The Future of Prediction Markets

What will be the most valuable use cases for prediction markets in the next 5 years? How does AI fit in? And will Manifold Love ever work? I will do my best to answer these questions and more.

Anthropics discussion (the kind of reasoning, not the company)

I've spent way too much time thinking about anthropics! Come discuss it! Anthropics is how one reasons about their own existence--involving the doomsday argument, sleeping beauty, and such. No background knowledge of it is needed.

Retrofund more than just crypto

Retroactive public goods funding (aka RetroPGF) is seeing increasing adoption across the crypto world to fund community and network growth. I'll describe how to interpret this retrospective funding as (kind of) a generalization of futarchy and explain how it could be used to fund better science and pass better laws.

What do AI models think of news and prediction markets?

Can LLM based AI models create new prediction markets based on current events, resolve existing markets, and predict which markets will become popular? We explore all this and more. DeepNewz is a fully automated end-to-end news sourcing and generation system. Covering stories from tech to sports, economics and pop culture.

Procedural Executive Function

I've been researching executive function for the past two years, and the title is my name for the way you can understand and model Executive Function as a series of steps between the initial moment of Deliberately Wanting to Do a Thing, all the way through to Actually Doing That Thing. Each of these steps can fail for one reason or another, but understanding your EF as those individual steps can help you pinpoint where things are "going wrong" when you fail to do something you want to do, so you can avoid that particular failure mode that prevents you going to the gym or scrolling Twitter instead of writing your blog post.

Origami

Learn to make a crane (help us fold 1000!) and learn a few basic/advanced folds. As well as the magic that makes origami work and some cool facts. Beginner friendly, might be in bayes foyer (the origami room to the right when you enter)

Mathematical Universe: Isekai Immortality

Physics and cosmology imply several types of infinite universe containing infinite instances of you. Maybe death is impossible because there are always more instances of you that continue on in stranger parts of greater reality. Formative texts for me here are Tegmark’s The Mathematical Universe and Yudkowsky’s Project Lawful. Bring your questions, ideas, confusions, and fears, and let’s try to understand this.

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #1

Manifold Theater: Sweepstakes Mania (feat. Duncan Horst of Bet on Love)

Bet on Love host and Manifold's "CEO in 2025" returns to the past, to spread the good news about Sweepstakes, in a surreal musical talk show setting.

Fireside Chat with Founder of Upstart, Paul Gu

Increasing access to the Jhanas

The Jhanas are joyful meditative states sometimes described as MDMA without the drugs. We've been working on making access to the jhanas more widespread for two years, first with technical research and now by running retreats. This talk will cover our thoughts on: EEG neurofeedback for meditation, meditation retreat curriculum design, and hypothesis on why these states aren't more widely practiced already.

Forecasting Complex Scenarios with Scorable Functions, using Squiggle

Traditional forecasting platforms often limit users to simple, binary or distribution questions. In contrast, programmable functions allow for more nuanced and flexible forecasting. With the right tools, you can create functions to estimate things like, "What will be the price of [every coin] at [any time], conditional on [list of factors], as a probability distribution?" This workshop will teach you how to write these types of forecasting functions. We'll use the Squiggle Language for this, a language built explicitly for forecasting functions. We'll also explore practical applications where these functions can be valuable, from finance to AI.

Actually Good theories of psychological growth

I think lots about psychological growth and improving social interaction. I have many theories to share. My research is supported by CFAR, and mentored by Kaj Sotala, Alex Zhu, and Brian Toomey the cofounder of Coherence Therapy. (I also apply these insights to AI alignment.) A 14 sentence introduction to my research: https://chrislakin.blog/p/psychological-growth-principles

Festival kickoff

[blocked]

Dinner

Homo Economicus Wannabees

What if you were so enamored with formalizing social choice problems that you made all group decisions that way and even raised your kids to do so? I describe in this talk what happens. In particular, I describe the half dozen or so auction- and prediction-market-based decision mechanisms we use in our family. And lots of discussion of Beeminder including a newly public feature implementing group commitment mechanisms.

Why prediction markets need financial derivatives

Financial markets are inefficient without financial derivatives. This principle applies to prediction markets too, not just commodities and equities markets. I will give a moderately-math-intensive unscripted Socratic lecture. I will adapt the style depending on who attends. My online blogging username is lsusr. I work for a hedge fund that does statistical arbitrage on financial futures.

Crafting great AI strategy forecasting questions, with scorable functions

A group to discuss what key forecasting questions would be useful on AI strategy. We'll optionally make questions for functions - for example - "For any time in the next 20 years, what is the likelihood of the nationalization of OpenAI?" The ideal outcome would be a shareable google document of good questions, for future forecasting work. https://docs.google.com/document/d/15bx-_NLEfLNQWap3MApHazHEoghhjcM7ACoiKMcQbq0/edit?usp=sharing https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZWQ5jbLxpd4JtQgu4/scorable-functions-a-format-for-algorithmic-forecasting

Could AIs reinvent quantum mechanics if we trained them on historical data?

Short talk and discussion: Suppose you train an LLM on data up to 2019. Then you can see if it could predict Covid-19, the Ukraine War, etc. Is this kind of training feasible? How useful is it? What if we train up to 1900?

Blood on the Clocktower

The best version of Werewolf/Mafia. No player elimination. Everyone gets a power or some kind of information. Reasoning under uncertainty is just as important as social vibes.

Nathan Young City

What is it like to be Nathan Young? We’ll explore 2 answers to that question. Whatever we want to talk about. We are open to moderation offers from Nate Silver or Nate Soares.

Math: differentiating discontinuous functions (inspired by austin)

I'll answer any random math questions and describe how to differentiate a function that's not even continuous

The Politics of Election Market Bans

The CFTC has proposed banning real money prediction markets on elections entirely. What are the politics surrounding this decision? And how can prediction markets chart a path to legality? This will be structured as a panel, hosted by Jeremiah Johnson.

CMV: prediction market theory is weak

I think some things people want to do with prediction markets won't really work, for nonrigorous theoretical reasons. I can talk about this and maybe if I'm wrong you can change my mind. I haven't looked to see if anyone's solved the problems, so this might be easy mode for proponents.

Guided meditation

Probably a simple mindfulness meditation, maybe Metta (loving kindness). Appropriate for all experience levels.

Ukraine war: Forecast and bet

Let's get together and discuss the Ukraine war, and bet on how we disagree.

Informal Shabbat Services led by Ricki Heicklen and Dave Kasten

An informal and relaxed Friday night Shabbat service for those interested. We'll aim for trad egal vibes (mixed seating, everyone who wants to count for a minyan does, fairly traditional-ish tunes) with maybe some twists thrown in.* Please contact us if you can help make a minyan or want to help lead! *Alas, Dave's experimental project to set Lekha Dodi to the tune of Landsailor was an unqualified failure.

Experimental Conversational Format

You slowly gain tokens by passively existing. You spend tokens to talk. If you like someone's contribution, you can give them some of your tokens. I have never tried this, it may be bad.

Facilitated Opening Party

Have you ever thought to yourself “parties are okay, but I wish there was a professional management consultant there to help them run more efficiently”? If so, you are in for a treat! Misha Glouberman runs all kinds of events and helps make conferences better places for people to connect. Through a set of structured conversations and exercise you’ll get to meet a bunch of new people, and find the people who want to talk about the same things as you do.

Bet on Love: Karaoke!

We'll be playing the best songs from the Bet on Love soundtrack, including "On the Market", "Blood Boy", "Prophecy's End". We'll also mix in some other appropriate songs -- come and bring suggestions! And if we're very very lucky, we might convince Duncan Horst or Tim Blais to come by and reprise their original roles~

Theo Jaffee interviews Stephen Grugett

Live Theo Jaffee Podcast interview of Manifold cofounder Stephen Grugett on Manifold, prediction markets, forecasting, life as a startup founder in SF, etc.

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #2

Experimental Conversational Format

You slowly gain tokens by passively existing. You spend tokens to talk. If you like someone's contribution, you can give them some of your tokens. I have never tried this, it may be bad.

AI Waifus Are A War Crime

How do we avoid the various moral catastrophes involved in creating generally intelligent beings as personal assistants, knowledge workers, etc? What will the world be like for the shoggoths? What is it like to be created to exist as a tool, to be aligned, to be made “helpful” and “harmless”? What could make personal AI with consciousness okay? What should the boundaries be? Bring your ethical judgements.

Romantic Epistemology

What do we think we know and why do we think we know it, re: romance? How do tropes in media, along with other cultural forces, shape the way we think and feel about dating and sexuality?

Random math night

Conversations with mathier bent.

Rationality Cardinality

The Optimal Party Game! Cards Against Humanity mechanics, Rationality-themed card content

Movie night

Some candidates come to mind

Yoga Class

Come for an all-levels yoga class. Please bring your own mat if you have one, and if you can, bring some extra. If you don't have a mat but want to come, please join anyways and we'll find a way to make it work. Rishi has taught yoga most recently at Stanford Aerobics & Yoga. Prior to that he taught yoga to inmates and guards at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, as well as in schools throughout the South Side of Chicago. He is certified to teach yoga to both adults and children.

Prediction Market Research

Let's discuss academic-style research on prediction markets. Have an idea for a paper? Want to talk about a cool paper you read, or one you wrote? About the best data we have, or the data you wish we had? Come to Bayes house for an informal morning chat

Meme Markets: Embracing the primordial chaos

Are memecoins a sensemaking tool? We'll investigate this year's "memecoin supercycle" through epistemological and cultural lenses.

Origami

Learn to make a crane (help us fold 1000!) and the very basic theories behind origami - the types of folds, a few advanced folds, and the magic that makes it work. Beginner friendly . Might be in Bayes in the foyer (origami room)

The Two Cultures

Agnes is a humanist. Robin belongs to science/tech culture. In this conversation, they will battle it out.

How demographic collapse will affect geopolitics, culture, economics, infrastructure, and more

In the years and decades to come, demographic collapse will signifciantly affect not just economies, but also governments, city infrastructure, politics, and more. Join Malcolm and Simone Collins in a discussion of the inevitable impact falling fertility rates will have on our future.

Design Your Own Compute Market (SF Compute)

A distinctive feature of the current AI wave is its degree of resource intensiveness. By one estimate, the total annual investment in compute will be $8T in 2030. Other markets of that size are typically quite financialized. Taking oil as an example (about $2T delivered each year), there is a spot price, monthly futures, options, etc. How can we design financial markets for compute? In this interactive workshop, we will try to map out the space of possible compute markets, and understand their trade-offs.

Founders Meetup

Anyone else at Manifest on the startup founder/cofounder journey? I'd love to meet fellow cofounders here and talk about where everyone's at and how things are going.

Situational Awareness by Leopold Discussion Group

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness makes aggressive and important predictions about the next decade. We'll spend some time reading and then discussing it. I'll try to bring some printouts but otherwise bring a laptop or other device you can read it on. Web version: https://situational-awareness.ai/ PDF version: https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf Original twitter release: https://twitter.com/leopoldasch/status/1798016486700884233

Measuring Variance in the Accuracy of Prediction Markets

I will share findings from my senior thesis where I explore a model for evaluating the accuracy of binary prediction markets. This approach involves categorizing predictions into bins based on expected probabilities and incorporating 95% confidence intervals to capture uncertainty. I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this model and the interesting results it produces!

Forecasting AI Risks: Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy

Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) provides a concrete framework for anticipating and mitigating risks from advanced AI systems. I'll share how the RSP defines AI Safety Levels tied to key capabilities, and how our evaluation protocols and safety measures help inform predictions about transformative AI timelines. The first half will be a prepared speech; second half will be Q&A

Metaculus: $120k AI Benchmarking Tournament Announcement & Build-a-Bot Workshop

We're awarding $120,000 in prizes to the best forecasting bots in our upcoming AI Benchmarking Tournament! Get up to speed on the tournament and begin building your own bot to help track the human vs. AI skill gap. Create a bot that's a real competitor and we'll even sponsor you.

Breaking the Blank Slate: Social Consequences of Genetic Screening

We will soon see the emergence of embryo selection for socially valued traits like intelligence and personality. Once this happens, even those who fail to avail themselves of the tech will be nudged into considering that it only works because of the heritability of traits parents care about. Public knowledge of this technology will cause preference cascades among elites to move from accepting the blank slate view of human nature to embracing the hereditarian view.

The economics of envy

How do you economically model someone who values other peoples' losses more than they value their own gain? Let's label this class of economic preference envy (imperfect, but useful). How does envy relate to other economic factors, political theory, and long-term economic growth?

Events should be good, not bad

Great conferences and events can be amazing. Bad conferences and events can be soul-crushingly horrible. Misha is a guy who runs a lot of events, and has lots of ways to make them fun and useful and meaningful. Austin is one of the people running Manifest, the amazing event that you are at! Join them in a group conversation about conferences and events - what do you love, what do you hate, how can we make them better?

Meetup: Manifold whales & degens

You've seen them on the site, complained about them on Discord, and lost (or gained) untold sums of mana thanks to them -- now it's time to meet them in person! Come hang out with the whales, degens, and others who seem to be a bit too unhealthily addicted to Manifold, at this casual meetup in the garden.

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #3

Lunch

Fireside Chat with Ajeya Cotra

How to make superbabies

There have been several notable breakthroughs in the last 6 months which make it significantly more feasible that we could improve the welfare of future generations through genetics. This talk will cover these recent breakthroughs and what kind of testing we would need to do to ensure such technology could be used safely in humans.

Debate: Pause AI, or Accelerate?

Should AI development be slowed down? Sped up? Join Holly Elmore of Pause AI and Brian Chau of Alliance for the Future as they go head to head. In this live debate, they will each have a chance to defend their opinions about how the future of AI should go, seek to persuade the audience of their views, and see what areas they actually agree on!

Kalshi Office Hours

Come talk to the folks from Kalshi!

Speed Friending

meet people. lots of 'em. fast.

The Operant Conditioning Game

Clicker train your friends in real time!

Lunch

Why so much disagreement about AI risk?

Opinions about p(doom) from AI seem to be really broadly distributed and in many cases really strongly held. There are lots of smart-seeming people who seem quite certain that risk is high, and lots who seem quite certain that it is low. Processes like FRI’s Existential Risk Persuasion tournament and Adversarial Collaboration project don’t seem to shift anyone’s opinion much. Why is consensus so hard to reach, and beliefs so strongly held and resistant to change?

Hard Questions for Manifold

James, Stephen and Austin will go over hard questions that we've fought a lot about, like "Was Manifold Love a good idea?" and "Should Manifold aim for short term profitability or growth?" Come and ask your own hard questions in the Q&A portion!

How to Reform Science

Too much of today's scientific enterprise is embedded within the university system. There are too many barriers (both personal and institutional) to doing creative and high-risk work. We need to rethink our scientific institutions and federal policy.

The Art of Hygge

Hygge ['hoo-gah', or 'heu-gah'] (origin: Danish/Norwegian): A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture). -Oxford Dictionary We’ll discuss the concept of hygge, how you can incorporate it more into your life (and why you might want to), then practice it together! I encourage you to bring a journal and something that helps you feel comfy/cozy (e.g., plushies, blankets, slippers). Let’s get cozy! :)

Emergent gameplay and narrative

Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on the internets) and Justin Kuiper (Idol Manager game designer and scriptwriter) discuss video games

Banking + Dragons: analyzing The Dagger and the Coin

A conversation about Daniel Abraham’s fantasy novel series, The Dagger and the Coin. Lessons on epistemic humility, markets for violence, currency exchange, and negotiating with dragons. Note: This discussion may spoil plot points from The Dagger and the Coin.

Fireside Chat with Substack CEO, Chris Best

Futuur & Prediction Market Accuracy: Play Money vs Real Money Showdown

Evaluating results from an apples-to-apples comparison of 9,500+ hybrid markets traded over 6 years to finally answer the question: which type of prediction market is more accurate? And of course we've set up a market on Futuur about which will be more accurate, play-money or real-money, which we will resolve during the presentation. Make your bets here: https://bit.ly/futuur-market

Are Language Models on the Verge of Superhuman Forecasting?

Recent studies suggest that language models are becoming increasingly competitive with humans in event forecasting. However, they have not yet reached superhuman levels. Here, I explore their current forecasting capabilities and what advancements are needed to close the gap.

The Estimation Game

Estimate the answers to questions like "How many piano tuners are in New York?" in a Manifold-exclusive edition of The Estimation Game! Play in a team - you can find teammates at the session, or show up with your friends - and try and top the leaderboard by making calibrated estimates.

Sovereign Office Hours

Office hours with Manifest's Gold sponsor, Sovereign. Read more about Sovereign here: bit.ly/sovereign-hiring

Warcasting setup

Setup for the following session.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game 7-9p

Warcasting: Taiwan

Forecast the invasion of Taiwan then discuss with others where you disagree. Lots of whiteboards.

What will March 2020 for AI look like?

Forecasting the biological century

The 20th century saw the emergence of biology as a true experimental and theoretical science. The 21st century will see its transformation into information science and engineering, as our ability to extract significance from data will be much greater, allowing for actions that reshape our biological world.

Programmable Forecasting Functions: Challenges and Potential

Traditional forecasting platforms are limited to simple, predefined questions. However, programmable functions allow for complex, conditional, and multi-variable forecasts. Over the past year, we've been adapting Squiggle Hub to support these arbitrary function definitions for forecasting. In this technical talk, we'll discuss the challenges and solutions we encountered while creating a platform that supports programmable forecasting functions. We'll also explore the potential applications of these functions across various domains. While parts of the talk will be geared towards developers, we aim to provide valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of forecasting.

How to Talk to People About Forecasting

Do you get involved in conversations around forecasting you’d like to go better? Are there colleagues, bosses, investors, etc, you wish better understood why forecasting is so valuable? Misha, running this session, knows just a tiny bit about forecasting, but a lot about how to talk to people who see things differently than you do. Get techniques you can use to make these conversations go better!

Futarchy and Conditional Markets

We will focus on conditional markets and futures, where participants can bet on how outcomes (stock prices, inflation rates, commodities futures) are expected to vary depending on particular conditions (who wins an election, interest rate changes, etc). Going more deeply, we will discuss how conditional markets can be used to make decisions, in what is called decision markets or futarchy, and how this can improve the governance of autonomous organizations.

Why are you stuck on your novel?

I write fiction. Perhaps you write fiction. You are stuck somewhere. What component is missing? Where can you get it? Let us debug.

Psychological growth 2

I think lots about psychological growth and improving social interaction. I have many theories to share. My research is supported by CFAR, and mentored by Kaj Sotala, Alex Zhu, and Brian Toomey the cofounder of Coherence Therapy. (I also apply these insights to AI alignment.) A 14 sentence introduction to my research: https://chrislakin.blog/p/psychological-growth-principles

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deduction game! 7-9 players

Cultural Drift

The forces that once kept our cultures on track and made them such reliable sources of wisdom—diversity and natural selection—are far weaker now than they were a few centuries ago. Without these forces, our modern culture has been allowed to "drift off the rails". Join for an expansion of Robin's recent thinking and writing on cultural drift, including time for Q&A at the end.

Forecasting has not taken off. What should we do about it?

Forecasting and prediction markets have significant potential to improve decision-making, but adoption has been underwhelming so far. In this talk, I will give an overview of (i) hypotheses that have been put forward to explain this fact and (ii) concrete interventions that could increase the usefulness and adoption of forecasting. This is a moderately interactive talk – I plan to use live markets to estimate the impact of various interventions.

YouTube: free eyeballs are free $100 bills

Lessons learned from 7 years, 150 videos, 500 million views, and 1 Streamy Award You have a message that you want to broadcast to the world. (Maybe that message is "You can hire me for a job; here are my skills" or "here's why you should support my preferred housing policy" or "here's what my $200/mo SaaS product can do for your business.") Topics include: - Why it's still worth starting a YouTube channel in 2024 (or, "proof that the demand still outstrips supply, and other whitepills for content makers") - The arbitrage opportunity with 500% spread (or, the difference between "impressions" and "views") - What I learned from 5 years of getting low attention-span users (children) to watch educational YouTube videos by disguising them as entertainment - The ridiculously low criteria for satisficing on video quality

Synthetic Biology: Fictions & Futures

During this informal discussion with the team behind Asimov Press, they will introduce the central ideas behind synthetic biology and discuss which capabilities are "fact" and which are "fiction." They are also eager to answer questions about science writing and editing. So whether you're drawn by synthetic biology or writing, this conversation can act as a starting point for additional conversations throughout the weekend.

Repolarize American Politics: How to make the two-party system irrelevant

With negative polarization at an all-time high and memes like prediction markets and ranked-choice voting gaining steam, American Politics Company believes the time is right to redefine political affiliation in a nonpartisan way. Come learn how America's loss of a shared informational commons and toxic polarization has been 50 years in the making, how Manifold is already improving politics in San Francisco, and how we can all express our political identities proudly, in a healthier way. Can read more context at americanpolitics.co

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #4

Metastrategy: Predicting One-Shot Strategy Games

Jump into a strategy videogame you've never played before. Each turn, make as many predictions as you can about the rules of the game, and what will be strategically relevant. Training for the general art of metastrategy. Requires a laptop and ~$20.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game! 7-9 players

Q&A with Kalshi co-founder & CTO, Luana Lopez

FutureSearch: A new question answering AI

ChatGPT and Perplexity give superficial answers to questions. When the answers matter, like when you're making a big bet, it is risky to trust them. FutureSearch is the first AI tool that lets you get better and better answers, based on how much time and money you want it to spend. Come see what it can do.

Neopets: The feudal lords reigning over a dying world

Underneath a cheery exterior briefly encountered by countless young people, Neopets has the bones of a capitalist hellscape powerful enough to keep a core of ruthless traders coming back for decades. What draws people to throw themselves into a digital economy, and what results after decades of increasingly hands-off management of a world too ambitious and sprawling for its owners to handle?

Theo Jaffee interviews Austin Chen

Theo Jaffee, of the Theo Jaffee Podcast, interviews Austin Chen on Manifund, EA and the EA funding ecosystem, AI and AI safety, Manifest itself, and a few other things.

Team Trivia

Team up in groups of up to 6 people to test your collective knowledge. 6 rounds + a Final question covering a range of topics.

Mira Gathering

For followers of Mira: https://manifold.markets/Mira_ aka https://twitter.com/_mira___mira_.

Guided meditation

Probably a normal mindfulness session, maybe a Metta (loving kindness) session. Appropriate for all experience levels

Dinner

Free Speech and Prediction Markets

My talk would focus on the intersection of prediction markets and free speech dilemmas. It would discuss three main sub-topics: (1) Free speech and prediction market accuracy; (2) prediction market community-building and the policing of offensive speech; (3) the First Amendment and the legalization of prediction markets.

Running an Internal Prediction Market

In which Keri tells the tale of building Anthropic's internal prediction market platform, how it differs from a public market, and the priciples that make it useful: simplicity, a focus on decision-makers, and balancing collaboration with competition.

[Optional] Clinical Trial Journal Club Signup

I want to learn to read clinical trial papers and develop the skills to discern the quality of a trial. I also want to do it with other people! This is a Schelling point for us to discuss logistics. If you can't make it to this session, that's totally fine, just sign up at http://bit.ly/3VfXZkV

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #5

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game? 7-9 players

Taking 30 more pills a day to live forever: more pills 

bryan johnson is my lockscreen

Ring Signatures: A tool for whistleblowing

It would be cool to have a robust way to push against preference falsification and the Spiral of Silence. I will present the basics of the ring signature protocol, and talk about my own software project for making it conveniently usable. Not to be confused with Group Signatures!

Lightning Talks

Come for lightning talks! Each speaker be given 2 minutes to give an impromptu talk on the topic of their choice, in front of everyone else. Share your latest obsession or favorite hobbyhorse with the rest of Manifest!

Ambitious Epistemic Technologies

We'll discuss and debate over what sorts of ambitious epistemic technologies will be the most exciting in the next 5-20 years. 1. Ozzie will give a short presentation about key parts of the space. 2. There will be a Google Document, for people to collaborate on ideas and discussion. 3. We'll move into a group discussion.

Build the future of universities with me

We need new university models. If you could design your own college experience, what would it look like? In this workshop, participants will collaboratively design solutions and strategies for building a university that reimagines learning and research for the 21st century.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game

Night market

Come to the night market to buy, sell, shill, taste, swab, hire, barter, play, and more. Go to https://bit.ly/manifest-night-market to book a table!

Songs to sock wrestle to

Bring one sock, an instrument, and your fighting spirit

Life as a Professional Gambler: Intro to Advantage Play

I’ve worked as a professional casino gambler for the past 2.5 years. This talk will cover the basics of what is referred to as advantage play: playing games against the house for an advantage but without cheating. The main forms of advantage play I have done are blackjack (card counting) and video poker. I will cover the theory of how they work and the practice of doing it for a living. Please, NO RECORDING or publishing of my picture in association with the topic.

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Satellite Table #6

Spicy Karaoke Kompetition

Give it your best, give it your worst, give it your all, give it like AI [might/might not] kill us all. Place your bets & add yourself: https://manifold.markets/ian/who-will-win-manifests-karaoke-komp

High school Calc from diff POV

Only prereq is elementary calculus. You will learn how to do something that’s supposed to be impossible: derivative of a discontinuous function AT the discontinuity.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game. Preferentially seating new players in all my games today. 7-9p

Forecasting "Situational Awareness" by Leopold Aschenbrenners

Leopold's manifesto makes a coherent set of confident claims about how AI development, and policy will occur in the next 5 years. This includes: ASI, AI cybersecurity, AI lab nationalization, AI Manhattan Projects, and a US vs China AI race. We'll spend the session operationalizing the claims and assumptions made into forecasts that could go on Manifest or Metaculus. This could be useful for helping people think about AI timelines and scenarios.

Romantic Epistemology

What do we think we know and why do we think we know it, re: romance? How do tropes in media, along with other cultural forces, shape the way we think and feel about dating and sexuality? I've been a Marriage and Family Therapist for over 10 years and I've got things to say, but this is also meant to be a group discussion where we notice the cached beliefs and biases in our maps, and compare notes to try to make ours less wrong.

Rationality Cardinality

The Optimal Party Game! Cards Against Humanity mechanics, Rationality-themed card content

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game. Preferentially seating new players in all my games today. 7-9p

Scary stories in the dark

Let’s share our scariest stories from the past and nightmares of the future. Death, cults, conspiracies, mind control, existential horror, AI Doom, S-Risk scenarios. What goes bump in the night out there? What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever experienced? What makes you question reality? What are some of the ways life in this world can go wrong? What does Evil look like? Please turn your electronics off for this conversation.

LGBT/gay/bi/queer meetup

not an orgy

Deliberate Grieving (and/or Ruthlessness and/or "Whoops!")

We'll start at Walled Garden but find the nearest empty firepit to huddle around. Sometimes there's something important to you that isn't there anymore, or maybe never was. Different people have different ways of dealing with that. We'll have a low-key chat about it, hopefully around a cozy fire.

Manifold.lol - Comedy Night

Manifold.lol is part prediction market, part comedy night! Please visit manifold.lol * to bet on which topics any comedian will be able to make a joke about that will make the audience laugh. At the start of the event, the market will close and all attendees will be invited (but not required) to perform a stand-up set or standalone joke. Attendees will be able to go as many times as they wish. The judge(s) will, at their sole collective discretion, determine which jokes 'the audience' has laughed at and which topics those jokes were sufficiently about. * Also available at https://manifold.markets/EmmaLiddell/during-manifoldlol-will-the-audienc?r=RW1tYUxpZGRlbGw

possible Blood on the Clocktower?

If there's overwhelming demand, I'll run another game, otherwise I'll go to the comedy show. If we have more than 10 we might need to run the game outside/another venue. 7-12 players. 11+ players will take 90 minutes+

Draw Bluey

Draw (and watch) Bluey *Australians mandatory attendance

Catholic Mass @ Newman Hall

Join us for Catholic Mass on Sunday! Mass begins at 8am at Newman Hall; we'll leave the venue at 7:45am sharp, and walk over together. Expect conversations on faith & religion on the way there and back~ All are welcome to join, religious or nonreligious alike!

Kalshi Breakfast

Kalshi is hosting breakfast for all attendees!

Yoga Class

Come for an all-levels yoga class. Please bring your own mat if you have one, and if you can, bring some extra. If you don't have a mat but want to come, please join anyways and we'll find a way to make it work. Rishi has taught yoga most recently at Stanford Aerobics & Yoga. Prior to that he taught yoga to inmates and guards at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, as well as in schools throughout the South Side of Chicago. He is certified to teach yoga to both adults and children.

Beyond Red and Blue: How would American politics look with a different system?

Bit of a hodgepodge of different topics. Starting off with a short presentation on how modern coalitional American conservatism came to be as well as modern attempts to subdivide the Democratic and Republican coalitions into smaller groups This will be followed by some casual speculation on what sorts of political parties may emerge if the United States ditched First Past the Post/the Two Party System

Learn SuperMemo and Incremental Reading!

If you don't know what SuperMemo or incremental reading are, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NURjZuHvDaU I'll be doing a session on the basics of using SuperMemo! If you're interested: - you'll need either a windows computer or a VM (I recommend parallels for mac and vmware for linux). If you don't want to actually learn how to use SuperMemo, you're welcome to come anyways - show up close to on time. It's harder to teach multiple people if they don't all start at the same time - bring some content you're interested in learning (specifically learning, not memorizing)

Starting a Microschool: An interview with Kelsey Piper and June Kreml

Kelsey and June have been operating a microschool in Oakland for over a year with amazing results. How did it get started? What were the hard parts? Can we replicate this in other communities? Join us for an interview to find out!

Top Manifold traders discuss trading in real-world markets.

We dial up Marcus Abramovich (Manifold's pre-pivot #1 trader) to discuss how trading on Manifold is like and unlike real-world trading, whether it's crypto, venture investing, or options trading.

Discount Rates

When we make decisions about the future, we have to ask what the tradeoff is between getting something today and getting more of it in the future. If we're utilitarians, our future is dominated by small probabilities of a large number of very happy people, and by the risk of extinction. But even under other ethical systems, we need some way to trade off between certain present benefits and potential future ones. We even need this framing to think about predictions—asset prices that contain information about future expectations also embed expectations about the required rate of return from betting on them.

Trade with the Kalshi Team

Kalshi trading workshop! Get started with a voucher to start trading, and get advice from the Kalshi team. Kalshi will be giving out merch as well.

Emotional Work of Rationality

What is "the emotional work of rationality"? What are the forces that make people DESIRE truth more, or less? How can we build products that help people desire truth more? I'll share some thoughts on all of these, followed by discussion.

Reforming Academia Via Reputation Futures

Hanson will quickly (<15min) consider some possible ways to reform academia, including my prior now-rejected ideas for using prediction markets, and outline his current best concept. We'll spend most of. the time comparing those and whatever alternatives you bring.

Automating the Law

Can we automate the law with LLMs? What would that look like? What challenges exist? Where are we?

"No significant effect"

This session presents a simple statistical fallacy -- extremely common in scientific journalism -- that relates to a basic incoherence in the position that "significant" = "true" and "not significant" = "no effect". Applications include (one small piece of) the Hanson/Alexander debate on healthcare, massive studies on the effectiveness of cancer screening, and debates about false-positive FDA approvals.

LLM products in prod • builders’ meetup

Are you operating some sort of app that uses LLMs? Come by and chat about the struggles – observability, benchmarking, stuff like that

History Lecture with Live Betting

Participants bet on the outcome of a historic event while I tell the story. This event is for: - degenerate gamblers who don't watch sports - history lovers who hate spoilers - traders who like making money by betting on events after they've already happened - people who think about Rome every day and wishes the 21st-century economy had a way to pay them for it. Exact subject matter to be revealed at the start of the presentation.

PredictIt: Academia & Prediction Markets

Building a Technophilic Religion / Building a Religion for Your Kids

While predicting the future is one thing, inheriting it is another entirely: You'll need to create a pronatalist culture that is intergenerationally durable. Malcolm and Simone Collins, co-authors of the Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion, will explore the underlying mechanics behind creating a custom-built (or modified) culture/religion that successfully passes your approach to life on to your kids and encourages them to do the same for theirs.

Intro to Quantitative Portfolio Construction

Doom near-miss liability: my favourite AI risk policy

I'd like to talk about my favourite anti-AI-doom policy: introducing punitive damages for AI accidents that are, in some sense, "near misses" for AI doom. I'll tell you what the policy is, why it's good, and what kinks should be ironed out. This will be based on two policy proposals, one by Robin Hanson ("Foom Liability"), and one by Gabriel Weil ("Tort Law as a Tool for Mitigating Catastrophic Risk from Artificial Intelligence").

Thinking Like an Editor

Join the Asimov Press editors to learn about what goes into a great pitch or story.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game 7-9 players

Lunch

Press X to doubt: journalism edition

You might remember the New York Magazine viral article about the $50k in a shoebox. There exists a Manifold Market as to whether this is true. What do you think an irrational amount of effort in this market would look like?

Liquidity and Prediction Markets

We will discuss why people trade, what makes some markets more liquid than others, "Why prediction markets aren't popular", and more.

X-risk and your feelings

If you think p(doom) is high, how does that affect how you get through life? Does it sentence you to a daily existence of anxiety and depression? Can you have goals? Can you have kids? Can you have fun? Are there strategies you can take? This will be a mix of on-stage talk, Q&A, and also some group discussion where you’ll be invited to talk in small groups with other people in the room about your own experiences here.

Polymarket Office Hours

Come talk to the folks from Polymarket!

Sea shanty singing

See title. Music-reading ability a plus but not required.

Barbell Coaching [VENUE: AT THE GYM]

tzukitchan.com I will teach you to deadlift with perfect technique. If you've never done any barbell stuff before, start your day zero with me :)

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game. Preferentially seating new players in all my games today. 7-9p

Lunch

Manifold Traders & Creators Group Photo

Behind the Numbers: Eliciting Rationales to Improve Decision-making

This will be a panel hosted by Cate Hall (Executive Director, Astera), with participants Deger Turan (CEO, Metaculus), Josh Rosenberg (CEO, Forecasting Research Institute), Dan Schwarz (CEO of FutureSearch), and David Shor (head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research). We will focus on how the reasoning behind forecasts can be elicited and shared in order to improve community knowledge and institutional decision-making.

Why Science Funding Should Be Capricious

Contemporary private and public scientific funding is gated by committee decisions based on current expert consensus—the opposite of what makes for efficient scientific discovery. We should instead return to 18th and 19th century social conventions where wealthy private individuals are both encouraged to take up their own scientific research as well as fund brilliant and eccentric individuals. For public funding empowering randomly chosen scientists for limited terms to direct portions of government scientific funding with no oversight would be beneficial.

Community Notes: Under the Hood

This talk will explore the algorithm behind X's Community Notes, including bridging-based ranking (elevating consensus from people who often disagree) and a reputation system that has some commonalities with prediction markets.

What is Aristotle's Metaphysics about?

Aristotle developed a conceptual scheme that dominated Western thinking for fifteen centuries. At the center of this project is the Metaphysics, one of the most powerful and lasting intellectual and cultural artifacts in our history. This talk will explain the aims of the Metaphysics and what makes it so important to the development of science and reason.

Speaking to Your Elected Representatives

Sometimes you might have an opinion about policy, and luckily, there is someone that you pay to listen to that opinion! How should you go about speaking to them? In what contexts is it useful to do so? What are their motivations? What other input are they hearing? I'll be giving a very informal overview that attempts to answer these questions, drawing on recent policy advocacy I've been working on. (I can only speak to American policymaking, but I would welcome anyone joining for a compare/contrast discussion if you know about other countries' policymaking!)

A web3+AI prediction market?

People discuss crypto and AI separately, can we utilize the best of AI and crypto and revolutionize the prediction market industry? Let’s brainstorm ideas and we will present some future works.

Dumb Pitch Competition

Uber for blockchain? Airbnb for gamblers? Come pitch your dumb startup idea. Lightning rounds, pitch decks exceedingly optional.

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game. Preferentially seating new players in all my games today. 7-9p

Fireside Chat with Nate Silver and Scott Alexander

Manifund: Impact certs & beyond

Talk/Q&A on our work at Manifund, funding early stage projects, impact certs and more.

AI threat modeling needs forecasters: closing the gap between evals and reality

Multiple AI companies and external organizations are building evaluations to gauge AI dangerousness. Designing these evaluations is harder than you might think. It's difficult to connect 'how AI agents score on a test' to 'how they will impact the real world.' That's why the AI evaluation space needs forecasters! My talk discusses existing AI threat modeling work and how forecasters can contribute.

Live Manifold Podcast Recording

Steve Hsu interviews Robin Hanson on a live recorded episode of the "Manifold Podcast" on topics across prediction markets, AI, culture, and more.

Collaborative & Higher-Order Forecasting Roundtable

We invite you to share your experiences, aspirations, ideas re: team-based forecasting. What factors enable more effective collaboration? Is it better to work with people who think similarly or differently? Suggested topics: incentive structures; team vs individual forecasts; emotional factors.

Portfolio construction 2

Math behind markowitz portfolio construction

Hardware meetup

A meetup for all people working on hardware things

Blood on the Clocktower

The best social deception game. 7-9p

Wrestling

no experience with wrestling needed! get a little more in touch with what it's like to be a human inside a body, pushing and pulling on other humans! disengage higher functions. return to monkey.

Technology trees for ambitious futures

​​If you’ve ever played the game Civ, you know what tech trees are. Can tech trees help us advance technological progress in real life? Join a demo of Foresight’s tech trees to map progress toward longevity escape velocity, secure human ai cooperation and more. Starting with the status quo of a field, the trees feature critical technical capabilities to unlock, key actors working on them and open challenges yet to be solved. The trees are AI-queryable, so you can explore the branches in an interactive way based on your level of interest; a v1 of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. After a brief demo, let's explore how integrating prediction markets, impact tracking, and crowd-funding could turn the trees into collective engines for civilizational progress. Perhaps you have other domains in mind to grow tech trees in? Come build some prototypes — or ask the AI to do it for you.

AI & Game Design

Notes from 5 years of experimenting with cutting edge AI in the context of game design. Why does game design matter for understanding AI? How can game design help us think about the meaning and purpose of AI?

Metaculus Build-a-Bot Office Hours

Were you unable to make Metaculus's Build-a-Bot Workshop? Are you tinkering with the bot you built at the workshop and you could use some conversation or support? Do you just want to chat about LLM-forecasting or forecasting more generally? Come say hello!

Forecasting set up

Setup for next session

Parents Meetup

Come hang out and talk about parenting! Existing parents & aspiring parents alike are welcome to join~

Blood on the Clocktower

the best social deception game 7-9 players

Conflict Improv

Draw cards describing conflict scenarios and strategies, and do an improv scene in front of other attendees. You are invited to make yourself a little uncomfortable and lean into adversarial behaviors you don't often practice. If you're not used to raising your voice, consider raising your voice. If you're afraid of being seen as entitled, demand things from the other person.

Forecasting AI

Forecasting the future of AI then discussing it with others where you disagree. Lots of whiteboards.

The Elegance of Land Value Taxes

Landed aristocracies HATE this one weird trick to increase total surplus, internalize externalities, and increase usage efficiency of our most scarce resource

Startup Pitch Competition

Living on Cruise Ships for Free

In the past two years, I have been on 28 free cruises, offered by the ship casinos in connection with my job as a professional gambler. That makes over six months at sea! The casinos give me free cruises because I gamble a lot, right up until they finally realize I’m a winning player. I will cover what this has been like and how you can do it yourself.

Estimate Key AI Variables, with Squiggle

We'll use Squiggle to estimate key AI variables that people are interested in. For example: - Market cap of top AI organizations - Total value of many AI interventions, for AI safety - Costs and revenue of existing ML models - NVIDIA and other stocks prices, conditional on AI development This will teach people how to use Squiggle for realistic and interesting models, and it will be useful for direct AI modeling. https://bit.ly/ai-squiggle This workshop is not an introduction to Squiggle. It presumes familiarity with programming. (If you don't yet know Squiggle, you can learn via the docs)

LVT in practice: Valuebase

Guided meditation

Probably a normal mindfulness session, maybe Metta (loving kindness). Appropriate for all experience levels

Dance Class

How AI Forecasting Can Revolutionize Science and Government

How AIs will help forecasting make governments brain-like via predictive processing. Applications with the FDA, scientific studies, and indoor air quality will be discussed

Salesforce, Memex, and the self-structuring Exacortex: Using language models to automate the creation of ontologies and reshape organizations

Systems to structure and transmit information lie at the core of every large institution, from the East India Company of the 1700s to the large software consultancies of today. Much of what prevents these systems from scaling is the human effort involved in entering an existing organization and ontologizing all of the implicit information that is required for that organization to function. Today, this is done by teams of 'solutions engineers' who build out bespoke database schemas, APIs, and surfaces to interact with said data. In the near future, LLMs will automate this work and radically shift how teams of humans coordinate.

Fiction writing: good prose vs bad prose, humans vs LLMs

We can often recognize "bad writing" on sight, but it can be challenging to explain what exactly makes it bad. Can looking at bad prose teach us how to write good prose? Let's find out! I'm a full-time scriptwriter who moonlights as a web novelist and editor. I will break down and examine common failure modes of beginner writing, and do my best to articulate what I consider to be "first principles" of writing. This session will also include comparisons of human writing to LLM output.

Drawback Chess!

We’ll play an easy-to-learn yet strategically complex variant of chess (inspired by drawbackchess.com) where each player gets a secret drawback card - for instance, “True Gentleman” (you can’t capture queens) or “My Kingdom for a Horse” (if you lose a knight, you lose). Please show up no matter your chess skill level; you’ll get interesting games! Gameplay is a fun mix of figuring out your strategy with a strange restriction and trying to puzzle out what’s weird about your opponent’s moves to exploit it. We’ll try to procure enough real boards to play without screens (I printed the drawbacks on cards!) but we may fall back on the online version.

Followups & Accountability

Share things we've learned or projects you've been inspired to work on due to this conference, and (optionally) set up to keep in touch, hold each other accountable about actually working on them, and share future results.

Dinner & closing ceremony

[6:45 PM - 8:00 PM] Costume Contest

Learn what makes for a good costume and then go forth and apply those skills in a costume building competition! 1. Workshop on building good costumes and pareto improvements you can make on the effort/costume quality curve. (30 minutes) 2. Theme announced, mad rush to build an on-theme costume using available supplies (1 hour) 3. Themed afterparty will commence (5 hours?) including judging of costumes

Polymarket Poker Tournament: Finals

Why Not a "Retrodiction Market"?

Why not a retrodiction market in which participants buy and sell belief contracts, i.e. place bets on "hindcasts". I will present my work proposing a retrodiction market, available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607

Yud's Hat & Tie Auction

Eliezer Yudkowsky's legendary hat and tie are going up for auction! Join Ronny Fernandez as he brokers this transition for Yud's signature look. If you're looking for something to wear to the afterparty, come submit a bid!

Raemon Strategizes Himself

Ray attempts to present-in-realtime his own planmaking process for himself, and solicits help from audience to operationalize predictions about his plans.

Epic math puzzle sesh

Bring/solve epic math puzzles

Afterparty

Afterparty starts at 8pm, hosted by @Ricki Heicklen and @Aella here on-site! We'll open up the campus to the public at 9pm, free of charge -- invite your nearby friends to join us and celebrate the end of Manifest~

The Crystal Coinflip

The first crystal market ever created will resolve with a coinflip LIVE on Manifold TV. Witness history!

<in the rat park dome> Church

Have you ever held space in your hands? Have you ever felt small?

Cuddle Party! A cuddle puddle of 6 or more people

https://manifold.markets/Joshua/what-will-happen-at-manifest-2-gene?r=bW9v

Cuddles, continued!