Why You Can Not Allow Nerds to Congregate with Austin Chen

Manifold:

The Taco Party:

In this engaging conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Austin Chen, co-founder of the prediction market platform Manifold, to discuss the upcoming Manifest conference, the newly launched grant-making entity Manifund, and the unique community that has formed around these initiatives. Austin shares his insights on the diverse group of intellectuals, tech enthusiasts, and "degenerates" that make up the Manifold user base, and how the platform's open, decentralized approach sets it apart from other prediction markets. The hosts and guest also delve into the challenges of creating vibrant social events and communities, the importance of taking initiative, and the potential for Manifund to fill a gap in the current intellectual landscape.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. We are very excited today to be joined by Austin Chen. He is one of the co founders of the prediction market Manifold, though now he is transitioning to work on Manifund, which is their sort of independent grant making entity, which is so excited.

But what he's doing right now as he's transitioning is Prepping and ramping up for basically the conference of the year for us. We're really excited for it aside from natalism conference, which we're also very excited for, because per natalism, right? But last year was the first ever manifest conference.

This is the flagship conference and the one only of manifold. And it was one of the best gatherings we've ever been to in terms of the California people in terms of execution. So you're planning for this we wanted to bring you on to talk about this, to talk about manifold, to talk about mana fund.

And I just wanted to kick this off with

Malcolm Collins: why? No, hold on. We got to kick it off with a good question. Okay. I think that

Austin Chen: was a great question. The

Malcolm Collins: good question is [00:01:00] around the betting pool that was put around when a a sex party would form at last year's event. Oh my God. Orgy.

Yes. Yeah. Can you speak to that? What happened there?

Austin Chen: So this is I think an outgrowth of Manifold's like very like libertarian philosophy. To take like very many steps back about what is special about Manifold, right? We're a prediction market platform where anyone can create any question.

And this was basically from the very beginning, we want it to be a place where instead of the more standard platforms, Metacliss, PolyMarket, Kaoshi, which all have like prediction markets or forecasts. But all of their forecasts and prediction market was like gatekept. They're like approved by the moderators of the platform.

We were like, we don't want this. We want more of a decentralized, like anyone can ask any question kind of system. So I think. Even from the very early days, we had a lot more of the like out there, sketchy, like raunchy degenerate, like crowd of people, but also a lot of people who are like, just very interested in prediction markets for their own sake, like prediction market nerds.

When you put those two together, you get like all kinds of weird questions Will there be an orgy at [00:02:00] Manifest? And I think the New York Times famously covered this maybe in a little bit more Like depth than I would have hoped because you know me i'm like i'm so excited to be on the New York Times Except that my name is now associated with this orgy that happens But yeah, I don't know if there's like too much more about that than what they cover.

It was like somebody who was one of our users was like, there's a bunch of like really spicy things happening. The like rationalist EA crowd is famous for the very loose, like norms on like sexuality, like polyamory, that kind of thing. Maybe there'll be an orgy. It's a thing that has probably ever happened before in like other rationalist parties or something like that.

And there's just like a market for it. And every prediction market can also be viewed as like an incentive market, where if you have inside information, or especially if you have the ability to make the outcome of the market happen, in this case, if you have the ability to make an orgy happen, then it's a very natural thing to bet up, will there be an orgy and just And I think that's basically what happened here.

So I'm like enterprising, like user in our community was like, it probably wouldn't be that hard to get together with the minimum viable orgy. If we can get three people to agree to come [00:03:00] over and have sex. I think they did this off the light, hidden campus. Then we can resolve this market correctly.

So that's my best guess of what happened.

Malcolm Collins: And Elo is one of the speakers. She's one of the speakers this year too. Yeah, that's right and also before we go further to get this all at the beginning if you happen to live in the bay Area and you are a fan of ours and you're not going to one of the natal cons or something because I think that's going to be in austin again This is a great place to meet up because we're going to be there speaking.

And The types of conversations that were happening at the event last year are very similar to what goes on in our discord with speaking of if you haven't seen our discord go check that out with the one caveat I that, because you have people like Eliezer Youkowski again coming this year, you get more of the anti AI side, whereas generally our audience is very pro AI accelerationist.

Yeah, but you also get a lot of accelerationists there yeah, we

Austin Chen: have, for example, Brian Chow coming, who is of the Alliance for the Future 2. 3 that's established. He's been on our podcast.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he has. A number of times, and we've done his a number of times too. Yeah he's great.

So Simone, you can now ask the question that you want. Yeah and

Simone Collins: You've partially answered the question, which I think is, so we're [00:04:00] getting there. And I think we need to dig deeper here is a lot of the people who follow this podcast and who liked this podcast are really starved for Intellectually interesting conversations, not just heterodox, there's a lot of people throw around the word heterodox thinker a lot, and that tends to sometimes just mean that someone's a contrarian, and they just like to troll people or say things that sound controversial, whereas the people who follow this podcast who really love it are like, I just want.

To really discuss something from first principles with people and really have an intellectual conversation. And these people are all over the place and manifest. And one thing that you pointed out was that the people who are drawn to manifold because it's more open are like a mixture of like very analytical people, like super autistic.

And then like also just degenerates and like people who are just willing to be very playful as well. So that seems to be one element of this is that you have a bunch of people who are both fun. And and I think the

Malcolm Collins: bigger element Simone is that prediction [00:05:00] marketplaces create a status hierarchy around real world information because a lot of quote unquote being smart in our society today is based around being able to parrot back a dominant societal narrative.

Whereas. In a prediction market environment, your knowledge about the state of the world today actually has to be predictive of future states. That's true. Which is genuine intelligence. And so it sorts for genuine intelligence and then within prediction marketplaces, it sorts for degenerates with genuine intelligence, which is our audience.

Simone Collins: So