I also think of Manifest as something like, a scaled up house party, rather than an arbiter of who is good or notable in forecasting/EA
Forecasting is young, and in putting on Manifest you have quite a lot of influence on how the field grows and matures.
To the extent that you have (and I think that you should have) goals around the kind of field you want to build, who you invite to your conference seems much more consequential to me than who you invite to a house party.
(I am not saying anything either way on the choices you’ve made with invites etc, only on how I’d encourage you to think about them)
Yeah—in practice, I know that conference invites are consequential (and we discussed this as a team, eg very abbreviated Apr 22 meeting notes). I use the words “scaled up house party” to try to implant a bit of how bizarre it feels to me that, like, something that was just an idea in my head 1.5 years ago, now has attracted many of my favorite writers in the world, received multiple major media mentions, and is viewed as consequential. I also think that there’s something special about our invite process which leads to the feeling of “how it feels to attend Manifest”, and I and many attendees are overall quite happy with the outcome—TracingWoodgrains talks more about this here. While I want to continue to improve on how we shape who comes to Manifest, I also don’t want to kill the golden goose.
While Manifest is a forecasting festival, I’m not sure I’m really trying to build up the field of forecasting in general, rather than something more specific and tautological like “the Manifest community”. Even more than EA, forecasting is a formless vague entity, without a clear leader or in/out distinction.
Forecasting is young, and in putting on Manifest you have quite a lot of influence on how the field grows and matures.
To the extent that you have (and I think that you should have) goals around the kind of field you want to build, who you invite to your conference seems much more consequential to me than who you invite to a house party.
(I am not saying anything either way on the choices you’ve made with invites etc, only on how I’d encourage you to think about them)
Yeah—in practice, I know that conference invites are consequential (and we discussed this as a team, eg very abbreviated Apr 22 meeting notes). I use the words “scaled up house party” to try to implant a bit of how bizarre it feels to me that, like, something that was just an idea in my head 1.5 years ago, now has attracted many of my favorite writers in the world, received multiple major media mentions, and is viewed as consequential. I also think that there’s something special about our invite process which leads to the feeling of “how it feels to attend Manifest”, and I and many attendees are overall quite happy with the outcome—TracingWoodgrains talks more about this here. While I want to continue to improve on how we shape who comes to Manifest, I also don’t want to kill the golden goose.
While Manifest is a forecasting festival, I’m not sure I’m really trying to build up the field of forecasting in general, rather than something more specific and tautological like “the Manifest community”. Even more than EA, forecasting is a formless vague entity, without a clear leader or in/out distinction.