Allowing users to create any question they want with no moderation gate (unlike Metaculus or any other prediction market site) is a big part of Manifold’s success (even business success!). We further empower users to judge and resolve their markets. While not everyone is perfect or is always acting in good faith, this system largely works.
This openness has been key, but is it the same thing as allowing anyone to go to our conference? Not exactly, but they are related. Another example is that the scheduling software allowed anyone to book any time slot for any room at Manifest, and we basically didn’t have any problems there.
My take is that: 1. the “controversy” is way overblown based on an unfair connecting of dots from journalists at The Guardian who didn’t even attend. The actual Manifest was amazing and people who attended were nearly unanimous on that point, except:
2. There may have been one person at Manifest who was both edgy and impolite, bordering on aggressive. If we could have kicked that person out, then the anonymous EA forum poster wouldn’t have ever felt threatened, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So, I do agree that some moderation can be helpful with business goals, just like we have had to ban some users from our site. But you need less moderation than you would think!
I strongly encourage people to discuss manifest elsewhere—as stated above, I didn’t go and only comment on it to illustrate the lack of thought-diversity in the site design.
If you run events with “controversial” speakers and attendees, and allow “controversial” stuff on your platform, then having critical pieces run against your business is part of the territory whether any specific article is fair or unfair.
Likewise, moderation and vetting are necessarily imprecise and error-prone; attempting to draw the line at X means that ~15% of the time you will actually draw the line at [X + 1 sd] and you’ll slide to [X + 2 sd] from time to time. I don’t know who the “one person” you are describing was, but given a near-miss on letting M.V. attend if he had bought a ticket, I’m hard pressed to see the “one person” as an extraordinarily uncommon [X + 3-4 sd] type error. It’s unlikely that there would be multiple extreme outlier misses associated with the same event. Also, I do not believe the poster characterized the problem as primarily linked to a single person who was preeminent in their problematic behavior. All that is to say that letting people like the “one person” slip through is probably not going to be rare given where you seem to have X set at the moment.
Allowing users to create any question they want with no moderation gate (unlike Metaculus or any other prediction market site) is a big part of Manifold’s success (even business success!). We further empower users to judge and resolve their markets. While not everyone is perfect or is always acting in good faith, this system largely works.
This openness has been key, but is it the same thing as allowing anyone to go to our conference? Not exactly, but they are related. Another example is that the scheduling software allowed anyone to book any time slot for any room at Manifest, and we basically didn’t have any problems there.
My take is that:
1. the “controversy” is way overblown based on an unfair connecting of dots from journalists at The Guardian who didn’t even attend. The actual Manifest was amazing and people who attended were nearly unanimous on that point, except:
2. There may have been one person at Manifest who was both edgy and impolite, bordering on aggressive. If we could have kicked that person out, then the anonymous EA forum poster wouldn’t have ever felt threatened, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So, I do agree that some moderation can be helpful with business goals, just like we have had to ban some users from our site. But you need less moderation than you would think!
I strongly encourage people to discuss manifest elsewhere—as stated above, I didn’t go and only comment on it to illustrate the lack of thought-diversity in the site design.
If you run events with “controversial” speakers and attendees, and allow “controversial” stuff on your platform, then having critical pieces run against your business is part of the territory whether any specific article is fair or unfair.
Likewise, moderation and vetting are necessarily imprecise and error-prone; attempting to draw the line at X means that ~15% of the time you will actually draw the line at [X + 1 sd] and you’ll slide to [X + 2 sd] from time to time. I don’t know who the “one person” you are describing was, but given a near-miss on letting M.V. attend if he had bought a ticket, I’m hard pressed to see the “one person” as an extraordinarily uncommon [X + 3-4 sd] type error. It’s unlikely that there would be multiple extreme outlier misses associated with the same event. Also, I do not believe the poster characterized the problem as primarily linked to a single person who was preeminent in their problematic behavior. All that is to say that letting people like the “one person” slip through is probably not going to be rare given where you seem to have X set at the moment.