Another concern is that subsidizing Manifold Markets with a lot of money could change the incentive landscape for forecasters in general, e.g. causing people who used to forecast on Metaculus to spend much less time there and more time on Manifold instead.
That could be the case! Although, this would only be harmful if 1) Metaculus provides really good forecasts 2) in a way Manifold could not. I’m curious which parts of Manifold feel less good for forecasting compared to Metaculus, and would love to see how we can improve.
I actually think the products are mostly aimed towards different segments, just due to the nature of complexity of the products; superforecasters will probably enjoy the power of modeling a specific probability distribution in Metaculus, while more everyday users will appreciate the simple buy YES/NO choices in Manifold.
Manifold feels like it has a lot of bad or mediocre questions, which are annoying to sort through. This is in part due to how anyone can submit any question. But even for the questions that try to be good, they often aren’t as good as they would be if they were subject to the community feedback period that Metaculus has (allowing users to suggest wording improvements, better operationalizations, or improvements to the resolution criteria, etc.).
I don’t like that even when I think the market price is wrong, it usually doesn’t make sense to spend more than the M$ 20 loan on buying shares (due to how it can tie your money up for a long time). And it’s hard to make money time-efficiently making only M$ 20 bets, so that usually means it’s not worth spending time evaluating questions that you know it won’t be worth betting more than M$ 20 on anyway. (Or if you don’t care that much since it’s not real money, on most questions you’ll just be making quick, low-information M$ 20 bets.)
I also don’t like that I can’t easily tell with high confidence whether a given question will be reliably resolved accurately in a timely manner (due to resolution being done by the question creator without any other oversight).
The top trader leaderboard rank still doesn’t seem like a very useful indicator of forecasting skill, which is what I think a leaderboard should try to signal. Metaculus’s ranking over-weights participation in my view so it isn’t great either, but it still seems a lot better than Manifold currently. (Manifold probably also over-weights participation.)
Another concern is that subsidizing Manifold Markets with a lot of money could change the incentive landscape for forecasters in general, e.g. causing people who used to forecast on Metaculus to spend much less time there and more time on Manifold instead.
That could be the case! Although, this would only be harmful if 1) Metaculus provides really good forecasts 2) in a way Manifold could not. I’m curious which parts of Manifold feel less good for forecasting compared to Metaculus, and would love to see how we can improve.
I actually think the products are mostly aimed towards different segments, just due to the nature of complexity of the products; superforecasters will probably enjoy the power of modeling a specific probability distribution in Metaculus, while more everyday users will appreciate the simple buy YES/NO choices in Manifold.
Manifold feels like it has a lot of bad or mediocre questions, which are annoying to sort through. This is in part due to how anyone can submit any question. But even for the questions that try to be good, they often aren’t as good as they would be if they were subject to the community feedback period that Metaculus has (allowing users to suggest wording improvements, better operationalizations, or improvements to the resolution criteria, etc.).
I don’t like that even when I think the market price is wrong, it usually doesn’t make sense to spend more than the M$ 20 loan on buying shares (due to how it can tie your money up for a long time). And it’s hard to make money time-efficiently making only M$ 20 bets, so that usually means it’s not worth spending time evaluating questions that you know it won’t be worth betting more than M$ 20 on anyway. (Or if you don’t care that much since it’s not real money, on most questions you’ll just be making quick, low-information M$ 20 bets.)
I also don’t like that I can’t easily tell with high confidence whether a given question will be reliably resolved accurately in a timely manner (due to resolution being done by the question creator without any other oversight).
The top trader leaderboard rank still doesn’t seem like a very useful indicator of forecasting skill, which is what I think a leaderboard should try to signal. Metaculus’s ranking over-weights participation in my view so it isn’t great either, but it still seems a lot better than Manifold currently. (Manifold probably also over-weights participation.)