dreev avatar
Daniel Reeves

@dreev

Cofounder of Beeminder, academic background in prediction markets

http://dreev.es
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dreev avatar

Daniel Reeves

12 months ago

This sounds like it'll be a huge contribution to Manifold, especially when paired with arbitrage bots that keep the market prices on Manifold in line with those on real-money platforms or any other platform that anyone might think of as a more authoritative source of predictions.

My thinking is that you start with arb bots that force the market prices on Manifold to match the mirrored markets. If those bots make mana, great! Free mana. As soon as those bots start losing mana, that's even better. You can pull the plug on the bots and also shout it from the rooftops that Manifold's market probabilities are provably more accurate than where the markets are mirrored from.

dreev avatar

Daniel Reeves

over 1 year ago

@Domenic: You're probably right that it's a long shot on this getting actual traction. I'm hoping that the right interface reduces the friction enough for it to be useful to a certain nerdy niche. The key is being able to agree on some made-up utility values and then to fight it out over a probability. I think that's not exactly a rare form of disagreement!

Also, I think the difficulty of assigning a probability is actually addressed pretty well by this tool. I agree that you don't have a strong feeling about the specific numerical probability but you do -- in the situations where this tool would be useful -- have a strong opinion about what action should be taken. If you've agreed on the utility values, then that strong opinion implies a threshold on the probability.

So the person you're disagreeing with feels strongly that the probability is on one side of that threshold and you feel strongly it's on the other side. Now you just let the stakes on the wager grow until one of you relents. You still think the other person is wrong but now they'll be paying you so much money for being wrong that you're ok with that!

It's gonna be great!

dreev avatar

Daniel Reeves

over 1 year ago

Q: Is this already possible with Manifold Markets?

A: Kind of, but if two people are having a tug of war over the price in a Manifold Market, any 3rd party can sit in the middle and extract money from them. So this works better as direct wagers. Maybe it can be done with Manifold's Challenge Bet feature? We'll definitely prefer to use Manifold for this tool if possible.

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