YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Grugett

lines on the record: 45
first: 2022-05-05
most recent: 2022-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think that's the big one manifold.markets you can join right now and we'll give you a thousand manifold dollars to bet on any market you like or create your own”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool, yeah. Yeah, I would say relatedly, one of the new types of markets we've introduced is this concept of a free response market. So in addition to a yes or no market where you're just betting on something will happen, we have this idea of a free response market where you ask a broad open-ended question and people can submit an answer. And whether submitting an answer, they're also placing a bet on that answer and other users can bid up different answers that the market creator will then choose. And that really opens up the space of possibilities towards allowing a much wider array of questions.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess one of the things that we've seen from launching this site is that users have come up with all sorts of exotic ways to use prediction markets that we hadn't previously considered. So part of that, or like prediction markets obviously can be used on predicting the future basic yes or no questions, but some exotic things you can do are like getting users to help research topics for you of, you know, you can create a market on, phrase these types of things in a market-based way, and then people can propose certain answers and other users can bet on them. That's an interesting feature of our site. People have hacked our platform to do things like create lotteries, to play games. We did manifold plays Wordle where we created a series of prediction markets on which word we should guess next. They're just like all sorts of other things, non-prediction type things you can do with this market mechanism.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annual recurring revenue or around like $50,000 monthly active users, something somewhere in that neighborhood. But yeah, if you are interested in prediction markets and manifold in particular, I encourage you to reach out to us. You can either email me jobs at manifold.markets or me personally, Stephen at manifold.markets.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah, yeah. So we right now we're looking to onboard a few people to our team. We're looking for full stack developers who preferably have front end, a lot of front-end and potentially React experience. We're looking for a community manager. That would be someone to help us manage our Discord, a help write blog posts, help with our substack, help reach out to people on social media and organize online events. Someone with a previous background in doing this at a startup would be great, but we're open to people from other backgrounds as well. And then we're looking for a head of growth or someone who has experience scaling up an early to mid stage startup. We're looking for someone who's helped take the company from one to 10 million.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, definitely the former. We had heard of Uniswap and some other mechanisms. I had heard of Hansen's log market scoring rule and some other things, but I didn't actually delve into the details until quite recently. Originally, we actually came up with the idea for dynamic paramutual, thinking about it from first principles. And then we later, like, I went back through the literature and read a bunch of papers and realized that it was called dynamic paramutual and found a more elegant implementation of a dynamic paramutual system based on a quadratic cost function that I hadn't considered previously.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It such that right when the grant announcement came out, we had a working prototype of our prediction market system ready to go. And then we were able to onboard a bunch of users from the ACX community immediately, which formed the base of our platform. And since then, we've been growing and responding.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably So this company began long, long ago way back in December of 2020. Yeah, it's a very new company. Basically decided to ditch crypto after maybe like a week's worth of speculation and research, mostly because we, or part of it is that we just thought we could build a play money prototype very quickly and we could just like test that and see what the experience is like and if we wanted to we could continue further on into crypto and partially is just based off reading about the regulatory nightmare that is prediction markets and crypto and partially is the usability concerns with crypto but basically we all like in the month of December we came up with the original idea we applied and received the ACX grant from Scott Alexander and we timed”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether we should try to monetize by selling the play money. Initially, we weren't sure whether that would be a good thing to do at all, whether users would hate it or it would seem scammy or whatever. But we created a prediction market on this subject. I think freezed in conditional terms that if we did introduce this, if we introduce the feature, would we keep it for some period of time? And the market seemed to think that we would. So that actually was a factor which played into our decision.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it is already. We actively create markets on all sorts of things which are of interest to us. So most recently, we created a market on whether we would be able to complete our fundraising round by the end of April. That was a cool market. The market believed in us for the most part. I don't think we fell lower than 85% somewhere around there. But we actually do try to dog food our markets as much as possible. We have a new market now, and whether we'll be able to onboard three employees, I think before the end of June, something like that. You know, that's a number that we try to keep our eyes on. I guess probably the first big case where like the market actually substantively informed our decision about how to act as a company was an early market we created on whether”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would say that in general, people are willing to put a lot of time and effort into virtual economies irrespective of financial gains. You know, if you look at things like World of Warcraft or earlier Second Life, which has virtual real estate, people are willing to invest the equivalent of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in this game world. I feel ability to drill in and focus and work on things that are of interest to them, you know, is just a very, very powerful force, even if it's not directly tied to a financial payout.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the idea is at certain times you'll have just like uninvested cash that's sitting in your account. The idea is to just like charge you for that. So charge a sales tax at the rate of 20% a year, but like maybe like once per day at midnight, you lose, you know, whatever amount that is, a small fraction, a small fraction of your uninvested cash”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Although I have toyed with some other interesting monetary schemes in the past. So one idea I had is introducing Demerge or basically negative interest rates on cash balances. So like you could imagine a world where you're purchasing power kind of erodes over time. If you made a bunch of like really good predictions this year, it's not necessarily the case that you should be rewarded by having all of that cash forever. Maybe some portion of that uninvested, those uninvested cash balances erodes by 20% a year or something like that. I think it's a really cool idea in principle, but in practice, like users absolutely hate losing money for any reason at all. So it's kind of like a non-starter. But it's interesting to think about.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in general, I'm pretty pro-efficient markets. If you think about what's happening when a whale comes in and buys up a huge amount of money and bets it on the wrong side, what they're essentially doing is just providing a huge subsidy and bonus to the people who are actually correct. Markets are a mechanism which is like the most efficient way of solving the whale problem. If you are too much money and you are not very smart and are very confident”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may not care about the stray cat. But a lot of people really do care about the Straight Cat in other contexts. So it's a fine balance to strike.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one thing you might care about is who is the best, like Russia, Ukraine, who is the best geopolitical and war predictor. One way to assess that would be to just be to handpick a few markets about the invasion and the subsequent course of events during the war and then just see how much profit people have made within those markets. And I think that'll actually give you a reasonable estimate of who the top predictors are there. Versus just like a global thing. For a while, one of our top markets on our site was about whether this guy would allow whether this stray cat would allow this random human to pet it. Totally random stuff like that. If you're trying to assess who the best geopolitical thinkers are, who the best economic thinkers are.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say one of the other things that we're interested in, or like the concept of a global leaderboard becomes less important over time the larger our site gets. A lot of the markets that people bet on our personal markets are markets between friends. What you as an individual care about in terms of ranking who the top traders are predictors are really is not all of the markets that we have on our platform, but the subset of markets that are of interest to you. We actually just remove or like we used to have this feature called communities where you could create a community centered around a collection of different markets and we would show the leaderboard just for those markets. And that's a way of judging the ability and skill of predictors within some particular domain that you care about rather than globally. We'll probably bring that back in some capacity in the”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly true that if you're giving away free money, that's not economically sound mechanism. We currently do some things to prevent abuse and bot behavior. I'm not going to tell you what those things are We end up open sourcing our code though, the cat will be out of the bag. You can see for yourself what abuse practices we have in place. I would say that we're not necessarily committed to maintaining our free giveaway or like free sign-up bonus indefinitely. That's definitely partially a growth and just starting golf thing. In the beginning, most of our users are have been very well behaved and haven't abused this system. If more and more people, if Manifold becomes like a key nexus for people trying to weigh in on the future, we may have to be more strict with our policies.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I don't know that I can think of a good example that's directly relevant. Although we did like simplicity of, I guess like both the business model and our user interface for our previous chat app were big considerations. You know, the idea of having, or like a subscription model is kind of like the minimum viable business for like a creator to support themselves in a real way over time. That might be one manifestation of this principle in action, but I don't know.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly correct. I think the most important thing for not just for us and not just for prediction markets, but for creating a usable platform is making sure that the key mechanism is something simple and easy to understand, more so than handling every possible edge case perfectly. You know, as long as the core experience is extremely simple and easy to use and user-friendly, that matters much more than the one percent of cases where, you know.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite small and manageable if you allow users to choose which markets to participate in. They for the most part are making pretty good decisions about where to allocate their time and money.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say the other key piece of the puzzle that other people were missing is the idea of user-resolved markets, which on the surface sounds a little bit crazy, that you just allow anyone to come and create a market on any question where they are also the judge of that question and can resolve it in any way that they want. You know, that obviously opens the door to fraud and abuse and people taking advantage of the system. And the fact that there is a possibility of fraud basically has prevented other people from even exploring this option. Instead, they're opting for oracles or centralized authorities deciding the outcome of all markets. But of course, that severely limits the scalability and reach of a prediction market platform if users can't go on and create their own thing. So it's really realizing that user resolve markets actually can work that led us down this path. There is a small amount of fraud, but it's actually”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's still going basically, we couldn't get the growth that we were hoping for. The ultimate cause is it's kind of too late. Like the creator market is already saturated with all different sorts of tools. Most creators are already monetizing one way or another and aren't keen on moving monetizing using a new platform.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, right before this, my brother and co founder, James and I were working on our app called Throne. It's a subscription group chat app for online creators. So people like you or like Instagram creators or DJs or anyone who's built up an audience online the idea was that they can set up a private group chat where their audience where they're paying a subscription fee to join and basically the premise of our app is that we provide a much better chatting experience for larger groups. So it's designed to accommodate like the creator's entire audience and make that a seamless experience.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess I studied computer science in school, then I went to work for SIG or Susquehanna. It's an options trading firm for a little bit. Then I left to go work for my friends like RoboAdvisor startup where I wrote their portfolio optimizing software. Yeah, so I have some financial experience as well. And all three of us are technical and also have our previous background doing other entrepreneurial things as well. So we're all, we're kind of like full stack entrepreneurs, I guess you could say.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, like fees do impede the efficiency of the market in some sense. There are people who on the margins would trade if there were no fees who don't when there are fees. That certainly is true. But part of the reason why we have fees is to encourage things that we like. We have a creator fee. The creator earns a commission on trades that incentivizes them to create and resolve more markets. We currently have a liquidity fee as well, which feeds into the liquidity pool, which you can think of as subsidizing the entire market.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. Or certainly I'm not implying that a large part or even like a majority of the consumption of political news is based on a desire for accurate information. I think that would be a very, very naive view of how humans operate. But at least a small part of that is. At least some portion of people's desire to consume news actually is to legitimately understand the world. And insofar as people are attempting to do that, prediction markets can help.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longevity research. Well, I would get to say, first of all, I would say that would probably be a much better world. Across a wide variety of domains, I think it's better nearly, but not all cases when people are grounded in terms of facts and well-calibrated predictions instead of pure speculation or ideologically biased thinking. But more concretely, I can imagine a world where the average news article, blog post, CNN station, if that's still around in 10 or 20 years, has like an embedded prediction market on whichever topic that they're discussing. And it'll just allow people to, you know, immediately get a sense of what the most grounded or like it'll immediately ground the opinions that people are hearing, in fact, and make it easier to have more productive conversations. And ultimately allow them to better understand the world.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say yes and no. So, like asset prices of major financial commodities and equities and other instruments are affected by way more factors than another prediction market on a more isolated question on some proxy variable that you care about. The nice feature of prediction markets is that you really can isolate the particular risk that you care about. And even if it's just discussing like one proxy variable that's related to the overall picture, you can still get a much better understanding of the thing that you care about by picking multiple well-targeted proxy variables and creating markets on those rather than like oil prices, you know, which tell you many things, too many things.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except, why I would say like, so in general, the best way to tackle these long-term more speculative questions is to try to break them down and address the proxy variables that are most relevant to predicting their success in the future. So instead of asking like, will the AI apocalypse happen in 2030 or in 2050? You can ask, will OpenAI's GBT4 exceed this number on this benchmark, et cetera? Or similarly for the rock, like instead of asking like, will the ROC be the president in 12 years or whatever, you could ask, what are his polling numbers today? Like, what are his favorability ratings? Will he indicate interest in running show interest in running as a politician, et cetera, et cetera? And those are much more short-term questions, which you can use too, you know, get a sense of, you know.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think, yeah, both of those concerns are very valid. I think a part of this is just like a fundamental human constraint is if things are very far in the future, we care about them less. It doesn't really, you know, that's screen prediction markets, but it's also true in every other domain as well and every other forecasting technique as well. The interest rate is a fact about human nature or like discounting of the future is a fundamental facet of human nature. And you can twiddle with the mechanism here on the margins here or there, but I don't think it'll fundamentally change that. For your second point, your other point is very well taken too, that you can't bet on apocalypse. You're not going to be there to collect your winnings. The money is worth less in that universe. So you should rationally bet against it.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, in general, my view of insider trading is, I basically have Matt Levine's view, is that it should be viewed as a like taking from shareholders rather than a fairness or equity type of discussion. I do think in general, insider trading obviously does benefit price efficiency. This is kind of a way of profiting a roundabout way of corruption in some sense. You can make a deal with some company and then trade on that and instead of the money that never directly passes into your hands, but you're privy to this insider information and the net effect is equivalent to this practice, which we would not normally condone.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that in general, like if you're making a decision in the real world, it's often very difficult to operationalize what the success criterion is down into one thing that the market can then measure and be used to act upon definitively. I would say so that's kind of the biggest case for personal discretion or human involvement in decision making. Or in general, I think prediction markets work best when people are creating markets on a variety of metrics and then using human intuition to figure out what the best course of action is to proceed using that information.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question becomes like why hasn't that happened yet? I would say part of that is just like a usability concerns. It's actually very hard to create a product that's extremely simple and easy for all of your employees to use that doesn't require too much thought but can still yield like reasonable results. And I would say part of our goal with Manifold really is to bring the bar down lower such that more and more people can participate in prediction markets and it be like a pleasant, fun and easy to use experience.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say there are two parts. I would say the first is a rational concern on the part of managers to not use prediction markets because it undercuts their mission. It's not merely an irrational quirk of human nature. Perhaps it is in general, but it's not an irrational quirk of the manager's part in choosing not to use them for certain contexts. The second part is actually, I think the areas where prediction markets more clearly add value without distracting from the mission or hurting management are where they're used for their informational aspects or to do market research. Questions where you need to survey a broad survey of what consumer behavior will be, how our competitors will behave, that sort of thing. I think that's a much clearer example of where prediction markets can provide value in a corporate setting, which doesn't fall prey to most of these downsides.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, can see doubt on the part of employees. And the introduction of a prediction market by itself might just lower the odds that that mission will be successful, even though one wouldn't think that just the addition of more information would actually change the outcome. But I would say that's the biggest point. It steps on management's toes and they don't like that.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. First of all, a lot of companies have tried using prediction markets internal, including Google, GM, the CIA, and a bunch of other firms as well. But for the most part, you find that they will use it. People will talk about it for a bit. They will even praise the benefits of prediction markets, but ultimately they'll abandon them. And I think the main reason for that and a very Hansonian point is that people literally don't want to know the answers to a lot of questions. So in a corporate context, that mostly manifest manifests itself in the manager not wanting to choosing a course or vision for their company and then not wanting to get negative feedback about that. Even if the feedback is mostly positive, the fact, or like it's.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it'll be kind of a bimodal distribution where you'll see a few huge market creators that are high trust and have huge volumes across a lot of their markets. And then there'll be a very long tail of smaller individuals with less of a track record and their markets will be participated on by people closer to them on the social graph, their friends or friends of friends and stuff like that.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are several things. The first is just like onboarding. Only a tiny chunk of the global population actually has created a MetaMask wallet or a Solana wallet or any of these things. And the process of doing that and transferring tokens to the wallet is actually pretty cumbersome and not yet very easy. So that's kind of.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On our site, I think that's well, first of all, we are planning to do things like host tournaments with real cash prizes. That's something that we are able to offer despite being a play money product. We originally started as a crypto idea before pivoting back to Web2. That's funny. We're one of the first firms to pivot from Web3 back to Web2 for usability reasons. But real money crypto, creating a real money crypto offering is something that's on our back burner and something that's worth thinking about, that we're thinking actively thinking about. It would probably be in the form of a separate product, though, rather than as an addition to our current offering.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think that's great. I think that's great. I think that's a very obvious case of pro-social benefit of markets using the market mechanism to, or in some ways is kind of like providing a public good that wouldn't society otherwise wouldn't be able to produce, getting accurate information about corporate malpractices or whatever is very valuable to society, anything that we can do to encourage that is good.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or probably a big one is just like experience. A lot of our top predictors have actually come from other sites and have spent a good deal of time thinking about forecasting and prediction in general. Probably the first hurdle that most people have to overcome in order to start improving as a predictor is getting used to clarifying and crystallizing your views about the world. If you're thinking about some political event, you can very easily incorrectly misremember that you got some event right or not. But if you're not actively putting out like numerical predictions and recording those to keep yourself honest, it's very difficult to improve. So if that's a good first step and a lot of our users already cleared that before joining our site.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm obviously very biased, but I think something like that is possible. I think we have a leaderboard right now. Our top predictors are actually quite good. The person who's currently occupying the top slot, one big on the one of our markets on whether Russia would invade Ukraine in February. So in the forecasting community in general, there actually is, like, as you would expect, a fair amount of overlap between the people who are using these services and financial professionals who actually do manage money or trading as their profession. So don't entirely agree with the premise of the question or Tyler Count's earlier point. Although obviously, as a play money platform, we do attract a fair number of hobbyists who, despite not having a financial background, still are quite good. I do believe that there's a lot of untapped potential in these.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of Yes. So I guess to take a step back for people listening to this, Manifold uses a play money currency. If you sign up right now, we'll give you a thousand manifold dollars, which is our in-platform currency for you to use and bet as you see fit. The reason why we think that Play Money can work is that people are driven more by status and competitiveness than greed. We kind of see ourselves as a social game where people can come on to hone their skills at predicting and then demonstrate to others that they really do know more about what they're talking about and they can prove it with an objective track record from their betting history.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, thanks so much for having me on this podcast, Dorcash. It's great to be on here after seeing other people like Tyler Cowan and David Deutsch. I guess first thing I'm one of three co-founders of Manifold Markets. But what we're doing is building a platform for user-created prediction markets. So the idea is that anyone can come onto our site and create a question about anything that they care about. And then they can have their friends and other people on our site come bet on that. And the betting process through the magic of our market mechanism will help get the best and most calibrated probabilities that you can find.”
2022-05-05 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source