Probably no Manifold users have a gambling problem (maybe just that one guy?) but, just in case, now Manifold can say it has what casinos call a self-exclusion program. Kind of?
Mostly we expect this to be useful the other way around. Maybe Scott Alexander convinced you that prediction markets are the bees’ knees. Maybe you even agree that making predictions is a skill worth training or just epistemically virtuous. But maybe after betting in a couple markets you got overwhelmed and failed to get the habit to stick? Maybe you built up a streak and, despite Manifold literally paying you to maintain it, you broke it and immediately fell head-first off the wagon. [1]
We’ve got your back!
Wait, so what is Manifold?
It’s a play-money prediction market where anyone can create a market for any question. We’ve blogged about it before and we’ve made lots of markets about Beeminder. It’s amazing and we highly recommend it!
How the integration works
You just head to beeminder.com/manifold or click the Manifold logo on the Beeminder front page, and then just follow the prompts.
Everything you do on Manifold is public so we don’t need any pesky authorization — just tell us your Manifold username and we’re off to the races:
Then just decide whether, when left to your own devices, you’ll do more betting or less betting than you rationally endorse:
That’s also where you pick the number of bets per day — depicted as a bright red line on your graph — that you’re committing to stay over or under. Et voila, you have a spiffy new graph:
Wait, I’m a Manifold user new to Beeminder!
Welcome aboard! You might want to check out our getting started guide in our Help Docs, and then get yourself signed up. Assuming you’re on board with the commitment device, paying-money-if-you-go-off-track bit, the beauty of an autodata integration is that you don’t normally need to interact with Beeminder once you’ve gone through the process above of setting up your commitment. Just go place some bets (or go outside or something if you made a do-less goal) when Beeminder yells at you and you’re good.
Ok, and in case you didn’t actually read any of this and jumped down here for the punchline, just click this button and there’s a decent chance you’ll figure it out as you go:
PS: Have some meta-markets
- How many Beeminder goals will people create to beemind their betting?
- What fraction of Beeminder/Manifold goals will be do-more?
Footnotes
[1] We have a very old but we’ll immodestly say classic blog post about how fragile streaks are motivation-wise. In short: streaks work great once you have a streak built up but (a) how do you bootstrap that? and (b) if you ever break it then all the motivational power it had bursts like a bubble. Beeminder is the streak concept done right.