Manifest x DC
And how you can manifest a 'Manifest x' Too
Though many said it would be impossible to merge the freewheeling, unconference vibes of Manifest with the stiff, suit-wearing culture of our nation’s capital, we took it as a challenge. If a Manifest event could be held in DC, it can be held anywhere.
In the same vein as TEDx, the grassroots spinoff of TED, the inaugural ‘Manifest x’ was more pared down, more intimate, and more locally flavored. The capitoline verve couldn’t be missed. Federal employee attendees turned down anything that could be construed as gifts due to their stringent ethics guidelines. A panel on political forecasting drew questions on the shifting regulatory environment. Center-left think tank operatives mingled tenuously with center-right think tank operatives. The afterparty venue shared a wall with an embassy, causing a few folks to worry that some hapless forecasters might inadvertently violate international law by forcing their way through the wrong entrance.
Luckily the event went off without a hitch. The badges, with a subtle DC flag-and-map motif, came without any embarrassing typos. The shirts arrived to the venue in the nick of time to be handed out. And despite some of the attendees repeatedly betting up “fire” on a market on what might go wrong, there was no fire.
Since attendees to Manifest x DC are more privacy-conscious than the average bunch, I’ll default to anonymity in describing the talks, as well as censor the conference photos the only way I know how. The headline talks were a famed futarchist and a (the?) leading AI forecaster. One of the best exchanges of the night came when they debated how well competitive forecasting questions could extrapolate to economically valuable forecasting.
The panel of Manifold founders unveiled some tentative updates for the firm, and a couple of top Manifold traders unveiled some free trading alpha. I ran a live pub trivia-style forecasting competition where teams worked together to give their answers were given as percentages, and the team with the best-calibrated answers won. Here was the final round. Phone use was prohibited, of course:
As usual, the best parts of the event were conversations in the cracks between the talks. The advantage of a smaller event, with a higher fraction of local attendees, was that less effort had to go into finding people to meet. It was feasible, if you put your mind to it, to talk to nearly every other attendee for at least a passing moment. And many of these attendees might live in your neighborhood! In the bay, every other person works in tech, and in DC, every other person at least peripherally works for the government. It’s far easier to “build things” in the bay than it is to affect policy outcomes in DC, but the group of wonks and bureaucrats that assembled at Manifest x DC were a pretty agile bunch. A community of forecasters from across the government is a pretty unique network unified by epistemology, rather than ideology.
I think there’s a large demand for Manifest x [insert your city here]. We didn’t have to bother putting too much effort into advertising or spreading the word about Manifest x DC because it sold out almost immediately after the first announcement (with a large waitlist as well). We gave some DC local forecasters a week head-start and speakers were enthusiastic about participating in the event, which minimized the legwork required to ensure active participation, as well. But, there was latent demand for a much larger event, and probably sufficient demand in smaller cities for an event of the size we had.
If you—the reader—are passionate about bringing a ‘Manifest x’ to your own locale, we invite you to get in touch! I know that at least a few of you are the kind of people that like hosting more than attending, enjoy having some amount of creative control over an event than your friends will love and talk about, and want to see your own community get off their butts and lay out the red carpet.
Plus, there’s some liquidity in this market to be had if you’d like to beat NYC to the punch:
If you’re interested in the takeaways from this event, I invite you to read John’s much longer and more detailed after action report on LessWrong, containing advice for future organizers.
And if you’re stressed about what it would take to put on a ‘Manifest x,’ well, the worst thing that happened was that we felt guilty about how long the waitlist was getting:
Happy Forecasting!
-Above the Fold
PS: Thanks to John, David, Pratik, the Manifold team, and many others for organizing an outstanding conference.