TLDR
Manifold is hosting a festival for prediction markets: Manifest 2024! We’ll have serious talks, attendee-run workshops, and fun side events over the weekend. Chat with special guests like Nate Silver, Scott Alexander, Robin Hanson, Dwarkesh Patel, Cate Hall, and more at this second in-person gathering of the forecasting & prediction market community!
Tickets & more info: manifest.is
WHEN: June 7-9, 2024, with LessOnline and Summer Camp starting May 31
WHERE: Lighthaven, Berkeley, CA
WHO: Hundreds of folks, interested in forecasting, rationality, EA, economics, journalism, tech and more. If you’re reading this, you’re invited!
People
Manifest is an event for the forecasting & prediction market community, and everyone else who’s interested. We’re aiming for about 500-700 attendees (you can check the markets here!).
Current speakers & special guests include:
Content
Everything’s optional, and there’ll always be a bunch of sessions running concurrently. Like last year, we’ll host a mix of talks from experts, attendee-run workshops, and fun side events. We’re especially excited about attendee-run sessions — people loved hosting their own and attending their friends’. Topics range from:
forecasting in journalism & government
legalizing prediction markets
AI forecasting (& AIs making forecasts)
the case against forecasting/prediction markets
adjacent experimental stuff (impact certificates, quadratic voting, etc)
…and much, much more!
Since Manifest is forecasted to be bigger this year, we’re putting extra effort into making it easier for the right people to connect. We’ll have interest-specific meetups for politics, journalism, AI, mechanism design, etc — and plenty of infrastructure for you to run your own sessions on topics you’re excited about.
Last year’s content
To give you a sense of what to expect, here were some talks from last year:
Prediction Markets in Journalism — Scott Alexander (ACX) and Dylan Matthews (Vox)
Fireside Chat — Nate Silver (538)
Biggest Questions in AI Forecasting — Matthew Barnett (Epoch AI)
The Future of Trust and Evidence in the Age of AI — Emmett Shear (Twitch, YC, OpenAI)
Improving AI Benchmarks — Isabel Juniewicz (Open Philanthropy)
Revolution Strategies — Robin Hanson (GMU, Mercatus Center)
Prediction Markets vs. Financial Markets — Byrne Hobart (The Diff)
Genetic Enhancement: Prediction Markets for Future People — Jonathan Anomaly
And some side events from last year:
Poker tournament with ex-pros (and live betting, ofc)
Spicy live polling (and live betting, ofc)
Wrestling in the park (and live betting, ofc)
Magic: the Gathering tournament (and live… you get the idea)
Night market
Jazz Jam (BYO Instrument)
Speedfriending
Lightning talks
Descent into Dance Hell, run by Aella
And a whole lot of smaller, attendee-run events too! We’re looking forward to hosting even more of them this summer.
Testimonials Festimonials
Manifest 2023 was pretty awesome. But don’t take our word for it — the median response on the feedback form was 10⁄10 (n=152). Here were some of our favorite festimonials:
The vibes were immaculate. I was actively excited by easily 70% of the talks and side conversations. Fantastic.
Kudos to the whole team. Definitely worth crossing an ocean and a continent to attend. Thanks for everything 💙
The venue, the vibe, the weather, the speakers, the size, the weekend, the food, the fun, the laughs, the markets, the mayhem, the everything
Variety of events, fun things as well as serious. High density of interesting people to talk to. Great food and site.
You can look through more festimonials here, or read the New York Times’ piece here.
Place
Just like last year, Manifest will be held at Lighthaven. We credit much of the great vibes of Manifest 2023 to the space — it’s beautiful and cozy. It has literal fires for literal fireside chats, infinite nooks for one on one conversations, spaces for small workshops & big talks, and (gorgeous) overnight accommodations.
Extra events
But Manifest this year is so much more than just a 3-day festival. It’s really a 10-day extravaganza that happens to end with Manifest:
Lightcone Infrastructure — the team behind LessWrong and the venue Lighthaven — are hosting their own festival the weekend prior to Manifest, called LessOnline. And to bridge the two big weekend events, we’re collaborating with them to host Summer Camp in between. All in the same location.
You can come to any combination of these three events, but we’re offering a $200 discount if you buy tickets to all three events together.
We’re excited about this experiment because we believe in the power of immersive events and repeated interactions. We’re really excited about providing value by sparking longterm collaborations and friendships, and we wonder whether perhaps a ten day event can do that far better than a two or three day one.
LessOnline
LessOnline is a festival celebrating truth-seeking, optimization, and blogging. It’s an opportunity to meet people you’ve only ever known by their LessWrong username or Substack handle.
It will bring together a “mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.”
The structure will be determined by you: LessOnline will have a collaborative schedule for “unconference” sessions, where attendees can sign up to run anything they want.
Summer Camp
In the week between LessOnline and Manifest, come hang out at Lighthaven with other attendees! Cowork and share meals during the day, attend casual workshops and talks in the evening, and enjoy conversations by the (again, literal) fire late into the night.
Summer Camp will be pretty lightweight: we’ll provide the space and the tools, and you & your fellow attendees will bring the discussions, workshops, tournaments, games, and whatever else you’re excited about organizing.
Here are the types of events you’ll see at Summer Camp:
Hackathons (or “Forecastathons”)
Organized discussions and workshops
Jam sessions and dance parties
Games of all kinds: social deception games, poker, MTG, jackbox, etc.
Campy activities: sardines, s’mores, singalongs
Multi-day intensive workshops, e.g. a CFAR-style workshop or a Quantitative Trading Bootcamp (Note: these may come at some extra cost, TBD by the organizers)
Tickets & contact
You can buy tickets here :)
If you’re interested in sponsoring or speaking at Manifest, schedule a meeting with Saul here, or email him here. For any other questions, join us on Discord!
What are the norms on drug/alcohol use at these events?
On a scale from ‘absent from the campus and if found with legal substances you will be expelled from the event and possibly the community’ to ‘use of pharma or illegal drugs is likely to be common and potentially encouraged by mild peer pressure’?
i’ll give two answers, the Official Event Guidelines and the practical social environment.[1] i will say that i have have a bit of a COI in that i’m an event organizer; it’d be good if someone who isn’t organizing the event, but e.g. attended the event last year, to either second my thoughts or give their own.
Official Event Guidelines
Unsafe drug use of any kind is disallowed and strongly discouraged, both by the venue and by us.
Illegal drug use is disallowed and strongly discouraged, both by the venue and by us.
Alcohol use during the event is discouraged, but you can bring & drink your own if you drink responsibly. However, at the official afterparty (and possibly at some points during Summer Camp), we may serve drinks. Broadly, our rules with regard to alcohol are “drink responsibly; please don’t drink during the day; definitely don’t drink if you’re going to drink irresponsibly, because that will be no fun for us and definitely no fun for you.” The social environment will not be conducive to alcohol during the day, and probably not super conducive at night.
practical social environment
during the main event, drugs & alcohol are pretty strongly discouraged. it makes the event lower quality for everyone.
during the official afterparty, we’ll probably serve alcohol in moderate, safe amounts. we will not be serving drugs, and the social environment will probably not be very conducive to drugs.
i could imagine that external, unofficial parties/meetups/etc have a different vibe. for these, my guess is that if you can imagine something between a regular conference meetup at a bar and a college party, you’re probably somewhere on the right track. note that you are on your own if you attend external, unnofficial parties.
for future reference, i do not necessarily endorse the practical social environment. more formally, the stance i take was written in the first bullet point (the Official Event Guidelines), regardless of anything written in the second bullet point.