Agreed that the marginal dollar moved between different weird altruistic donors is less impactful than winning a bet on Polymarket; but there are a host of usability issues in Polymarket (crypto onboarding, market availability, UX design) that we think we solve much better in Manifold. Over time, the long-term vision of this would be to draw in more charitable dollars from outside the EA community as well.
The externalities of demanding constant vigilance are a good point, and something we do take seriously; I’d like to work out an interface/design a mechanism that allows a trader to input a true probability and be rewarded, without needing to check in on their position constantly. Maybe this just is being a prediction pool!
I think prediction pools are quite promising, though I’m not sure if a good (easy-to-use, incentive-aligned) mechanism has been worked out; do you have any pointers to setups/implementations/designs of prediction pools that you think are good? I’m especially curious if these are framed in a way that allow a normal person (aka not superforecaster) to understand the system and meaningfully contribute.
re: 1 — agree, MM is nicer than Poly. And I view UX as a very important issue for adoption (think of Robinhood).
re: 2 — would be great if you’d work that out!
re: 3 — I think just using the proper scoring rules (like log or Brier) is good enough; what are the problems with these? Smart aggregation (based on track-record and some other info) would allow leveraging non-superforecasters (likely through putting weight on prospective superforecasters). I think another way to participate in prediction pools and markets is to bring new information and considerations, this can be rewarded through Reddit’s karma, r/changemyview deltas, or with StackOverflow upvotes (one interesting challenge is to figure that out).
Donor lotteries are a good case study; they seem great (I sent my donations last year to the EA Funds lottery) but also very underutilized, which should be a warning sign for other kinds of weird altruistic schemes. I’m wondering how much of this is lack of promotion, and how much that the arguments in favor are too hard to grok. I’m also hopeful that the “skill” aspect of a prediction market makes it more attractive than a straight lottery.
3 -- There’s two kinds of incentive alignment, I think?
First, there’s “do I win the most points for putting down accurate prediction”, and I think both proper scoring rules & prediction markets do a reasonable job of this? Possibly proper scoring rules do even better than markets here.
Second, there’s “why do I care about points”, which afaict is much harder to get right outside of prediction market settings. (This might be not standard usage of “incentive-alignment”, for which I apologize). Metaculus, for example, is a positive-sum system, and it’s not obvious how to pay people for good predictions through that. Metaculus does run cash tournaments on specific topics; my vague understanding is that the tournament structure encourages high-variance bets, in order to have a better shot at top prizes?
As a novice to the forecasting space, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of options; I’m very curious about which forecasting incentive structures work well in your experience!
Austin replied to the earlier version of the comment (my bad), which is similar in substance on the relevant market: https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-the-ftx-future-fund-decide-to
(I am out of funds to reply to them there :P, this should be seen as foot voting for their platform as a whole.)
re: 1 — agree, MM is nicer than Poly. And I view UX as a very important issue for adoption (think of Robinhood).
re: 2 — would be great if you’d work that out!
re: 3 — I think just using the proper scoring rules (like log or Brier) is good enough; what are the problems with these? Smart aggregation (based on track-record and some other info) would allow leveraging non-superforecasters (likely through putting weight on prospective superforecasters). I think another way to participate in prediction pools and markets is to bring new information and considerations, this can be rewarded through Reddit’s karma, r/changemyview deltas, or with StackOverflow upvotes (one interesting challenge is to figure that out).
Thanks for the kind words!
Donor lotteries are a good case study; they seem great (I sent my donations last year to the EA Funds lottery) but also very underutilized, which should be a warning sign for other kinds of weird altruistic schemes. I’m wondering how much of this is lack of promotion, and how much that the arguments in favor are too hard to grok. I’m also hopeful that the “skill” aspect of a prediction market makes it more attractive than a straight lottery.
3 -- There’s two kinds of incentive alignment, I think?
First, there’s “do I win the most points for putting down accurate prediction”, and I think both proper scoring rules & prediction markets do a reasonable job of this? Possibly proper scoring rules do even better than markets here.
Second, there’s “why do I care about points”, which afaict is much harder to get right outside of prediction market settings. (This might be not standard usage of “incentive-alignment”, for which I apologize). Metaculus, for example, is a positive-sum system, and it’s not obvious how to pay people for good predictions through that. Metaculus does run cash tournaments on specific topics; my vague understanding is that the tournament structure encourages high-variance bets, in order to have a better shot at top prizes?
As a novice to the forecasting space, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of options; I’m very curious about which forecasting incentive structures work well in your experience!