This post feels structurally misleading to me. You spend most of it diving into reasonably common but useful technical critiques before, in the final paragraphs, shifting abruptly to what appears to be the substance of your dispute: that you would prefer to exclude some people from events connected to it. In contrast to your data-driven, numbers-heavy analysis of its predictive power, you assert in brief and without evidence that “neoliberal ideology” and the participation of people you consider bigots has meaningfully reduced its accuracy as a market.
I think both topics in isolation are worth discussing, and perhaps there would be a productive way to combine the technical and cultural critique, but a response to your first fifteen paragraphs looks dramatically different to a response to your last two paragraphs, such that combining the two clouds more than it elucidates.
Yeah I would have upvoted the post aside from that—even though I agree with some of the OPs sentiment in the last 2 paragraphs, I really dislike conflating issues.
The problems I outline are all caused by the fact that Manifold requires that all value be denominated in a fungible and impersonal currency* that relates probabilities to rewards, and assumes that market forces will resolve irregularities in the distribution of this currency. This assumption is what I am criticising and is a reasonable definition of neoliberal. I neither assert nor believe that bigots participating in the market make it worse (as long as they are diverse bigots who aren’t publicly abusive), I am criticising the lack of thought diversity in the design of the market.
*Yes, I know it has two currencies now which are hard to trade between one direction, but they’re not used in systematically different ways within the site. Some of these criticisms could be alleviated if, say, personal markets produced a currency that can’t be spent on political markets.
This post feels structurally misleading to me. You spend most of it diving into reasonably common but useful technical critiques before, in the final paragraphs, shifting abruptly to what appears to be the substance of your dispute: that you would prefer to exclude some people from events connected to it. In contrast to your data-driven, numbers-heavy analysis of its predictive power, you assert in brief and without evidence that “neoliberal ideology” and the participation of people you consider bigots has meaningfully reduced its accuracy as a market.
I think both topics in isolation are worth discussing, and perhaps there would be a productive way to combine the technical and cultural critique, but a response to your first fifteen paragraphs looks dramatically different to a response to your last two paragraphs, such that combining the two clouds more than it elucidates.
Well said; this was my impression as well.
Yeah I would have upvoted the post aside from that—even though I agree with some of the OPs sentiment in the last 2 paragraphs, I really dislike conflating issues.
The problems I outline are all caused by the fact that Manifold requires that all value be denominated in a fungible and impersonal currency* that relates probabilities to rewards, and assumes that market forces will resolve irregularities in the distribution of this currency. This assumption is what I am criticising and is a reasonable definition of neoliberal. I neither assert nor believe that bigots participating in the market make it worse (as long as they are diverse bigots who aren’t publicly abusive), I am criticising the lack of thought diversity in the design of the market.
*Yes, I know it has two currencies now which are hard to trade between one direction, but they’re not used in systematically different ways within the site. Some of these criticisms could be alleviated if, say, personal markets produced a currency that can’t be spent on political markets.