Project summary

I blog at Outside The Asylum, mostly about Magic: The Gathering. I have an established audience of Magic nerds who read my content. (Google Analytics tells me that I've had 26,000 total visitors in the past year, though I suspect the real number is lower.)

This seems like an ideal audience for popularizing Manifold; most of them have likely never heard of prediction markets before, but would be open to such a concept. (My Magic articles tend to be on the more technical end of things, touching on math, psychology, and quantitative reasoning in general. For example, I made a Magic-themed probability calibration tool, an explainer for how Bayesian probability applies to shuffling decks of cards, a guide to resolving Magic's dependency system in terms of finding cycles in a directed graph, etc.)

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

My goal is to write high quality articles that touch on Manifold and/or prediction markets in general.

I can't guarantee any specific number of signups, but my blog is popular within a very niche community (it's the top Google result for many searches relating to Magic's rules, such as "MTG dependency"), and the first step to widespread usage is to bring awareness of Manifold's existence to as many different subcultures as possible.

I also plan to write up comprehensive explanations of some particular aspect of prediction markets, which can be linked-to to answer commonly-asked questions.

A few articles that are already in the works:

• An investigation into how informative markets like "will AI wipe out humanity" actually are given the distorted incentives, and an exploration of ways in which prediction markets can still be useful for discussions of existential risk.

• A comprehensive explanation of how online buyers and sellers of trading cards can protect themselves from scams, and how reputation markets on Manifold are likely one of the best solutions.

• A retrospective on Whales vs. Minnows, explaining what actually happened, what led to each of my mistakes, and how people can avoid similar errors in the future.

• A debunking of common misconceptions about "assassination markets", discussing the fundamental difficulties of predicting without influencing the world, and exploring how much of a problem assassination markets actually are.

How will this funding be used?

I don't have a traditional day job, my income comes from various forms of gig work and self-employment. Any money I get from this project is time that I don't have to spend making that money some other way, and is therefore additional time I can put into Manifold.

If this project is funded, I plan to release at least the 4 articles I listed above, and hopefully several more.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

It's a personal blog, but I always ask for external feedback on complicated topics. I plan to run articles by knowledgable people I know in the Manifold community to ensure I don't miss anything before posting them live.

I wrote the original Manifold FAQ in early 2022, which Manifold liked enough to award me one of their first bounties.

I also wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about replacing magic judges with prediction markets on April 1st of that year. (Unfortunately referral links didn't exist yet, so I don't know how many people clicked the links.)

Outside of prediction markets, I've written over 60 articles over the past 4 years, and my blog is currently one of the main information hubs for the Magic judge program.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

A low conversion rate. Manifold has consistently struggled with getting people to understand the value proposition of personal prediction markets, so it's entirely possible that hundreds of people read my articles and not a single one becomes a regular user.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

None.