By my accounts, you have implicitly agreed that all of 1-6 used to be issues, but 2-4 are currently not issues and 5 now needs the phrase “negative equity” deleted. I’m still making mana by reading the news, so don’t see that you’ve halved that claim. You’re right that whalebait is less profitable, and I now need to actually search for free mana to find the free mana markets. The fact that I can still do this and then throw all my savings into it means that we should expect exponential growth of mana at some risk-free rate (depending on the saturation of these markets), which is then the comparison point for determining investment skill. In practice there are most likely better things to do with it, and also I can’t be bothered.
I recognise the benefit of inflation as a good thing in countering historic wealth inequality, and will remark that it’s effectively a wealth tax. It unfortunately coincided with the other changes which make it harder and less rewarding to donate and worsening the time-value problem, triggering my general disengagement with the site. I agree that loans never fixed this problem, but they mitigated it partially.
The difference between this and Metaculus sock puppets is that there’s no reward for making them there. The virtual currencies can’t be translated into real-world gain, and only one “reward” depends on other people, so making bad predictions with your sock puppets doesn’t make you look that much better if people look at multiple metrics. Similarly, by requiring currency to express a belief, Manifold structurally limits engagement on questions with no positive resolution possibility—it’s cost-free to predict extinction on Metaculus, but on Manifold, even with perfect foresight (or the guarantee that the market will be NAd later) you still sacrifice the time value of your mana to warn people of a risk. This problem is unique to prediction markets. They make it costly (but potentially remunerated) to express your beliefs.
The other problem unique to adversarial prediction grading is that collaboration is disincentivised. Currently, because mana isn’t that valuable, the comments section is full of people exchanging information for social kudos. But when the market becomes financially lucrative people stop doing this—the comments on polymarket are basically pure spam. This is one of the reasons why I find the idea that Manifold should become more financialised very unwise. It’s not clear that the collaborative factor is smaller than the professionalisation factor for net predictive power (as indicated by the fact that polymarket doesn’t have that good a calibration). To make money on these things, you don’t need to beat a superforecasting team (the thing that actually beats all of these statistical aggregation methods, least we forget), you need to beat the individual whose salary the prize can support.
I don’t believe the original donation has been redistributed and donations are now curtailed by the pivot, so I imagine it will last a while longer. I know the founders believe donations will eventually come from mana purchases (or more venture capital), I’m just skeptical.
By my accounts, you have implicitly agreed that all of 1-6 used to be issues, but 2-4 are currently not issues and 5 now needs the phrase “negative equity” deleted. I’m still making mana by reading the news, so don’t see that you’ve halved that claim. You’re right that whalebait is less profitable, and I now need to actually search for free mana to find the free mana markets. The fact that I can still do this and then throw all my savings into it means that we should expect exponential growth of mana at some risk-free rate (depending on the saturation of these markets), which is then the comparison point for determining investment skill. In practice there are most likely better things to do with it, and also I can’t be bothered.
I recognise the benefit of inflation as a good thing in countering historic wealth inequality, and will remark that it’s effectively a wealth tax. It unfortunately coincided with the other changes which make it harder and less rewarding to donate and worsening the time-value problem, triggering my general disengagement with the site. I agree that loans never fixed this problem, but they mitigated it partially.
The difference between this and Metaculus sock puppets is that there’s no reward for making them there. The virtual currencies can’t be translated into real-world gain, and only one “reward” depends on other people, so making bad predictions with your sock puppets doesn’t make you look that much better if people look at multiple metrics. Similarly, by requiring currency to express a belief, Manifold structurally limits engagement on questions with no positive resolution possibility—it’s cost-free to predict extinction on Metaculus, but on Manifold, even with perfect foresight (or the guarantee that the market will be NAd later) you still sacrifice the time value of your mana to warn people of a risk. This problem is unique to prediction markets. They make it costly (but potentially remunerated) to express your beliefs.
The other problem unique to adversarial prediction grading is that collaboration is disincentivised. Currently, because mana isn’t that valuable, the comments section is full of people exchanging information for social kudos. But when the market becomes financially lucrative people stop doing this—the comments on polymarket are basically pure spam. This is one of the reasons why I find the idea that Manifold should become more financialised very unwise. It’s not clear that the collaborative factor is smaller than the professionalisation factor for net predictive power (as indicated by the fact that polymarket doesn’t have that good a calibration). To make money on these things, you don’t need to beat a superforecasting team (the thing that actually beats all of these statistical aggregation methods, least we forget), you need to beat the individual whose salary the prize can support.
I don’t believe the original donation has been redistributed and donations are now curtailed by the pivot, so I imagine it will last a while longer. I know the founders believe donations will eventually come from mana purchases (or more venture capital), I’m just skeptical.