Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifold.markets. Always happy to meet LessWrong people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin Chen
Karma: 1,343
A $10k retroactive grant for VaccinateCA
Announcing Manifund Regrants
Great post! One note:
Think in terms of language-to-language translators: to translate really well from language A to language B, you need be masterful at A (to understand all the subtleties of the meaning) and also at B (to convey that meaning while preserving those nuances). That’s why good translators (in both senses) are so rare.
Mastery of both A and B is great, obviously, but if you can choose only one, choose B.
I’ve spent a decent chunk of my life scanlating manga from Japanese to English, and my observation is that fluency in the target language (English, in this case) is much more important for a good translation than fluency in the source. I can overcome a misunderstanding in Japanese with copious amounts of research (Google Translate, JP dictionaries, etc); but the thing that my readers consume is a product in English, which is much harder to “fake”.
Two takeaways, continuing on the translation analogy:
If you want to get into cultural translation, start by writing for the audience you know really well, and then do research into the source culture. My bet is that Scott is more “fluent” in the analytical audience, not the social one.
Scanlation teams often have a JP to Eng translator, fluent in JP, and a second English editor who can clean up the script. Cultural translation may also benefit from two people from different cultures collaborating (SSC’s adversial collaboration comes to mind)
What We Owe the Past
I liked how the epub strips out unnecessary UI from the glowfic site, but downloading and moving epubs around is a pain...
So I built a web reader on top of this code! Check it out here: https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main
It’ll work for any Glowfic post actually, eg https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main?post=5111 Would probably be simple to add a download button to get the epub file; source code here.
Prediction markets covered in the NYT podcast “Hard Fork”
Create a prediction market in two minutes on Manifold Markets
NYT on the Manifest forecasting conference
Manifund: What we’re funding (weeks 2-4)
Predicting for charity
On the Manifund regranting program: we’ve received 60 requests for funding in the last month, and have commited $670k to date (or about 1/3rd of our initial budget of $1.9m). My rough guess is we could productively distribute another $1m immediately, or $10m total by the end of the year.
I’m not sure if the other tallies are as useful for us—in contrast to an open call, a regranting program scales up pretty easily; we have a backlog of both new regrantors to onboard and existing regrantors to increase budgets, and regrantors tend to generate opportunities based on the size of their budgets.
(With a few million in unrestricted funding, we’d also branch out beyond regranting and start experimenting with other programs such as impact certificates, retroactive funding, and peer bonuses in EA)
Manafold Markets is out of mana 🤭
I took a couple hours and hacked together a very simple prototype, just to see how MetaPrompt would play out! Try it out here.
Doesn’t support multiple users yet, but it wouldn’t be that much harder to build out. Here’s the rough source code.
(And since your post led to an implementation of MetaPrompt, that would make your post a… MetaMetaPrompt)
Manifund x AI Worldviews
Manifund: 2023 in Review
Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
This is a really powerful concept; I can immediately think of at least two fields this applies to:
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When you’re not sure how to build a software user interface, you might think “let’s run an A/B test on 1000 people and see which performs better”. But you’ll get 90 percent of the value just by showing it to one or two users and watching them use it, live.
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When you’re learning to cook, one of the first things they teach you is to sample your food throughout. The first sip or bite will immediately tell you how to adjust the recipe (eg add more salt, add something spicy, or a dash of vinegar)
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First off, I’d like to apologize; I wasn’t trying to gatekeep LessWrong or anything like that. This is part of what’s hard about giving advice online; my mental model of the audience is shaped by the few I know personally + myself, but it’s by no means comprehensive. Some people need to hear “this is specifically how you can save $20/month” and not “this is the general way to approach personal finance”!
That said—I still want to push back. When it comes to personal finance, it’s easy to focus on cutting costs and personal spending; it feels virtuous, and the benefits are visible. But the huge gains in personal finance come from a getting a handful of things very right, almost all of which are related to making more money rather than cutting your costs.In my head, these things are:
Earning a consistent high return on your cash (stock market’s ~10% rather than saving account’s ~0.5%)
Negotiating your salary
Working on your career capital and connections
One intuition for this is the amount of money you can earn is unbounded; no matter who you are, I’d guess you personally know someone making 2x as much, and know of someone who makes 10-100x as much. But the amount of expenses you can cut is hard capped at 100%, and most people would have a pretty difficult time dropping it by even 30%.
And again, it’s hard for me to speak to your financial situation, not knowing you personally; it’s possible your financial strategy matches well to your risk appetite and lifestyle, in which case, please ignore my musings!
I’ve been following the SMTM hypothesis with great interest; don’t have much to add on a technical level, but I’m happy to pay a $200 bounty in M$ to Natália in recognition of her excellent writeup here. Also—happy to match (in M$) any of the bounties that she outlined!
I desperately want to make this ecosystem exist, either as part of Manifold Markets, or separately. Some people call it “impact certificates” or “retroactive public goods funding”; I call it “equity for public goods”, or “Manifund” in the specific case.
If anyone is interested in:
a) Being a retroactive funder for good work (aka bounties, prizes)
b) Getting funding through this kind of mechanism (aka income share agreements, angel investment)
c) Working on this project full time (full-stack web dev, ops, community management)
Please get in touch! Reply here, or message austin@manifold.markets~