Do you have any evidence about the mutual acceptability of market resolution in controversial cases like the hospital car park explosion? Like, how did the many COVID-19 origins markets resolve?
At some point these markets are really asking "how will the platform/host resolve this market", which may have dramatically different odds from "what is reality". I guess that's banal at this point but how much does it matter after all?
Great post! For those not on Manifold, I think it's also worth directing attention to the biggest market on the site, the main Speaker of The House Market:
"I can’t find any markets on the Middle East topic I’m actually interested in, which is Israel’s medium-term plan. Will they kill some Hamas leaders, then get out? Install a puppet government? Permanently occupy Gaza like they’re occupying the West Bank? These all seem like bad options, but they’re very different bad options, and I haven’t seen much speculation about which is most likely."
Does Israel have ANY non-bad options? I think the answer is unfortunately no...
Jonathan Anomaly's talk was mostly laying out the basics of polygenic screening. Prediction markets factor in because we want to know which diseases will likely be cured in the coming decades. Genomic Prediction creates an embryo health score to maximize DALYs for the embryo. But a lot of diseases only reduce the quality of life when someone is much later in life. If we think a disease will be cured, we should put less weight on it. I would put stronger weight on traits we likely will not be able to cure such as low mood, poor personality traits, and cognitive ability.
1) Markets resolve "no" when someone presses the "reject" button. So every market is implicitly "Will neither subject press the reject button, and will they date for 6 months?"
2) Since Scott checked the site out, they've added an easier way to see who has bet yes or no on a match. You can also see the full trade history by opening the match's market and looking at the "trades" tab like a normal market.
3) There is currently ongoing debate as to whether the site should focus more on 6 month relationships or 1st/2nd/3rd dates. If you have an opinion, come bet on it here:
The markets on whether the two people will date for six months are indeed conditional on whether they reach a decision (either party can reject, but both have to confirm they dated for 6 months to resolve Yes). The markets either don't resolve (depending on loans to get your mana back) or resolve N/A after a long time, like when you get married.
Also, you can now see the positions of who bet on a relationship!
Super excited to see where this goes as we've literally just launched a few days ago.
How does manifold.love prevent the problem of female hypergamy that afflicts every other dating site and app? (Once female users of the app/site have seen the top 20 percent, say, in "attractiveness" of men, the other 80% of males effectively become invisible to all women. Adjust percentage to suit, 50% seems a reasonable upper bound/lower bound.)
Regarding the hospital bombing, as far as I know it wouldn't be fair to say the markets "got it right" and the evidence that it was fired from Gaza is still weak. We have the aljazerra video which NYT analysts say does not show whatever hit the hospital as Israel is claiming (https://archive.ph/Z3L81). We have an audio recording purported to be two Hamas militants blaming it on PIJ, which apparently does not ring true to Arabic speakers from the region (https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospital-blast-visual-investigation). The lack of a warning shot doesn't mean much since it appears from eye witnesses reports Israel has at least partly discontinued that policy after Oct. 7. We have vague assertions from Israeli and American intelligence with no info about how they came to that conclusion, historically that type of evidence has been.. unreliable. I'm not aware of the photos you refer to, but if they are the nail in the coffin I'd be surprised. Perhaps I've missed something, if anyone has more please let me know
I'm not an expert here, but aren't there Forecasting sites and Prediction Markets and aren't they different things? Should they be compared? The mechanics of them are different.
Manifold markets having fairly flat DAUs is a pretty negative signal to me on finding a real niche (you'd expect it to be growing a lot). Curious what people think about this.
I always respected Scott's choice not to do podcasts. Still do. (Though he has an invitation from Tyler Cowen.) Now, doing an "interview/pretend talk" on youtube seems in all aspects like a (video)podcast, just worse. But who can say "No" to persons in skirts/cilts. ;) - Whatever, we all get to do stuff once - I was Santa.
The implication that Israel so far hasn't been occupying Gaza is misleading at best. They simply chose the somewhat unorthodox "open-air prison that prisoners run" model of occupation.
There are reasons to think manifold.love is a terrible idea, e.g. Scott could bet on being in relationship with Aella not because he thinks this is at all likely to happen, but just to boost his status as measured by the prediction market. People being willing to loose money to influence the market makes it not work.
But, misgivings about the whole idea aside, it seems to be have been a big hit with the LGBT segment of the effective altruist community. It's looking like a Pride march or a gay bar in San Francisco. So it could still work, and the lack of cis-gendered women might not necessarily be a problem for that demographic...
It seems worth recalling the problems which actually did occur resolving the 2020 presidential election. I personally made a reasonable amount of money betting that Biden would win after the results had been announced. I can't recall the exact details now, but there was some date at which I thought the market ought to have resolved according to the published criteria, and there was some later date at which it actually did resolve. People were unhappy about both parts: the Biden bettors thought their payments were unjustly delayed (depriving them of the use value of the money) while a significant number of Trump bettors continue to believe that their man really won. People threatened to sue (https://www.insider.com/bettors-plan-to-sue-betfair-after-they-called-election-biden-2020-12), although I haven't heard anything about that since, so I guess it didn't go anywhere.
> People seem to trust the new Speaker to avert a government shutdown.
That's not exactly what's going on here. The market you linked shows the chance of a shutdown by the end of 2023 decreasing from ~55% to ~35% comparing before and after the speaker election.
But this market shows the chance of a shutdown by the end of 2024 dropping from ~70% to ~55% (still above 50%). And presumably Mike Johnson will remain speaker until the end of 2024!
Some missing context here is that after election, Mike Johnson immediately announced his plan to *temporarily* avert a shutdown by passing a stopgap (continuing resolution), pushing the potential shutdown date in the new year (January or April).
So, it's definitely a possibility that the market isn't showing so much "averting a shutdown" as "delaying a shutdown" (possibly only a delay of two months from November to January).
With that said, it is still notable that even the 2024 shutdown odds dropped after Johnson's election. And it would be nice to have a market for shutdown before April 30, 2024, to separate out a shutdown over the FY2024 budget vs a shutdown over the FY2025 budget.
"For real steam engines, that first niche was pumping water out of coal mines."
It helped a lot for that niche that the fuel was more or less just lying around, because the first ones installed were very inefficient. They quickly became more efficient as the owners could see that every shovelful going into the engine wasn't getting sold. But the first ones would not have made sense if the fuel had to be brought in from any distance.
So where's the "free fuel" and "quick feedback loop" for prediction markets?
> Hanson is less sure about this answer than the overall story, but he suggests hiring. You could create some kind of product that companies could buy and give their hiring managers at the beginning of a hiring round, asking them to predict which candidates would get good employee evaluation results or promotions at the end of X amount of time.
Honestly, that sounds horrifying, as it opens up the door to all manner of abuse and conflict-of-interest questions. Predicting who will win an election that millions of people participate in is one thing; "predicting" what will happen to people when you have some degree of control over their fate is quite another! (And yes, the "hiring manager" is not necessarily the *manager* manager who will be making these decisions on evaluation or promotion, but I bet they know each other and talk about work stuff on a pretty regular basis...)
The New York Times has a history of getting things wrong-- that hospital in Gaza, weapons of mass destruction, Kitty Genovese, crack babies.... Is there money to be made in betting against the NYT?
"Normally this is a problem for Congress, election regulators, the courts, the media, and the American people. But if there are election prediction markets, then election fraud would indirectly become a type of financial fraud, and now it is also a problem for the CFTC."
Yeah, I imagine that if prediction markets set themselves up to be "we're like the stock market" rather than "we're like bookies", then financial regulation bodies, instead of Revenue or gambling regulatory bodies, will be the ones overseeing them. And if they have to decide on the outcome of elections, no wonder they don't want to be involved.
You're thinking "surely reasonable people won't need big decisions made", but you're forgetting there's a lot of unreasonable people out there. Who would have thought that the courts would have to decide if a piece of paper that was nearly, but not quite, all the way punched through counted as a vote or not? I don't blame the CFTC for not wanting to get involved in the financial equivalent of hanging chads.
For the love market, I would ordinarily advise user Nathan to ditch the left-side black and white photo, as "My hobbies include dressing up as Slenderman" wouldn't seem to appeal to most women, but if he's looking for love among the rationalists, who knows? Slendy could be just the guy they're looking for!
I tried to phrase two mid-term solutions for Israel as prediction markets: withdraw and occupy. No idea how phrase "puppet-government" in a way that I could reasonably resolve it.
I think Manifold.love should *embrace* people betting up their own candidacy, rather than trying to restrict it. The basic problem with Tinder or Hinge is that men swipe right on ~everyone and women are overloaded with potential matches. But if you start charging people money (indirectly via mana purchases) to make bets, men would be incentivized to think carefully before "swiping right" and the cost of swiping will go up if the person in question is more attractive.
So, eventually, if Manifold.love gets enough traction, it will cost (say) $100 to get to the top of Aella's match queue, $50 for someone attractive but not well known or $5 for the average person. Thus no one will be overwhelmed with potential matches.
I'd make two changes to the process:
1. Let each person immediately resolve any market to No if they're confident they're not a good match with one of the candidates in the pool
2. Introduce a fee for men to create a profile, in order to encourage a better gender ratio. Perhaps something on the order of 1000 mana?
TL;DR: Here’s how I’d use prediction markets if I was a dictator.
Prediction markets are about providing information. The steam engine use case for prediction markets is throttling the information ecosystem. Right now the way that something like twitter (“X”) works is that you make a divisive tweet, then other people fight about it, and you get visibility and more followers. You do it again and this time it goes out to even more people. A feedback loop of rage. You do this enough times and end up with a power law distribution of users-to-followers, and twitter has turned into a dumpster fire and everyone is screaming at each other and we can’t agree on who won the election and is supposed to have control of the nuclear football.
So instead, you have a site where you start with 1,000 points, like manifold, and this is your max number of followers. When you hit your limit, no one else can follow you. You’re capped. If you want the ability to have > 1,000 followers then you need to win some bets.
The rule doesn't mean that “You must follow superforecasters,” because superforecasters might be super boring and no one wants to follow them. Instead, the rule means, “Only super forecasters are allowed to have a disproportionate influence on the information ecosystem.” You’re only allowed to have a hundred thousand followers if you have a basic grasp of reality. Lots of people don’t want to do forecasting and that’s fine. You’d still have your default 1,000 limit and most social media users never get above that anyway.
Of course, this only improves the information ecosystem if people actually use it. Lots of people want rage. But if I was a dictator, I might just ban everything else.
Here in the US, maybe Elon Musk had an opportunity, but since the system was already in place, he couldn’t have done anything without ripping it apart. You’d have to start from scratch. Or maybe substack had an opportunity when they rolled out Notes.
A few years back, I listened to an interview with the founders of airbnb where they were talking about growing pains in their early days. They complained to their investors that people weren't getting into the spirit of how to set up their pages so people would be enticed to rent from them. They wanted to create a culture of high-quality pages, but their guidelines weren't being followed.
"Where are your users?"
"About 80% of them are in New York City."
"You should go to New York and help them set up their pages, then."
"That doesn't make any sense. We want this to be a global system. Helping every user set up their page will never scale."
"Right, but when you're small you do things that don't scale."
So they went to NYC with a DSLR, telling users they'd been selected to have a professional photographer and a consultant help them set up their page. It worked, and the rest is history.
I think about this idea a lot when it comes to early growth models for a company or an idea. Whether it's prediction markets or impact markets, I think you have to be willing to do things that don't scale when you're small. And once you're willing to do things that don't scale, this opens up a lot of ideas for WHAT you could do to grow the idea that hadn't been options before.
I've mentioned it in one of the open threads, but Fox News has this America Predicts [0] thing which seems like it deserves an honorable mention. I'm not aware of any other major mainstream news organization doing something similar.
I'd be interested in seeing prediction markets used to decide whom to invite to political debates. Rather than the current system of coming up with a bunch of ad hoc criteria, just have a prediction market for each candidate's odds of winning the primary or the general election contingent on them being invited to the next debate. Everyone over a certain threshold that increases the closer you get to the election (say, start at 10% and ramp it up to 30%) gets a spot on the stage.
It'll also be an excellent test case for arguments over how robust prediction markets are against manipulation by people with deep pockets and large stakes in the market's prediction.
Plasma's survey of manifold users found a lot of furries.
Bit of an omission for manifold.social here ... manifold,social asks you for your preferences re. M/f/nb/trans m/trans f, but no questions on how you feel about furries.
This is on the Internet .. of course there will be furries.
A lot of people who believe the American government lies about everything are sure that Israel didn't bomb the hospital because the American government says so
My reaction to the legalization talk was "well, what did they expect?" Trying to pass off gambling on elections as "hedging" just sounds disingenuous on top of the existing problems.
Next Mantic Monday maybe you should look into markets on the Tesla Strike in Sweden. I think there is probably alpha in those. Remarkable situation really, historically the unionizers usually win by getting their demands met, but if the CEO is outspoken anti-unionizer Elon Musk will it truly go down that way?
The resolution criteria on the hospital bombing question are bullshit.
Do you have any evidence about the mutual acceptability of market resolution in controversial cases like the hospital car park explosion? Like, how did the many COVID-19 origins markets resolve?
At some point these markets are really asking "how will the platform/host resolve this market", which may have dramatically different odds from "what is reality". I guess that's banal at this point but how much does it matter after all?
Great post! For those not on Manifold, I think it's also worth directing attention to the biggest market on the site, the main Speaker of The House Market:
https://manifold.markets/SimonGrayson/who-will-be-the-next-speaker-of-the-0b49bf53ad12?r=Sm9zaHVh
It was an absolutely insane three week rollercoaster, as the graph suggests. I also recommend this post by Marketwise summarizing winning trading strategies: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/speaker-election-interviewing-the?r=28sbv1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"I can’t find any markets on the Middle East topic I’m actually interested in, which is Israel’s medium-term plan. Will they kill some Hamas leaders, then get out? Install a puppet government? Permanently occupy Gaza like they’re occupying the West Bank? These all seem like bad options, but they’re very different bad options, and I haven’t seen much speculation about which is most likely."
Does Israel have ANY non-bad options? I think the answer is unfortunately no...
Jonathan Anomaly's talk was mostly laying out the basics of polygenic screening. Prediction markets factor in because we want to know which diseases will likely be cured in the coming decades. Genomic Prediction creates an embryo health score to maximize DALYs for the embryo. But a lot of diseases only reduce the quality of life when someone is much later in life. If we think a disease will be cured, we should put less weight on it. I would put stronger weight on traits we likely will not be able to cure such as low mood, poor personality traits, and cognitive ability.
Regarding manifold.love:
1) Markets resolve "no" when someone presses the "reject" button. So every market is implicitly "Will neither subject press the reject button, and will they date for 6 months?"
2) Since Scott checked the site out, they've added an easier way to see who has bet yes or no on a match. You can also see the full trade history by opening the match's market and looking at the "trades" tab like a normal market.
3) There is currently ongoing debate as to whether the site should focus more on 6 month relationships or 1st/2nd/3rd dates. If you have an opinion, come bet on it here:
https://manifold.markets/SG/will-manifoldlove-hit-1000-signed-i?r=Sm9zaHVh
Awesome!
Happy to answer any questions about manifold.love.
The markets on whether the two people will date for six months are indeed conditional on whether they reach a decision (either party can reject, but both have to confirm they dated for 6 months to resolve Yes). The markets either don't resolve (depending on loans to get your mana back) or resolve N/A after a long time, like when you get married.
Also, you can now see the positions of who bet on a relationship!
Super excited to see where this goes as we've literally just launched a few days ago.
How does manifold.love prevent the problem of female hypergamy that afflicts every other dating site and app? (Once female users of the app/site have seen the top 20 percent, say, in "attractiveness" of men, the other 80% of males effectively become invisible to all women. Adjust percentage to suit, 50% seems a reasonable upper bound/lower bound.)
Regarding the hospital bombing, as far as I know it wouldn't be fair to say the markets "got it right" and the evidence that it was fired from Gaza is still weak. We have the aljazerra video which NYT analysts say does not show whatever hit the hospital as Israel is claiming (https://archive.ph/Z3L81). We have an audio recording purported to be two Hamas militants blaming it on PIJ, which apparently does not ring true to Arabic speakers from the region (https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospital-blast-visual-investigation). The lack of a warning shot doesn't mean much since it appears from eye witnesses reports Israel has at least partly discontinued that policy after Oct. 7. We have vague assertions from Israeli and American intelligence with no info about how they came to that conclusion, historically that type of evidence has been.. unreliable. I'm not aware of the photos you refer to, but if they are the nail in the coffin I'd be surprised. Perhaps I've missed something, if anyone has more please let me know
I'm not an expert here, but aren't there Forecasting sites and Prediction Markets and aren't they different things? Should they be compared? The mechanics of them are different.
Manifold markets having fairly flat DAUs is a pretty negative signal to me on finding a real niche (you'd expect it to be growing a lot). Curious what people think about this.
I always respected Scott's choice not to do podcasts. Still do. (Though he has an invitation from Tyler Cowen.) Now, doing an "interview/pretend talk" on youtube seems in all aspects like a (video)podcast, just worse. But who can say "No" to persons in skirts/cilts. ;) - Whatever, we all get to do stuff once - I was Santa.
The implication that Israel so far hasn't been occupying Gaza is misleading at best. They simply chose the somewhat unorthodox "open-air prison that prisoners run" model of occupation.
There are reasons to think manifold.love is a terrible idea, e.g. Scott could bet on being in relationship with Aella not because he thinks this is at all likely to happen, but just to boost his status as measured by the prediction market. People being willing to loose money to influence the market makes it not work.
But, misgivings about the whole idea aside, it seems to be have been a big hit with the LGBT segment of the effective altruist community. It's looking like a Pride march or a gay bar in San Francisco. So it could still work, and the lack of cis-gendered women might not necessarily be a problem for that demographic...
Hiring prediction markets will immediately run into disparate impact doctrine.
Unless they somehow match the demographic distribution of the population exactly by chance.
It seems worth recalling the problems which actually did occur resolving the 2020 presidential election. I personally made a reasonable amount of money betting that Biden would win after the results had been announced. I can't recall the exact details now, but there was some date at which I thought the market ought to have resolved according to the published criteria, and there was some later date at which it actually did resolve. People were unhappy about both parts: the Biden bettors thought their payments were unjustly delayed (depriving them of the use value of the money) while a significant number of Trump bettors continue to believe that their man really won. People threatened to sue (https://www.insider.com/bettors-plan-to-sue-betfair-after-they-called-election-biden-2020-12), although I haven't heard anything about that since, so I guess it didn't go anywhere.
> People seem to trust the new Speaker to avert a government shutdown.
That's not exactly what's going on here. The market you linked shows the chance of a shutdown by the end of 2023 decreasing from ~55% to ~35% comparing before and after the speaker election.
But this market shows the chance of a shutdown by the end of 2024 dropping from ~70% to ~55% (still above 50%). And presumably Mike Johnson will remain speaker until the end of 2024!
https://manifold.markets/MarcusAbramovitch/will-there-be-a-us-government-shutd-9878106a2b1c
Some missing context here is that after election, Mike Johnson immediately announced his plan to *temporarily* avert a shutdown by passing a stopgap (continuing resolution), pushing the potential shutdown date in the new year (January or April).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mike-johnson-lays-out-appropriations-timeline-to-avoid-november-shutdown/ar-AA1iQ3iu
So, it's definitely a possibility that the market isn't showing so much "averting a shutdown" as "delaying a shutdown" (possibly only a delay of two months from November to January).
With that said, it is still notable that even the 2024 shutdown odds dropped after Johnson's election. And it would be nice to have a market for shutdown before April 30, 2024, to separate out a shutdown over the FY2024 budget vs a shutdown over the FY2025 budget.
"For real steam engines, that first niche was pumping water out of coal mines."
It helped a lot for that niche that the fuel was more or less just lying around, because the first ones installed were very inefficient. They quickly became more efficient as the owners could see that every shovelful going into the engine wasn't getting sold. But the first ones would not have made sense if the fuel had to be brought in from any distance.
So where's the "free fuel" and "quick feedback loop" for prediction markets?
> Hanson is less sure about this answer than the overall story, but he suggests hiring. You could create some kind of product that companies could buy and give their hiring managers at the beginning of a hiring round, asking them to predict which candidates would get good employee evaluation results or promotions at the end of X amount of time.
Honestly, that sounds horrifying, as it opens up the door to all manner of abuse and conflict-of-interest questions. Predicting who will win an election that millions of people participate in is one thing; "predicting" what will happen to people when you have some degree of control over their fate is quite another! (And yes, the "hiring manager" is not necessarily the *manager* manager who will be making these decisions on evaluation or promotion, but I bet they know each other and talk about work stuff on a pretty regular basis...)
Maybe the first niche for prediction markets can be betting on the probability of celebrity divorces.
The New York Times has a history of getting things wrong-- that hospital in Gaza, weapons of mass destruction, Kitty Genovese, crack babies.... Is there money to be made in betting against the NYT?
https://manifold.markets/BenjaminIkuta/what-is-israels-mediumterm-plan-wha?r=QmVuamFtaW5Ja3V0YQ
I made a market as you were wondering.
"Normally this is a problem for Congress, election regulators, the courts, the media, and the American people. But if there are election prediction markets, then election fraud would indirectly become a type of financial fraud, and now it is also a problem for the CFTC."
Yeah, I imagine that if prediction markets set themselves up to be "we're like the stock market" rather than "we're like bookies", then financial regulation bodies, instead of Revenue or gambling regulatory bodies, will be the ones overseeing them. And if they have to decide on the outcome of elections, no wonder they don't want to be involved.
You're thinking "surely reasonable people won't need big decisions made", but you're forgetting there's a lot of unreasonable people out there. Who would have thought that the courts would have to decide if a piece of paper that was nearly, but not quite, all the way punched through counted as a vote or not? I don't blame the CFTC for not wanting to get involved in the financial equivalent of hanging chads.
For the love market, I would ordinarily advise user Nathan to ditch the left-side black and white photo, as "My hobbies include dressing up as Slenderman" wouldn't seem to appeal to most women, but if he's looking for love among the rationalists, who knows? Slendy could be just the guy they're looking for!
I thought this article on the manifold speaker market had some good takes. https://marketwise.substack.com/p/speaker-election-interviewing-the?r=28sbv1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&nthPub=1291
I tried to phrase two mid-term solutions for Israel as prediction markets: withdraw and occupy. No idea how phrase "puppet-government" in a way that I could reasonably resolve it.
https://manifold.markets/marketwise/will-israel-occupy-gaza-in-april?r=bWFya2V0d2lzZQ
https://manifold.markets/marketwise/will-israel-withdraw-again-from-gaz?r=bWFya2V0d2lzZQ
I think Manifold.love should *embrace* people betting up their own candidacy, rather than trying to restrict it. The basic problem with Tinder or Hinge is that men swipe right on ~everyone and women are overloaded with potential matches. But if you start charging people money (indirectly via mana purchases) to make bets, men would be incentivized to think carefully before "swiping right" and the cost of swiping will go up if the person in question is more attractive.
So, eventually, if Manifold.love gets enough traction, it will cost (say) $100 to get to the top of Aella's match queue, $50 for someone attractive but not well known or $5 for the average person. Thus no one will be overwhelmed with potential matches.
I'd make two changes to the process:
1. Let each person immediately resolve any market to No if they're confident they're not a good match with one of the candidates in the pool
2. Introduce a fee for men to create a profile, in order to encourage a better gender ratio. Perhaps something on the order of 1000 mana?
TL;DR: Here’s how I’d use prediction markets if I was a dictator.
Prediction markets are about providing information. The steam engine use case for prediction markets is throttling the information ecosystem. Right now the way that something like twitter (“X”) works is that you make a divisive tweet, then other people fight about it, and you get visibility and more followers. You do it again and this time it goes out to even more people. A feedback loop of rage. You do this enough times and end up with a power law distribution of users-to-followers, and twitter has turned into a dumpster fire and everyone is screaming at each other and we can’t agree on who won the election and is supposed to have control of the nuclear football.
So instead, you have a site where you start with 1,000 points, like manifold, and this is your max number of followers. When you hit your limit, no one else can follow you. You’re capped. If you want the ability to have > 1,000 followers then you need to win some bets.
The rule doesn't mean that “You must follow superforecasters,” because superforecasters might be super boring and no one wants to follow them. Instead, the rule means, “Only super forecasters are allowed to have a disproportionate influence on the information ecosystem.” You’re only allowed to have a hundred thousand followers if you have a basic grasp of reality. Lots of people don’t want to do forecasting and that’s fine. You’d still have your default 1,000 limit and most social media users never get above that anyway.
Of course, this only improves the information ecosystem if people actually use it. Lots of people want rage. But if I was a dictator, I might just ban everything else.
Here in the US, maybe Elon Musk had an opportunity, but since the system was already in place, he couldn’t have done anything without ripping it apart. You’d have to start from scratch. Or maybe substack had an opportunity when they rolled out Notes.
A few years back, I listened to an interview with the founders of airbnb where they were talking about growing pains in their early days. They complained to their investors that people weren't getting into the spirit of how to set up their pages so people would be enticed to rent from them. They wanted to create a culture of high-quality pages, but their guidelines weren't being followed.
"Where are your users?"
"About 80% of them are in New York City."
"You should go to New York and help them set up their pages, then."
"That doesn't make any sense. We want this to be a global system. Helping every user set up their page will never scale."
"Right, but when you're small you do things that don't scale."
So they went to NYC with a DSLR, telling users they'd been selected to have a professional photographer and a consultant help them set up their page. It worked, and the rest is history.
I think about this idea a lot when it comes to early growth models for a company or an idea. Whether it's prediction markets or impact markets, I think you have to be willing to do things that don't scale when you're small. And once you're willing to do things that don't scale, this opens up a lot of ideas for WHAT you could do to grow the idea that hadn't been options before.
I've mentioned it in one of the open threads, but Fox News has this America Predicts [0] thing which seems like it deserves an honorable mention. I'm not aware of any other major mainstream news organization doing something similar.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/americapredicts
I'd be interested in seeing prediction markets used to decide whom to invite to political debates. Rather than the current system of coming up with a bunch of ad hoc criteria, just have a prediction market for each candidate's odds of winning the primary or the general election contingent on them being invited to the next debate. Everyone over a certain threshold that increases the closer you get to the election (say, start at 10% and ramp it up to 30%) gets a spot on the stage.
It'll also be an excellent test case for arguments over how robust prediction markets are against manipulation by people with deep pockets and large stakes in the market's prediction.
"Prediction markets" have reached stage 6 in Scott's "every cause wants to be a tribe" cycle (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/)
Plasma's survey of manifold users found a lot of furries.
Bit of an omission for manifold.social here ... manifold,social asks you for your preferences re. M/f/nb/trans m/trans f, but no questions on how you feel about furries.
This is on the Internet .. of course there will be furries.
A lot of people who believe the American government lies about everything are sure that Israel didn't bomb the hospital because the American government says so
My reaction to the legalization talk was "well, what did they expect?" Trying to pass off gambling on elections as "hedging" just sounds disingenuous on top of the existing problems.
Next Mantic Monday maybe you should look into markets on the Tesla Strike in Sweden. I think there is probably alpha in those. Remarkable situation really, historically the unionizers usually win by getting their demands met, but if the CEO is outspoken anti-unionizer Elon Musk will it truly go down that way?