Manifold

Indelible memory, yeah.

Because I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Yeah, that was a, there's a startup called Manifold associated with these groups, a rationalist kind of group.

They have, you know, it's like a betting futures kind of thing, a man of fun markets and Manifold.

But they had a, they were, I think as a branding or a commercial enterprise, they made a win a date with Ayala game show musical where they paid, like it was not a bad musical, like the music was bad.

But it was a bunch of people from the community competed to win a date with her.

The future is going to get weird in various ways, although that future is likely to be unevenly distributed and not arrive at its first possible moment.

Will this happen? John Pressman has a Manifold market that expires in July 2027 with a threshold of at least one thousand devices for a week or a consensus that the worm cannot be contained.

As I write this, it is trading at forty-one percent.

This is a cool market of the type that I would use more often if I didn't have to deal with a bunch of hypothetical corner case questions.

Show me the money.

Anthropic revenue hit a highly disappointing sixteen point eight billion in the third quarter, or sixty-seven point two billion dollars annualized.

Manifold's expected IPO value for Anthropic dropped about four percent on the news, which seems fair.

Quote.

Anthropic revenue hit a highly disappointing $16.8 billion in the third quarter, or $67.2 billion annualized.

Manifold's expected IPO value for Anthropic dropped about 4% on the news, which seems fair.

Bailey Lipschultz, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Rebecca Torrance.

Bloomberg.

But Hansen wrote up the academic case for prediction markets generally, invented policy prediction markets, pointed out prediction markets' potential uses in science and governance and corporate governance, and pushed for early prediction markets to get started.

And was upstream of the community that, having heard about Hansen's ideas, then founded and funded Manifold.

which used Hansen's notion of a market scoring rule to not require market makers in every idea's market.

Maybe you'd have somehow ever come across the idea Bayesian's shouldn't predictably update without Hansen's role as a public intellectual turning that into a forceful, in-your-face application of previously invented principles to internal mental life.

And without Robin Hanson's blog, upstream of my own blogging mentioning the topic, and indeed upstream of the subsequent formation of a rationalist community.

And without Robin Hanson's creation of prediction markets, upstream of Manifold.

But it seems to me, looking back over the pieces of history that I know with any intimacy, that history looks a lot more fragile than those people imagine who take it for granted.

I make no claim that the less wrong sequences or the formation of a rationalist community happen inevitably with without Robin Hanson.

So if we fall far short of these numbers for future AI revenues, then this investment will turn out when you look back, say it's twenty thirty and you're looking back at money that was invested in twenty twenty-six or twenty twenty-seven, you look back and say, "Wow, those guys got a terrible rate of return," maybe even a negative real rate of return from their investments.

And then people will look back and say, "This was a bubble." [instrumental music] Welcome to Manifold.

This is a special episode.

It will not be very long because I'm on the road.

They're also available on my X feed, so you can, you can see what it was that I was talking about.

So thanks a lot for joining me.

I'll see you next time on Manifold.

[outro music]

Uh, do you know-

I know Manifest and Manifold.

Yes.

Okay, great.

[laughs]

Great.

Manifold is the prediction market that uses Mana, not real money.

Uh, it is pretty darn popular, and it was started by Austin Chen and a couple other people, I think, with him.

In a blog post explaining why he hired her, CEO Austin Chen listed first among his bullet points, quote, "I specifically enjoyed Caroline's Tumblr and other writings, which I found thoughtful and relatable." This is the blog where Ellison regularly blogged about so-called human biodiversity, a euphemism for scientific racism, and wrote, quote, "How do I signal my genuinely sweet and feminine nature on my dating profile? Should it go before or after the section on wire fraud?" He also wrote that, quote, "Caroline brings specific, useful expertise around finance and systems management to Mana Fund." Which, yeah, I guess I can't argue with that in the same way that Bernie Madoff had very specific expertise.

FTX essentially bankrolled Mana Fund and the associated Manifold Markets, think Polymarket but with fake money, through grants and investments.

This may explain why Chen, citing a, quote, "keen debt to FTX", decided to hire Ellison and pay her using funds derived from her fraud, money Mana Fund is currently fighting the FTX estate over rather than returning to creditors.

Binance.