prove a point”, the evidence points to you being wrong. With uber-energized minnows recruiting faster than ever on Reddit and on the Destiny livestream, Isaac himself was by the morning of 4/25 indicating he was out of money he could dump into the market, and despairing of his own chances to win.
[image]Manifold bets are cheaper the more they disagree with the current winning side, and up until this point the Minnows had been strategically holding back on purchases to keep Yes votes artificially expensive. Isaac admitting weakness put chum in the water, and the Minnows immediately swarmed with purchases and drove the market downward in a way it never recovered from.
At this drop, the chart started showing what close observers already knew; the market was effectively over, and the minnows had won.
Aftermath and thoughts
OK, so, I want you to understand: Manifold is paying me for these articles. But at the same time, I’m writing them in my voice and name, so there’s a bit of an understanding that I can more or less say what I want. They don’t have to print what I write; that’s their call. But there’s some freedom that’s been asked for and granted on this project, and I’m utilizing it.
Mostly I’m using it to say the following: This story is interesting, this story is fun to write about, and this story is also horrifying and nobody should want stuff like this to happen.
The point of a prediction market is just that - to make predictions. It’s so you can log on and easily access the wisdom of the crowds to help you make decisions or to help you learn about the reality of a topic that might be so politically or culturally loaded that you otherwise would have difficulty getting a handle on it.
Betting on markets is supposed to be your way of participating in that. Mana exists, near as I can tell, so that you feel like you have some skin in the game; it’s available for free, and buying a significant amount of it doesn’t necessarily cost a ton. Ideally, you put just enough value on Mana that it influences you to make careful, thoughtful bets.
What happened here wasn’t that. It’s been said a lot in the comments, but this story carries a lot of the flavor of gambling addiction - of someone who bets more than they want to lose, feels trapped, and keeps betting. And what we know about the story supports that; $29k does not seem to have been small-amount play money to Isaac.
[image]I don’t understand every aspect of prediction markets. Go to Scott for that. I’m not an expert, but I do understand this: this is not what they are for. If you like these markets, this kind of betting is destructive and gets in the way of everything good you think they should do.
As far as Manifold goes, I’m only slightly more privy to their inner thoughts on this than you are. But from what I can tell, they agree with me at least that this was a bad event and it should be discouraged from happening again. First, and I think I approve of this a lot, they bailed out Isaac to the tune of $25k of the total 29k - an amount that I think means “here’s a penalty to make you not do it again, but also we don’t want to ruin your life to make a point”.
They also have been making some public statements in the comments that indicate they don’t like this and are trying to figure out how to prevent it while not constraining the markets too much:
[image]To be clear once more, I’m sort of broadly allowed to say “Manifold is handling this poorly and I hate them” here. For the most part, they seem to instead be making the moves I’d want them to make - helping this be as small of a disaster as possible for the person most affected, and taking steps to prevent similar stuff while retaining community focus.
My understanding is that Manifold is working on a more comprehensive public statement about how they are working towards discouraging this kind of problem, and when they do I’d encourage them to link it.
(Manifold note: We did do this, and it’s available here. We also put together a showcase of high-quality object-level markets that better represent Manifold here).
In summary: This market was interesting, it’s interesting to talk about, and I hope I made it interesting to read about. Isaac made a huge bet on the idea that the whales had enough money to buy predictions in direct opposition to the mob, and lost. Looking just at that, this is a good thing; arguably, this was the most direct and conclusive way to show that wisdom-of-crowds can’t be taken down by wealth-of-the-few on Manifold at this point in time.
But looking at the social aspects of this (especially to the extent they concern Isaac) shows some dangers of the market; the bets are called bets for a reason. They feel like bets, and Mana has been successful in feeling like something valuable. That’s necessary for the prediction markets to work at all, but it’s dangerous.
Manifold is taking steps to discourage the kind of markets and behavior that would hurt individuals that made bad decisions, but that’s only half of the picture; it’s important that the individuals themselves understand the psychological dangers of things that feel a lot like betting. If a person can freak out because their important-to-them DnD character died and damage friendships over it (and they can, and do) then people can get too wrapped up in these markets.
I’m traditionally a skeptic of ultra-quant solutions to things, and prediction markets fall under the heading. Writing both this piece and my last guest piece has made me far, far more friendly to prediction markets than I was before; they are neat. They are interesting. I sort of get it a bit now. It would be a shame to limit that appeal by losing sight of the purpose of all this: to learn more, and make better decisions.
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check RC out on his Substack! He also works at Quill, and takes advantage of inopportune times to mention he loves his wife.
Created 2 years ago
Manifold Search Position Over Time
How manifold.markets ranks when searching "manifold" on Google and counting according to the rules described in these markets:
[markets]"Timeline:"
March 12: 38th
March 24: 114th
March 25: 44th
March 28: 39th
April 2: 83rd
April 9: 53rd
April 29th: 69th
June 16th: 70th
July 14th: 39th
August 13th: 21st
September 25th: 3rd
October 8th: 11th
October 9th: 4th
October 16th: 11th
October 26th: 2ndCreated 2 years ago
Money & AI
I was just ordering a pizza online, and I was thinking, it is kind of amazing that I have reliably learned from scratch that spending money via a credit card taps into a limited amount of resources that I have in my bank account. I mean, yes, it's easy to understand! But I don't think we'd have an AI algorithm that can reliably learn this sort of thing from scratch, from the small amount of experience a human gets with it, and avoid catastrophic forgetting and similar later.
Raises two questions:
What's missing from existing AI algorithms that prevents this?
Can we create a prediction market that measures the ability?
The trouble with question 2 is that it would be easy enough to hardcode, or to bypass the problem by increasing the amount of training data, or to otherwise patch up in this specific case. There's probably already AIs that can sort of do this. I'm just thinking about the more abstract capability.Created 3 years ago
Predict CEP Winners
Forecast Tournament Rules
[WIP] prizes go to people on top of the leaderboard. Will update this section when we've figured it out. Austin's leaning towards real money rewards.
CEP details & judgement criteria
Copied from EA Forum
At Open Philanthropy, we aim to give as effectively as we can. To find the best opportunities, we’ve looked at many different causes, some of which have become our current focus areas.
Even after a decade of research, we think there are many excellent grantmaking ideas we haven’t yet uncovered. So we’ve launched the Cause Exploration Prizes around a set of questions that will help us explore new areas.
We’re most interested in responses to our open prompt: “What new cause area should Open Philanthropy consider funding?”
We also have prompts in the following areas:
Health
Development
Worldview Investigations
We’re looking for responses of up to 5,000 words that clearly convey your findings. It’s fine to use bullet points and informal language. For more detail, see our guidance for authors. To submit, go to this page.
We hope that the Prizes help us to:
Identify new cause areas and funding strategies.
Develop our thinking on how best to measure impact.
Find people who might be a good fit to work with us in the future.
You can read more about the Cause Exploration Prizes on our dedicated website. You’ll also be able to read all of the submissions on the Effective Altruism Forum later this summer – stay tuned!
Prizes, rules, and deadlines
All work must be submitted by 11:00 pm PDT on August 11, 2022 (deadline extended on July 28) August 4, 2022.
You are almost certainly eligible. We think these questions can be approached from many directions; you don’t need to be an expert or have a PhD to apply.
There’s a $25,000 prize for the top submission, and three $15,000 prizes. Anyone who wins one of these prizes will be invited to present their work to Open Phil’s cause prioritization team in San Francisco (with compensation for time and travel). And we will follow up with authors if their work contributes to our grantmaking decisions!
We will also award twenty honorable mentions ($500), and a participation award ($200) for the first 200 submissions made in good faith and not awarded another prize.
All submissions will be shared on the Forum to allow others to learn from them. If participants prefer, their submission can be published anonymously, and we can handle the logistics of posting to the Forum. See more detail here.
For full eligibility requirements and prize details, see our rules and FAQs.
If you have any questions not answered by that page, contact us at hello@causeexplorationprizes.com.Created 3 years ago
Economy in Shambles?
Can we say that the health of our economy is based on a single outcome in a sports match? It relies heavily on the winner of the World Series. But is it simply speculation based on the correlation of data? We are determined to find out.
[markets]Will the outcome of the World Series in turn save our economy? It is for the consumer to determine
(https://manifold.markets/embed/kazoo/if-the-philadelphia-phillies-win-th)Let's investigate and make a guess. This will determine my participation in the stock market and invest strategy
https://www.foxbusiness.com/sports/if-philadelphia-phillies-win-world-series-prepare-economic-crisisCreated 3 years ago
Creating a Community of Good Markets
Characteristics of a Good Market
Specific Question
Verifiable Resolution
Relevant Timescale
Example:
Specific Question: "Will democrats have a majority in the senate after the midterms?".
Verifiable Resolution: after the midterms are counted anyone will be able to look up the composition of the Senate and can verify if the market was resolved correctly.
Relevant Timescale: the midterms have a clear cut off on November 8th. If there is not a clear cut off, one should be picked that is close enough for people to watch for but not long enough that they forget about it.
Ex: "Will the Mr.Girl bridge stand on January 31st" is good because it sets a clear day and is relatively soon.
Tags
'Destiny.gg' tags should be for questions or speculation related to the community.
'Desting.gg Stocks' tags should be for markets related to "X orbiter stocks"
Created 3 years ago
Sneako Stocks underpriced
I believe 20 years from now sneako stocks will be looked at as a long term blue chip investment as he has a high potential for improvement I don't believe is currently priced in. He may have scuffed opinions now but even destiny was once Nebraska Steve. Created 3 years ago
Time Arbitrage
Nuclear risk is priced at ~7-9% per day for the next two days:
(https://manifold.markets/embed/BTE/will-north-korea-conduct-a-nuclear)
Followed by ~2%/day through midterms
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Gigacasting/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated-5b3361923e29)~5% day-of
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Gigacasting/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated-689e9cc3c012)~1%/day thereafter:
(https://manifold.markets/embed/Gigacasting/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated-decbb69f00b3)And <0.3%/day
(https://manifold.markets/embed/jack/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated-d8af7cf07475)Down to 0.03%/day next year
(https://manifold.markets/embed/kolotom99/will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-detonated-41dfff460cab)