It seems underrated for LessWrong to have cached high quality answers to questions like this. Also stuff on exercise, nutrition, parenting and schooling. That we don’t really have a clear set seems to point towards this being difficult or us being less competent than we’d like.
Nathan Young
Karma: 1,163
Nevertheless lots of people were hassled. That has real costs, both to them and to you.
If that were true then there are many ways you could partially do that—eg give people a set of tokens to represent their mana at the time of the devluation and if at future point you raise. you could give them 10x those tokens back.
I’m discussing with Carson. I might change my mind but i don’t know that i’ll argue with both of you at once.
Austin said they have $1.5 million in the bank, vs $1.2 million mana issued. The only outflows right now are to the charity programme which even with a lot of outflows is only at $200k. they also recently raised at a $40 million valuation. I am confused by running out of money. They have a large user base that wants to bet and will do so at larger amounts if given the opportunity. I’m not so convinced that there is some tiny timeline here.
But if there is, then say so “we know that we often talked about mana being eventually worth $100 mana per dollar, but we printed too much and we’re sorry. Here are some reasons we won’t devalue in the future..”
Austin took his salary in mana as an often referred to incentive for him to want mana to become valuable, presumably at that rate.
I recall comments like ‘we pay 250 in referrals mana per user because we reckon we’d pay about $2.50’ likewise in the in person mana auction. I’m not saying it was an explicit contract, but there were norms.
From https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Charitable-donation-program-668d55f4ded147cf8cf1282a007fb005
“That being said, we will do everything we can to communicate to our users what our plans are for the future and work with anyone who has participated in our platform with the expectation of being able to donate mana earnings.”
″everything we can” is not a couple of weeks notice and lot of hassle. Am I supposed to trust this organisation in future with my real money?
Well they have a much larger donation than has been spent so there were ways to avoid this abrupt change:
“Manifold for Good has received grants totaling $500k from the Center for Effective Altruism (via the FTX Future Fund) to support our charitable endeavors.”
Manifold has donated $200k so far. So there is $300k left. Why not at least, say “we will change the rate at which mana can be donated when we burn through this money”(via https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Charitable-donation-program-668d55f4ded147cf8cf1282a007fb005 )
Carson:
Ppl don’t seem to understand that Manifold could literally not exist in a year or 2 if they don’t find a product market fit
Carson’s response:
There was no implicit contract that 100 mana was worth $1 IMO. This was explicitly not the case given CFTC restrictions?
Carson’s response:
weren’t donations always flagged to be a temporary thing that may or may not continue to exist? I’m not inclined to search for links but that was my understanding.
seems like they are breaking an explicit contract (by pausing donations on ~a weeks notice)
seems breaking an implicity contract (that 100 mana was worth a dollar)
Nathan and Carson’s Manifold discussion.
As of the last edit my position is something like:
“Manifold could have handled this better, so as not to force everyone with large amounts of mana to have to do something urgently, when many were busy.
Beyond that they are attempting to satisfy two classes of people:People who played to donate can donate the full value of their investments
People who played for fun now get the chance to turn their mana into money
To this end, and modulo the above hassle this decision is good.
It is unclear to me whether there was an implicit promise that mana was worth 100 to the dollar. Manifold has made some small attempt to stick to this, but many untried avenues are available, as is acknowledging they will rectify the error if possible later. To the extent that there was a promise (uncertain) and no further attempt is made, I don’t really believe they really take that promise seriously.
It is unclear to me what I should take from this, though they have not acted as I would have expected them to. Who is wrong? Me, them, both of us? I am unsure.”
Threaded discussion
Counter point: We would likely guess that the graph of rent to income would look similar.
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Do you find it dampens good emotions. Like if you are deeply in love and feel it does it diminish the experience?
I write this song about Bryan Caplan’s My Beautiful Bubble
https://suno.com/song/5f6d4d5d-6b5d-4b71-af7b-2cc197989172
I wish there were a clear unifying place for all commentary on this topic. I could create a wiki page I suppose.
Sure sounds good. Can you crosspost to the EA forum? Also I think Nicky’s pronouns are they/them.