manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 615
after thinking and researching for not-long, I think there may be nonzero prior art in gift economics, blockchain reputation systems (belief in people); public goods funding (like quadratic funding); and viewpoints.xyz or vTaiwan (polling platform that k-means “coalitions” and rewards people who “build bridges”). It in general feels like the kind of math problem that the RadicalXChange people would be interested in.
I am not impressed with the current versions of these technologies that are actually “in production.”
I think the field is still very experimental. I think its so pre-paradigm that art / philosophy / anthropology / “traditional-ways-of-knowing” are probably ahead of us on this
woah I didn’t even know lw team was working on a “pre 2024 review” feature using prediction markets probabilities integrated into the UI. super cool!
what would the math for aggregating different “believing in”s across people in an incentive aligned, accurate way look like?
This reminds me of the observation that most things on the internet are written by insane people—empirically for most forms of media, including user-produced media, a few exceptional users contribute a supermajority of the output. And to be this exceptional you are likely to differ from the population in a lot of other ways as well.
yes, I’d recommend play money isolated to the game itself
Each player has certain information on the distribution because they know their own role. The game would become a mixed game that depends on how much you care about the market payout vs winning, like mafia members would have an incentive to throw if they cared more about the money. I think this would be tricky to balance. The spectator version can mostly use existing rules (such as mafia members knowing for certain who the other members are). This also means that of you do figure out the balance, the game would be more novel and interesting
Concrete steps towards removing language barriers:
- promote idea that letting languages die is good actually
- improve translation speed, offline-capability, and UI
- create great products that take advantage of auto-translating non-english internets, social media, or traditional media
- accelerate capabilities of LLMs
Concrete steps towards free banking
- Fintech startup that issues VISA cards backed by your liquid investment portfolio, that autosells to pay for things
- Write code for crypto projects
More pie in the sky
- Design new social media that is fun and meaningful rather than divisive or draining
- Create the one true religion
- Stop tipping
Decision theory didn’t take off because it’s “law thinking” but better decisionmaking in practice needs “rule thinking”. And the mathematical formalisms early on actually weren’t very complete or meaningful?
There were and are market-economics-knowing people who tried very hard to get the world to a better place. They’re called developmental economists. Turns out that stuff is actually pretty hard, but people are making progress.
People should be more curious about what the heck is going on with trans people on a physical, biological, level. I think this is could be a good citizen science research project for y’all since gender dysphoria afflicts a lot of us in this community, and knowledge leads to better detection and treatment. Many trans-women especially do a ton of research/experimentation themselves. Or so I hear. I actually haven’t received any mad-science google docs of research from any trans person yet. What’s up with that? Who’s working on this?
Where I’d start maybe:
- https://transfemscience.org/
- Dr Powers’s powerpoint deck
- r/diyhrt
My open questions
- trans is comorbid with adhd, autism, and connective tissue disorders.
- what’s the playbook for connective tissue disorders? Should more people try supplementing collagen? it’s cheap!
- trans is slightly genetic. which genes?
- do any non-human animals have similar conditions?
- is the late-transitioning + female-attraction / early-transitioning + male-attraction typology for trans-women real? like are these traits actually bimodal or is it more linear and correlated?
- best ways to maintain sexual desire and performance on feminizing hrt.
but probably best research directions are ones I haven’t thought of. there’s so much we don’t know (or or maybe just so much I don’t know) just gotta keep pulling threads until we get answers!
Zach’s post is not vibe-neutral because nothing is vibe-neutral. There’s a subtextual claim that: 1. when people criticize your arguments you should take it as a gift 2. when you criticise other people’s opinions you should present it as a gift. 3. when “debating” be chill, as if you are at the grocery store check-out
I think this is a good strategy, and that (2) actually can succeed at at quelling bad emotional reaction. If you present an argument as an attack, or prematurely apologize for attacking, it will be felt like an attack. If you just present it with kindness, people will realize you mean no harm. If you present it with a detached professional “objectivity” and like actually feel [i just care about the truth] then … well some people would still react badly but it should usually be fine. could be done with a bit more finesse maybe.
There’s also 4. this is the right frame that people who read LW ought to take to debates with other people who read LW. Which I also agree with.[I’m probably reading into Zach’s writing stuff that he didn’t intend to imply. But death of the author; I’m following the advice of the post]
[Question] Prediction markets are consistently underconfident. Why?
I don’t think, like, re-editing AI to Zombies once again is valuable.
I do think, like, “come up with your own n virtues of rationality” is a good exercise. I think destruction & resynthesis could be more fruitful
[Question] Anki setup best practices?
I added the reviews feature on July 12.
We’ve been thinking about letting market creators delegate a judge that is not themselves. People sometimes do this informally.
Also Manifold team members (and mods we delegate) have the power to overturn resolutions—though iirc we only do this in extreme cases.
Yes, and firms already experiment with different economic mechanisms to produce this self-generated information—this is just compensation and employee benefits, including stock options, commissions, bonuses. In this frame, it’s seems like a bad idea to let employees bet against, like projects shipping on time. A negative stake is the least aligned form of compensation possible. There are hacks on top of a pure prediction market you could do to prevent people from having a negative stake. But I think once you realize that the recursive aspect of the market you may as well just … design good compensation.
I’m also more enthusiastic about prediction markets on things mostly outside of employees’ control that are still relevant to business decisions—market trends, actions of competitors and regulators, consumer preferences maybe. Though there’s less reason for these to be internal.
Prediction markets with even very small amounts of traders are remarkably well-calibrated. Try playing around with the data in https://calibration.city/. Albeit these are traders out of a wider population.
I am skeptical of prediction markets as tools within organizations, even very large organizations (like Google’s Gleangen or Microsoft). It hasn’t been very useful, and I don’t think this is a just a UX or culture issue, I think the information just isn’t valuable enough. Better off running polls, doing user studies, or just letting project owners execute their big-brained vision. I more bullish of prediction markets that are part of a product/service, or part of an advertising campaign.
I think it incorrect to paint with such a broad brush that external capital ruins design.
Apple is publicly traded. If I think of software with design that I personally love a lot—Notion, Raycast, Figma, Partiful, Discord, Supabase—are all venture-backed or were early on. Some exceptions are Sublime Merge, the personal site dimden.dev, and I guess a lot of open-source packages although that is more engineering than design.
The startup wisdom I’ve heard is that VCs should mostly leave founders alone to do whatever crazy thing they think is right. I agree with this take.
I can think of many examples of software getting worse due to growth pressure (insomnia.rest)
or acquisition by a big company (OkCupid).
You mention investors pushing founders to take risks being bad. I disagree—risk is good. It’s interesting to ask whether the median venture-backed software is better or worse than than the median bootstrapped software. But in terms of utilitarian value I think the user-weighted average is what matters. And personally what matters to me is how good the very best software is, because that’s what I’ll use if I can.
I’m sorry, but Atlassian’s Jira is bad design. Steam is bad design—it’s slow, ad-filled and hard to find your friends; compare its design to Itch.io (also bootstrapped). Jetbrains is fine, I guess.
I agree with your thesis when it comes to game design. I grant that Minecraft is very well designed (actually not entirely, it just gets the important things really right). I feel like AAA games are punching way below their weight compared to indie games in terms of how fun they should be.
… actually do indie devs/studios seek venture capital? I am much less informed about how game development is financed.
I’m not convinced that the new reddit example is worse than the old one. They serve different purposes, the new one lets you actually read the posts without having to click in. It’s also more pretty and clean—I expect the median and modal user to like the new UI better even if it less useful to reddit powerusers.
Capitalistic forces causes companies to converge on design that most people find intuitive, and this is good
People bet a lot on sports despite sports odds having very confusing notation. many non-professionals trade options or crypto with numerical interfaces. a lot of popular videogames have resources denominated in numbers.
The way info from the non-numerate gets incorporated into financial markets today is that more sophisticated people & firms scrape social media or look at statistics (like generated by consumer activity). markets do not need to be fully accessible for markets to be accurate.
I’m very skeptical of the need to represent functions.
That said I’m always game to try out building new, simpler trading interfaces. At manifold we tried a mobile interface where you swiped left to bet no and right to bet yes. It was kinda fun and saw limited use but we ended up killing it because it was a lot to maintain
I see smart ppl often try to abstract, generalize, mathify, in arguments that are actually emotion/vibes issues. I do this too.
The neurotypical finds this MEAN. but the real problem is that the math is wrong