This week’s newsletter bears some heavy news for those who haven’t already seen it. But, there is also lots to be excited about!

Our charity program comes to an end…

Why is this happening?

Stripe has requested that we, “make the Mana payment flow a closed-loop system by removing the charitable donation piece”. We have had significant back and forth and have been unable to appeal this decision. We have considered switching providers but it’s unlikely as we aren’t aware of any good ones and there is no guarantee we won’t just run into the same problems again.

What happens next?

It is possible, but unlikely, that Stripe will reverse their decision.

We are doing everything we can to find a workaround, possibly a more limited version of the charity program that does not involve direct mana redemptions. We will need time to determine the viability of this.

What can you do?

Make any final donations at https://manifold.markets/charity by the end of the month.
Join our Discord event, Tuesday 2:30pm PST, where we will be answering questions and listening to what the community has to say about all of this: https://discord.gg/hzkK3pFd?event=1076939911464243250
Reach out to any contacts you may have at Stripe (please maintain a kind and respectful tone!).

The Manifold Markets team is just as frustrated and sad about this as I’m sure many of you are. We will continue to find ways to support charities and EA causes even if it isn’t directly through a mana redemption.

CSPI tournament update

Richard Hanania and CSPI have decided to add $5,000 to their ongoing tournament with Manifold. In addition to the current prizes up for grabs, the trader who has the greatest increase in profit from now till the end of the tournament wins the cash bonus! See full details:

Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology

New $5,000 Prize in the Salem Center/CSPI Forecasting Tournament

As the Salem Center/CSPI forecasting tournament has continued, there has been a bit of a drop-off in participation as it’s become clear to many people that they do not have a good chance of winning. Below, one can see our number of weekly users since the beginning of the tournament in August. Recently, we’ve gone from around 60-80 throughout much of the…

a month ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Richard Hanania

Love is in the air ~

I hope you had as splendid a Valentine’s day as I did, in fact, I even received my first ever Valentine’s card… from my 6-year-old cousin. 😅

In the spirit of embracing capitalism driven holidays, I thought I’d share some of our love markets.

This one from Aella has been going for several months, but has recently gotten spicy after she created her date-me-doc on Manifold and Destiny fans started shipping the two of them. Spindle, a user notorious for throwing mana for seemingly no reason at an outcome and blessing the community with their traunching, took a large position for Vince Offer. Does he know something we don’t?

Scott Alexander even discussed this market and its merits. I particularly enjoyed the potential rom-com he imagined, any of Aella’s close friends want to try and make it a reality?

“Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl does not like boy. But girl’s best friend bet a lot of money on the market that girl and boy would go on at least ten dates. Friend begs girl to go on ten dates with the guy. Guy finds out, realizes he has ten dates to win her over. Hijinks ensue.”

Ro-mantic Monday 2/13/23

That being said, Aella doesn’t seem to be too confident that she will meet someone.

Aella isn’t the only one looking for love on Manifold! We have a whole group going:

Feel free to bet on my current love life drama (or slide in):

You can also bet on founder Austin’s current relationship! They are both heavily invested in YES which prompted Scott Alexander to question whether they know what “hedging is”.

Follow our Youtube/TikTok channel

We are actively seeking out growth avenues and capturing new communities. With so many trending markets on our site, we thought we’d try creating short videos about popular markets and let new media algorithm magic do its thing.

Here is an example video and links to the channels (the same content gets posted to both):

Example video: Is the virus for the next pandemic already here?

https://www.youtube.com/@manifoldmarkets

https://www.tiktok.com/@manifoldmarkets

I also plan to make markets about drama from specific communities we want to target, so if there are any communities you would be excited about trying to infiltrate via short videos and markets let me know!

Meet us in San Francisco!

Some of our team were already living in SF, but Stephen and James also moved there this month. We decided to move into our first office! 🥳

Austin is attending EAG Bay Area this weekend so please go say hi if you see him!

One of our users, Carson Gale, has generously offered to cohost a Manifold Markets party at his house this Friday (24th, 7pm, Presidio of San Francisco). See here for full details if you want to attend and relevant markets.

Manifold in the Wild

Shoutout to Lex Fridman and Aella who talked about Manifold and did some insider trading on their podcast.

Fantastic blog post by Holden Karnofsky, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell, who discusses the most important jobs and even mentions Manifold and other forecasting sites. https://www.cold-takes.com/jobs-that-can-help-with-the-most-important-century/
A neat, little article targeted at the quantum computing community using Manifold.

The Quantum Observer

QC Prediction Markets

One of the perks of working in QC is that there’s plenty to argue about. The technology is so new, there are so many plausible approaches, and so much uncertainty that you can have an argument about anything. There are some perennial favorites: quantum hype, whether NISQ devices will do anything commercially (or otherwise) useful, which interpretation o…

a month ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · The Observer

Scott Alexander’s Mantic Mondays:

Astral Codex Ten

Mantic Monday 1/30/2023

2 months ago · 54 likes · 142 comments · Scott Alexander

Astral Codex Ten

Ro-mantic Monday 2/13/23

a month ago · 82 likes · 361 comments · Scott Alexander

Site Updates

Quadratic funding

I apologise in advance for this next part, but I’m meant to include these abhorrent jokes in this Newsletter thanks to our wonderful new Quadratic Funding mechanism we are testing.

“Why is Hollywood starting to pay more attention to Manifold?
Because it's super fore casting!”
@ForrestTaylor

“What is the difference between love and the CFTC?
Money can't buy me love.”
@MartinRandall

The mechanism itself is pretty cool though, see the test market and more jokes here.

Thanks for reading. Have an amazing week, and hopefully Manifold can make it a lil’ better in some small way <3

David Chee

Above The Fold

Above the Fold - Donate before March!