5. Questions with Austin, Stephen, Sinclair, & James from Manifold

Your hosts Jacob (@Conflux) and Andrew (@Imbens) have journeyed to Manifold headquarters to interview Manifold cofounders Stephen Grugett (@SG) and Austin Chen (@Austin), with additional appearances from developer Sinclair Chen (@Sinclair) and cofounder James Grugett (@JamesGrugett). We discuss a wide range of topics, many suggested via bounty market: the rebrand of markets as questions (and whether we need to rebrand as the Question Manipulation Podcast), Manifold’s name backstory, the upcoming Manifest conference, Austin’s relationship markets, dogfooding, Manifund, bounty markets themselves, banning philosophy (as applied to Levi Finkelstein), the real reason Manifold employees sometimes write bad resolution criteria, Mana-chan, catgirls among us, what Manifold will look like in a million years — and we ask each of them to guess the chance that Crystal Ballin’ will become real by September.

Read about the podcast on Above the Fold!

Links:

• Manifest website
• Will non-adults be permitted to attend Manifest 2023? (88%)
• Am I one of the speakers at Manifest? (23%) / Will I attend Manifest? (11%)
• Rachel & Austin's Wedding
• Will the Crystal Ballin’ podcast release an episode before September? (78%)
• What topics should we discuss on Episode 5 of the Market Manipulation Podcast?
• Will Superalignment succeed? (15%) / according to Eliezer Yudkowsky (6%) / according to Joshua (10%)
• Will Silicon Valley Bank file for bankruptcy by April 1st? (N/A)
• (resolved 69%)
• ​​Will catgirls walk among us by 2030 (10%)
• was gonna make a market about James' last prediction, but 7-year close dates don't work...

0:00 Intro

0:35 [Austin] Markets vs questions

2:30 Manifold's name

5:02 Manifest

8:28 Relationship markets

8:58 Dogfooding

9:58 Manifund

11:22 Crystal Ballin's chances

13:43 [Stephen] Inspiration

14:29 Bounties

15:38 Mana-chan

16:56 Banning philosophy/Levi

19:52 Manifold team's resolution criteria

25:39 CB

26:24 Wobbles

28:11 [Sinclair + James] Hot takes

30:55 Catgirls among us

32:31 CB

33:15 M$ in 1M years