# The LessWrong Team Was Selling Dollars For 86 Cents

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
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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 202**5** we'll be picking the best posts of 202**4.**) 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 will happen or not; if you bet yes, the market displays higher odds it happens, and if whatever the market was about actually happens you get paid based on how unlikely the outcome was when you bet. If it doesn't happen, you lose your stake.

(Note that Manifold Markets uses a fake currency called mana. For a while it was possible to get paid out in USD for predicting correctly, but that's no longer possible.)

After a little messing around with LessWrong's GraphiQL, you can see that there are 4244 total 2024 posts, of which 364 had >=100 karma. Again, there will be about 50 posts in the top 100, which is sort of like saying a 100 karma post becoming a Best Of LessWrong selection has a base rate of about 14%. 

(Anyone better with GraphiQL feel free to double check me.)

*But this is a base rate, and it's pretty dumb.*

Are You Smarter Than A Base Rate?
---------------------------------

Sure, some high karma posts are great. But others have much lower chance of getting immortalized.

Consider the current top crop. There's [The Lightcone is Nothing Without Its People](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc/the-lightcone-is-nothing-without-its-people). It's a fundraiser post. People on LessWrong love it. But is it going to be reread years from now? Is anyone going to nominate it for a Best Of collection? Then there's [Introducing AI Lab Watch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2r9EayvsWJmLBZuF/introducing-ai-lab-watch): cool project, not a very useful post. How about [Research Directions OpenPhil Wants To Fund In Technical AI Safety](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/26SHhxK2yYQbh7ors/research-directions-open-phil-wants-to-fund-in-technical-ai)? I see why it got upvoted, it's useful information for some people, but who is going to look at it two years later and think "yeah, this really matters for recommending to the whole site?" Or [Introducing Open Asteroid Impact](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tBy4RvCzhYyrrMFj3/introducing-open-asteroid-impact), which is a great April Fools post, don't get me wrong, but likely isn't going into the Best Of collection on the strength of the gag. 

(Think I'm wrong about any of those? [Bet](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-the-lightcone-is-nothing-witho) [against](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-introducing-ai-lab-watch-make) [me](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-research-directions-open-phil) [then](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-introducing-open-asteroid-impa). My mana is yours for the taking if you're right.)

Or go for easier fields. A constant question when trading on a market is whether you think you know something that the rest of the market doesn't. You want to know who the dumb money is. Except here LessWrong is the dumb money.

Manifold lets you see how many other people have traded on a market, so you can look for markets with zero traders. You can also skim or filter for markets from LessWrong with exactly 14% odds. Those are places where no human being has spent any individual attention, and quite possibly no other human being will. 

(I'll note that Manifold also gives you a small mana bonus for the first market you trade in every day. That means you could go to one such market a day, make one bet for 20 mana, and come out ahead by 5 mana a day even if you lost every single bet you made.)

Sure, you're locking up your mana. . . except the LessWrong Annual Review is just around the corner. It's not like there's a lot of new updates or changes over time here. You can just wait until late November, make a bunch of bets on last year's posts, and confidently expect the market will resolve in a couple of months. 

Zero And One Are Not Probabilities
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So the next question is if you're actually sure about this. If you buy "No" meaning, say, "Introducing Open Asteroid Impact is not going to be in the Best of LessWrong top 50" then you are in effect paying 86 mana in exchange for 100 mana once it resolves, if it resolves no. 

You are not 100% sure of anything. I admit my title is rounding and clickbaity. 

But I will take odds of 99% on some of these. You, dear reader, may or may not have similar certainty on some markets. There's a lot of safe bets, because again, the automatic process that creates these markets is pretty dumb. What are the kinds of places where you can be sure you have an edge?

*Sometimes* my answer is an inscrutible intuition for the whims of the annual review process. I took a few positions like that. *Mostly* my answer is "because it is obvious to anyone who took five seconds to think about it, but I can tell from the fact that nobody has bid on the market that nobody did."

Take [2023 Survey Results](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-2023-survey-results-make-the-t). It's one of mine. There's a lot of work that goes into the community survey. But it's inherently a kind of navel gazing post, not the kind that winds up in Best Of lists. Keep an eye out for the overly-community focused post.

Or consider the announcement of [Daniel Kahneman's death](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-daniel-kahneman-has-died-make). This is a linkpost to an obituary. In what world does someone nominate this? What would the voters be thinking when they add it to the Best Of collection? Same with [Verner Vinge](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-vernor-vinge-who-coined-the-te). Look for anything where the upvotes that got it to 100 were condolences or agreement with a statement nobody needs to reread

Look at [OMMC Announces RIP](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-ommc-announces-rip-make-the-to). It's an April Fools gag. It was funny when it came out, but I didn't remember it a week later. Gag posts are fun and also correctly struggle in the Annual Review.

I think [A List of 45 Mech Interp Project Ideas From Apollo's Research Interpretability Team](https://manifold.markets/LessWrong/will-a-list-of-45-mech-interp-proje) is a good post for them to make, and a good post for the right sort of person to read. It's obviously not getting a place in the Best Of list, though if anyone went and pulled off one of the projects and made a post maybe that would get there. I have a thesis that AI posts are actually incorrectly frontpaged fairly often, and in particular posts about specific developments or advancements have a hard time making Best Of lists.

This is my same point from Are You Smarter Than A Base Rate again, basically. 

Now, this general strategy of making small EV bets on 'sure things' is colloquially known as picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. I generally get about ten mana for every hundred I risk, so I need to be right at least eleven times for every time I'm wrong. That said, I am allowed to pick my size - I often bet down markets a little bit when I suspect it's wrong, and save my big bets for when I'm actually that sure.

Size appropriately, and don't bet mana you can't afford to lose. Me? I think this particular steamroller is slow and easy to pinch pennies from.

Why Would Anyone Do This?
-------------------------

I'm going to be honest with you; even when you could convert silly internet points into cold hard cash, the return on investment wasn't great. Being totally correct on every post as soon as it came out was worth, like, about a dime's worth of mana unless someone specifically disagreed with you. If it takes you ten seconds to read a post title, click through to check the author, input your bet up or down, and submit your bet, then you'd be making about $36 an hour. You can go faster than that or even automate parts of it, but at some point *you're* the dumb automatic money that you were planning to take from LessWrong.

I did it because I had a thesis about the LessWrong readership, and this was one way to test my predictions.[^m4f2qxpy1r] Being in tune with the vibe of LessWrong is a useful subskill for me.[^ydho82fzeul] I did it because I wanted a cheap place to practice bet sizing and limit order usage. I did it because I like high volume chances to test my prediction and calibration skills.  It's good practice. In a few cases I did it to express a statement about the world, that this kind of thing was or was not a fit for inclusion in the Best Of lists.

(I also did it on principle. I knew those markets were mispriced and it itched.)

You may or may not have the same reasons. It's not a lucrative hobby, that's for sure. And the fewer of you partake, the more easy bets there are for me. But more than LessWrong's generous donation of mana to my coffers, I want those markets to be priced correctly. It'd be nice to know *now* whether the posts I'm writing will be remembered *then*, and so if you're in the market (heh) for an extremely niche hobby, then maybe you should join me.

See you on the other side of the order book.

[^m4f2qxpy1r]: Concisely, my thesis is "there's too much AI content, and it does not actually fit the 'timeless' criteria for frontpage." 

[^ydho82fzeul]: It'd be more useful if more ACX posts were considered, but alas.