@Isaac-King Oh, please mention any specific features that you liked/didn't like for the purposes of resolving this market: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/what-changes-to-my-manifold-dashboa-5151c7c05ae0

It looks like Manifold is taking over the merch store themselves at https://shop.manifold.markets/, rendering this project superfluous. Tobi and I are still happy to help in any way we can with design and printing.

The main change this month was adding the bulk add/remove groups option, which moderators have been using to get markets categorized better. I also added an omnibox, though its functionality is minimal at the moment. Probably also some other minor changes that I'm forgetting. I've been brainstorming with Will Howard about how to best integrate Manifolio, but nothing concrete yet.

Other than the subsidies post, I haven't written anything Manifold-related this month, sorry. Will do more soon.

The understanding subjective probabilities post has been getting some traction on Twitter though; I've been posting it whenever I see the topic comes up, and it seems well-liked.

This hasn't gone anywhere. I started the PD2 tournament, but it only has only one entry so far. And I asked SirSalty to advertise the Among Us tournament, but IDK if that happened, and we still only have 5 signups, which is not enough to make it a consistent thing.

I'm still hopeful about Among Us; I think it's a great fit for Manifold and could be a lot of fun if we get a consistent crowd. Maybe I'll try reaching out to some non-Manifolders who play Among Us and seeing if any of them would be interested in joining.

Other than that, I'm not really sure where else to go with this. Seems there just isn't that much demand for tournaments. Open to ideas.

@Austin I of course plan to represent them as honestly as possible; I'll reach out to some members to look it over to point out any inaccuracies. It will unavoidably be rather negative though, as the movement is fundamentally one about naive optimism and internet trolling; it's not a serious intellectual movement. (Silicon descendants being morally no worse than biological descendants is not an insight at all related to e/acc, that's been discussed in philosophy ever since the invention of computing, and transhumanists/extropians have been proponents of that idea since the 90s at least, possibly earlier. e/acc only appeared ~a year ago, and has little connection to traditional transhumanism.)

I suppose I could start a wiki, but it seems like too niche a topic to really be worth it?

Having a LW dialogue assumes that any e/acc is interested in such a discussion, which doesn't seem likely. (I've been trying to find one who will for a few weeks, no luck yet.)

@FoldyOfficial The focus on function over form is intentional. Manifold already looks really good, and people who care about that can use the native search. It seems like a waste of effort for me to duplicate aesthetic appeal; I'd rather provide a project that's tailored for a different group of people.

(I'm not opposed to making it look good, it just doesn't seem worth spending lots of time on when that time could instead be spent on useful features.)

The next prisoner's dilemma tournament has begun!

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/who-will-win-the-second-installment

IDK if this should count for this project, since it was a part of another project that Manifold separately said they'd send me some mana for, but post #4: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/subsidies

Project update: I have not yet started working on the website, I've been focusing on other projects. Tobi has come up with some preliminary shirt designs, pictures here. I'm not a huge fan of any of those TBH, so we're still brainstorming.

We're still undecided on a name, weigh in here: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/what-name-will-we-choose-for-the-ma

Project update: I plan to get the Prisoner's Dilemma tournament v2 started after this weekend. I haven't done anything with Among Us, as there weren't enough signups to get a consistent weekly game. After prisoner's dilemma I've been thinking of trying some other economics/game theory bot competitions, like bots that play the 2/3s game against each other. I'm open to other ideas; if there's any game or competition you'd like to play, please let me know!

Current project update: I've added several quality-of-life improvements and fixed various bugs; you can find a full list of features on the documentation page.

The site is a little broken right now; I'm having trouble figuring out how to eliminate the lag while the markets are loading in, and I had to turn the database updating script off as it seemed to be eating up all my server bandwidth and preventing people from reading other pages on my blog. So new markets will not currently be reflected in the search, but searching old markets will still work fine. I'm going to be busy this weekend, but will try to fix this on Monday or Tuesday. Apologies.

I'm pretty hopeful about the project overall; quite a few people in the Manifold ecosystem have made suggestions or said they want tools much like what I have in mind for this project, so I'm confident that the demand is there. It's just a matter of finding the time to do everything.

(If any Manifold employee is reading this and wants to help out, there are some simple changes to your API that would significantly help me out.)

After the current bugs are fixed, my focus for the next month is going to be on the trading dashboard side of things. People clearly want a better interface for rapid betting on multiple related markets, and I think I can give them that within a few weeks. I also plan to integrate my rate of return calculator and either Manifolio or my own Kelly bet calculator, with the end goal of letting people input only their personal credence, and then the site will handle choosing a bet amount for them. (This makes betting on current events much faster, since traders will only need to enter one number each time, and won't need to check their current investment amount.)

General summary of the project so far: I'm pretty happy with the two articles and one tool I've created so far, and people on Manifold have seemed to find them useful. I shared the one on subjective probabilities with some Magic players who have no familiarity with forecasting, and got a lukewarm but positive response. (Most were uninterested, but a few said they found it to be a good explanation.)

Other than that, none of these have been shared very much outside the Manifold community. But I wrote them to be general resources that will remain accurate for a long time, so people can get incremental use out of linking to them to answer questions for years to come.

Manifold predicts a 50% chance that at least one of my non-MTG articles will get somewhat popular before February, though it might not be one that's explicitly about Manifold. https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-any-of-my-nonmtg-articles-be-m

Third post: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/understanding-subjective-probabilities/

Second post is up: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/long-term-bet-calculator

I've created a rate of return calculator that shows your rate of return on a market in monthly-compounding-interest-equivalent. Manifold's average growth in mana is about 4% a month, so any market that offers <4% a month is irrational to bet in no matter how highly subsidized it is or how low you get the transaction costs.

https://outsidetheasylum.blog/long-term-bet-calculator

Admittedly, there are a lot of existing markets that offer >4% and have still not been bet on sufficiently, so I think I stand corrected on the whole. Trading bots and subsidies can potentially be of help on some markets in 1% - 10%, 1 month - 5 year range.

First blog post is out: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/prediction-markets-are-not-polls/

I've created a market on what features will result in this project receiving a Community Fund payout.

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/what-changes-to-my-manifold-dashboa

@evand I'm not really interested in the "moderate success" goal; coming up with plans is easy, it's putting them into practice that's the challenge. Conditional on "extreme success" (using my judgement on what level of improvement is enough to count) I'd be happy to fund the full $750.

The reason I expect this to fail is because your proposal doesn't include anything to address the core issue of discounting rates. Adding subsidies only decreases the relative temporal transaction costs of betting, asymptotically towards 0. But even with no transaction costs whatsoever it's still irrational to bet in a market if a higher rate of return can be found elsewhere, which is almost always true for a market at <3% that resolves in more than a month.

Arbitrage bots and derivative markets are just further epicycles that don't address the core issue either. A real solution will need to fundamentally change the market structure such that the rate of return is competitive. The two best suggestions I've seen thus far are some sort of log payout market structure developed by Robin Hanson, and an increased loan rate. (The latter runs into massive bankruptcy risk.)

I'm a big fan of this goal, and I would be willing to fund it conditional upon success, but I unfortunately expect it to fail.