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N.C. Young's Umbrella Project

$316raised
$200valuation
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Project summary

I’ve got a bunch of ideas for stuff I could do to help Manifold out. This is an umbrella project for all of those.

(I’m also planning on doing a Manifold Live Show with Joshua!)

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

Great question. This market covers what I will do; this market predicts which ones will lead to this project being funded.

To summarise my main ideas:

  • Open-sourcing @NcyBot: I have a relatively effective arbitrage bot (although his current league standing is kinda bad because I messed up). I think it’s the only arbitrage bot that can currently trade on multichoice markets. I think Manifold would be improved by making it open-source, both by enabling others to arbitrage any markets they like but also by providing a starting point for an all-purpose Manifold trading bot that anyone can use. I’d like it to also be able to take a user-given list of markets and estimated probabilities and determine the best way to allocate their balance.

  • Automated Fire-the-CEO markets: Robin Hanson says that if he had a million dollars, he’d fund a group of markets predicting the stock price of each Fortune 500 company conditional on the current CEO staying on, and on the CEO stepping down (as well as a binary market on whether the CEO will step down). The idea is to make it obvious when a CEO should be fired, eventually giving shareholders enough info to sue when a company board ignores the markets’ advice: “A revolution in CEO accountability would then be complete, all for only a million.”
    This seems simple enough to automate on Manifold. All you’d need is a bit of code (which I’m confident I can handle), a reliable source for stock prices + the Fortune 500 + current CEOs (which I’ve briefly looked for but not found to my satisfaction), and about M$150000 per quarter (which is probably why no one’s done it yet).
    This is a high-risk high-reward project: it could be the killer app for prediction markets with its own heavily-visited spinoff site, or it could be 1500 markets with very little activity.

  • Making a market to predict what will improve my mood over the coming months and writing about it: I’ve been regularly measuring my mood on a scale from 2 to -2 for the past month, with the average tending between 0 and 1. This maps very well onto a binary market, allowing me to use one of Manifold’s new binary multi-markets to predict what my mood will be over a given time period, conditional on doing any number of activities during that time period. In theory, answers that would improve my life should have higher probabilities. Hopefully, this market will make my life better and more interesting in a way that will make for a good blog post/sequence.
    If this works well enough, I think it’d make a great spinoff website a la Manifold Love: maybe Manifold Life, where experienced traders trade on what will help you be a better person and live a better life.
    (There’s another option on the markets linked above where I might use a different metric, because I’m not sure that moods are the best thing to optimise. Ideas for metrics are appreciated.)

Other very rough ideas:

  • Manifold arbitrage web app: instead of (or as well as) open-sourcing my arbitrage bot, I could build a web app allowing anyone to select markets that should be equal and pressing a button to arbitrage them. I could try building this directly into Manifold.

  • Standardisation of common resolution criteria ambiguities, to give a Schelling point in arguments over what a vague market description means (which would also let people type shorter descriptions, if they can be understood to be operating by standard guidelines outlined elsewhere).

  • A feature on Manifold that gives ‘free’ (loaned) bets on any market that has gone long enough without a trade, to incentivise keeping all markets fresh.

How will this funding be used?

Depends on what I do, obviously. Some very rough cost estimates:

  • $720: Open-sourcing @NcyBot

  • $300: Fire-the-CEO markets

  • $100: Mood market & blog post

  • $500: Arbitrage web app

Notes:

  • @NcyBot has made about M$8000 in about 4 months, so at M$2000=$20 a month and a 3-year repayment period I’d happily open-source him for $720.

  • Automated Fire-the-CEO markets will cost a fair bit - to go by Hanson’s specification, it would cost M$300 per company if I used a binary + a (old style) numeric market (well, two numeric markets with one N/A’d), which would cost M$150000=$1500 per quarter for every company in the Fortune 500, not accounting for trader bonuses. (I could also use a multiple choice market, which would probably cost a similar amount.) I’m convinced that with enough activity this would be a great mock-up of Hanson’s basic idea, but 1000 markets is a lot, and the only realistic way you’d get much activity is with bots (which wouldn’t give trader bonuses). If I were to try this, I’d probably start with just the Fortune 100, which would cost M$30000=$300.
    If Manifold grant me M$30000 (or M$150000), I’ll just mock this up and see how it goes.

  • Funding expensive-but-effective lifestyle interventions would likely help demonstrate the efficacy of my lifestyle market idea.

Funders can comment to earmark their money for a specific project if they’d like.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

This is an umbrella project for everything I pursue on my own related to Manifold in the period covered by the Community Fund, so the team is just me. I have a very strong track record of doing whatever I feel like and seeing if it works.

Okay seriously. I’m pretty experienced at making markets on Manifold, I’m a pretty good writer, and I’m a good enough coder that I built https://manifold.markets/ancient back when that was relevant.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

Again, it obviously depends on what I pursue.

  • My arbitrage bot might fail to get any users or contributors, and might not have much effect due to the presence of several other arbitrage bots on the site already (including itself!)

  • If Fire-the-CEO markets fail, it’s because the markets didn’t get many traders, possibly meaning that the markets conditional on the CEO stepping down get little movement, becoming totally uninformative. Subsidisation and boosting would help a bit on this front, but I might have to face the fact that most people who want to daytrade stocks won’t do it on Manifold...

  • My mood might not be very affected by most interventions, and there might not be enough ambiguity in whether I’ll go through with any given intervention or not to have a noticeable effect

What other funding are you or your project getting?

I have no other funding source for these projects in particular, unless you count trading bonuses on their corresponding markets.

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FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

8 months ago

Final Evaluation Results

Valuations: 400, 200, 200

Median Valuation: 200.0

Tod Waddington: I don't really care about open sourcing the bot; the mood markets are only cool if he attaches an IF and tests the thing most likely to improve his mood (like a mini-study, I saw someone else was doing this too)

Fire the CEO markets seem cool, but I wouldn't just want the markets - I would want him to build a display page like the elections page, that shows companies with controversial leaders (e.g. Elon Musk, SBF pre-prison) and the expectation for company growth with/without them. The way the markets currently exist, they're boring. I think they have great potential & application, but it needs to be delivered in a more exciting way, otherwise it's just markets. I don't think there needs to be 1,000 fire the CEO markets, but a carefully picked 10-15 that are packaged and displayed effectively.

Arbitrage app sounds useful. If we indexed all the markets that are perfect to arb, it also provides a collection for us to see if we should be unlisting dupes (or maybe one day, merging) to clean the site up a bit.

Rachel: No progress, no change.

Austin: No change in valuation since there haven't been any updates (though I appreciate that NC Young took the time to write these in!)

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NcyRocks avatar

N.C. Young

9 months ago

Progress update

What progress have you made since your last update?

None, unfortunately.

What are your next steps?

I'm making some progress towards open-sourcing my bot, and still plan to post a writeup about the Fire-the-CEO markets, but that might take a backseat to my other priorities.

Is there anything others could help you with?

I'd appreciate hearing from any bot owners about how they run their bot - there are at least 3 different open-source Manifold APIs written in Python, so if anyone's tried more than one I'd like to know how they compare.

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FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

10 months ago

January 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 50, 20, 50, 200, 75, 200

Weighted Median Valuation: 200

cc6: Only mood market is out at the moment, and while it is creative, it's not enough to warrant a high valuation

Isaac King: The mood market seems like more of a personal project than anything prosocial. (At least until the writeup comes out.) $0.

Fire the CEO markets are an interesting idea, but low engagement and no one is making decisions based on them. This kind of conditional market is also strongly affected by correlation-is-not-causation bias; seems more likely that a CEO will be fired because the stock price went down than vice versa. $20.

wasabipesto: > Fire the CEO markets seem interesting, but I don't see any evidence they're more useful than most other stock-related markets. I'd be more interested if there was some evidence that they had been cited/used for some decision making, which is unlikely with play-money.

I don't think the mood market is particularly interesting, it's a question format that has been done many times before on Manifold without much to show.

Rachel: It seems like most of the Fire the CEO markets still don't have very many traders, which makes them not worth much.

SG: No comment

Austin: I think Fire the CEO markets show the most promise to Manifold as a business, especially if they serve as a viral/fun intro into how prediction markets can work. We haven’t seen this happen much yet — maybe we should try to get Robin Hanson to tweet this out or something?

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NcyRocks avatar

N.C. Young

10 months ago

Sorry for slacking on posting an update! Not sure anyone's still evaluating, but I at least owe investors an update here.

  • Fire the CEO markets are live at manifold.markets/FireTheCEO! Still need to do some writing-up to sell them to the public. Making their own website showing which CEOs the market thinks should be fired would be a great addition, so I'll look into that, but no promises.

  • My mood market is going very well! Some great suggestions, which I ought to put into action with some commitment devices. Planning on keeping it going for at least a few months to see how it improves.

  • No progress on the bot front, but I've taken a look at the existing Manifold Python libraries and found them lacking, so I think that open-sourcing mine would be a great step for the community even without the bot.

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NcyRocks avatar

N.C. Young

11 months ago

Here's the mood market! https://manifold.markets/NcyRocks/what-will-improve-my-mood-in-januar

If you're reading this, you should bet!

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FoldyOfficial avatar

Manifold Markets

11 months ago

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 0, 0, 500, 0, 100, 150

Median Valuation: 50

James: Looks like it's still in progress.

SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet.

Rachel: I like the fire the CEO markets as another part of the same experiment Manifold.love was made for: trying to find an actually useful application for prediction markets. I also like the lifestyle market as a test of a theory Austin has put forth (which I mostly disagree with, but would like to see tested more) that personal markets are the most useful and underrated. It sounds like some work has been put into that, but nothing’s been shipped.

Sinclair: I don't believe in fire-the-ceo markets. I think robin hanson is just wrong; prediction markets do not imply causality.

open sourcing the bot seems somewhat useful...

Inga Wei: A little too broad, but I do like the idea of the fire the ceo markets.

Austin: I like the ideas here, especially seeing the demo of Fire the CEO markets that are underway. I agree that they could be a fun spinoff site that gets lots of traction. (For this kind of spinoff site to work, though, I’d expect that you’d need some polished design in addition to the markets). Since they aren’t launched yet, though, my valuation just reflects what I’ve gleaned from the demo.

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NcyRocks avatar

N.C. Young

12 months ago

Some updates:

  • Fire the CEO markets are nearly ready! Keep an eye on manifold.markets/FireTheCEO 👀🔥🧑‍💼

  • I’m still planning to do the lifestyle market, just need to finish fine tuning the format. I’m thinking that I’ll offer a bounty for good suggestions in some way, which should encourage some activity and get people thinking. I’m a little worried about my privacy, but I think I should be fine.

  • NcyBot is on the back burner, but I’ve got some good ideas for improvements. Cleaning up the code sufficiently well to make it open source is a ways down the todo list, though.

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Genzy avatar

Tod Waddington

12 months ago

Fire the CEO markets are Gigabrain. Even if we started with a smaller sample (50?, 10?) it seems like the exact kind of thing that people will discuss, as it can be used to determine the value of a CEO compared to their peers.

It might seem obvious that people will predict Tesla would do worse without Elon, but I'm sure there are some very interesting examples where that isn't the case.

Personally, I'd be saying Google could do better without Sundar Pichai.

BoltonBailey avatar

Bolton Bailey

about 1 year ago

What language is the bot written in?

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NcyRocks avatar

N.C. Young

about 1 year ago

Python.