“The LessWrong Team Was Selling Dollars For 86 Cents” by Screwtape

You know what's sweeter than free money? Free money that you take from an organization of smart people who love prediction markets and having good values, by being better at prediction markets and values than they are.

Sadly, you can no longer turn this into actual U.S. legal tender. You can, however, still turn it into mana and bragging points.

The Best Of LessWrong Manifold Markets

Here's the setup.

Once a year, LessWrong picks ~50 posts from two years ago to be the Best Of posts. This is called the LessWrong Annual Review. (So, at the end of 2025 we'll be picking the best posts of 2024.) Any post can be nominated, including things that weren't actually posted to LessWrong, but LessWrong posts with 100+ karma are the default for consideration.

During the year, LessWrong has a bot. That bot looks for posts that get 100 karma, and it makes a market on Manifold Markets for whether that post will make the top fifty during the LessWrong annual review. Each market is initialized to 14% chance that the post reaches that lofty goal.

Manifold Markets is a prediction market platform. That platform shows market about whether something [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) The Best Of LessWrong Manifold Markets

(02:26) Are You Smarter Than A Base Rate?

(04:41) Zero And One Are Not Probabilities

(07:49) Why Would Anyone Do This?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 24th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cuz2q5ygPrHBmQ2Fp/the-lesswrong-team-was-selling-dollars-for-86-cents

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.