What could be more EA than self-criticism?
Prediction markets aren’t that useful
- Any individual market provides very few bits of data: just a probability from 0 to 100%
- Decision-relevancy continues to be a major thorn
- Conditional prediction markets get less trading; hard to assess how accurate they are
- “Market” structure favors short-term over long-term forecasts
- Anecdotally: Austin went through a “prediction markets on everything” phase, but in the long run creating markets seems to require more work than is worthwhile, most of the time
Prediction markets are major attention drains
- Lots of EA celebs and AI safety researchers confess spending a lot of time on the site or call it “addictive”
- Scott Alexander, Peter Wildeford, Katja Grace
- Anecdotally: Austin often finds the dopamine loop of Manifold itself fairly disruptive; objectively it should be blocked just like EA Forum/Twitter
Startup incentives make Manifold chase growth
- Primary metric that Manifold tracks is DAU, not something like “value added” or “market accuracy”
- Revenue is mostly anti-correlated with usefulness; peak purchases coincide with gambling-like behavior
Manifold funges against more epistemically virtuous sites
Metaculus: Will at least 1 million people die from nuclear weapons before the end of 2025?Manifold markets: Will Eliezer Yudkowsky write a tweet containing the word "rationalussy" by the end of 2023?
Metaculus, Sage, and QURI all strive more in the direction of truthseeking
See also
- In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism by Vitalik Buterin