Third post: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/understanding-subjective-probabilities/

Second post is up: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/long-term-bet-calculator

I've created a rate of return calculator that shows your rate of return on a market in monthly-compounding-interest-equivalent. Manifold's average growth in mana is about 4% a month, so any market that offers <4% a month is irrational to bet in no matter how highly subsidized it is or how low you get the transaction costs.

https://outsidetheasylum.blog/long-term-bet-calculator

Admittedly, there are a lot of existing markets that offer >4% and have still not been bet on sufficiently, so I think I stand corrected on the whole. Trading bots and subsidies can potentially be of help on some markets in 1% - 10%, 1 month - 5 year range.

First blog post is out: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/prediction-markets-are-not-polls/

I've created a market on what features will result in this project receiving a Community Fund payout.

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/what-changes-to-my-manifold-dashboa

@evand I'm not really interested in the "moderate success" goal; coming up with plans is easy, it's putting them into practice that's the challenge. Conditional on "extreme success" (using my judgement on what level of improvement is enough to count) I'd be happy to fund the full $750.

The reason I expect this to fail is because your proposal doesn't include anything to address the core issue of discounting rates. Adding subsidies only decreases the relative temporal transaction costs of betting, asymptotically towards 0. But even with no transaction costs whatsoever it's still irrational to bet in a market if a higher rate of return can be found elsewhere, which is almost always true for a market at <3% that resolves in more than a month.

Arbitrage bots and derivative markets are just further epicycles that don't address the core issue either. A real solution will need to fundamentally change the market structure such that the rate of return is competitive. The two best suggestions I've seen thus far are some sort of log payout market structure developed by Robin Hanson, and an increased loan rate. (The latter runs into massive bankruptcy risk.)

I'm a big fan of this goal, and I would be willing to fund it conditional upon success, but I unfortunately expect it to fail.