hey! skimmed this & thought it was great, good luck with all your plans :)

thought i'd add — you might consider posting a funding app on manifund & linking it here? gives people a quick/easy way to donate to you. (coi, i work at manifund)

[quick answer from my phone]

all or roughly all dev work was done by rachel & austin. at the time, austin was at manifold; he’s now at manifund.

not too much bite from crypto donors/other nonstandard funders, though we also haven’t tried very hard.

Commenting to signal-boost that @frances_lorenz , who works on the EAG team, has responded here.

You can do this in parallel to having this post publicly; in fact, you can even email them to notify them that this post exists! However, I wouldn't expect that they'll see this question on the Forum by default. There's a lot of content on the Forum, and the EAG team is extremely busy.

I think it's quite possible that OP has built quantitative models which estimate GCR, but that they haven't published them (e.g. they use them internally).

i've been working at manifund for the last couple months, figured i'd respond where austin hasn't (yet)

here's a grant application for the meta charity funders circle that we submitted a few weeks ago, which i think is broadly representative of who we are & what we're raising for.

tldr of that application:

• core ops
  • staff salaries
  • misc things (software, etc)
• programs like regranting, impact certificates, etc, for us to run how we think is best^[1]

additionally, if a funder was particularly interested in a specific funding program, we're also happy to provide them with infrastructure. e.g. we're currently facilitating the ACX grants, we're probably (70%) going to run a prize round for dwarkesh patel, and we'd be excited about building/hosting the infrastructure for similar funding/prize/impact cert/etc programs. this wouldn't really look like [funding manifund core ops, where the money goes to manifund], but rather [running a funding round on manifund, where the funding mostly^[2] goes to object-level projects that aren't manifund].

i'll also add that we're a less funding-crunched than when austin first commented; we'll be running another regranting round, for which we'll be paid another $75k in commission. this was new info between his comment and this comment. (details of this are very rough/subject to change/not firm.)

1. ^{^}

   i'm keeping this section intentionally vague. what we want is [sufficient funding to be able to run the programs we think are best, iterate & adjust quickly, etc] not [this specific particular program in this specific particular way that we're tying ourselves down to]. we have experimentation built into our bones, and having strings attached breaks our ability to experiment fast.

2. ^{^}

   we often charge a fee of 5% of the total funding; we've been paid $75k in commission to run the $1.5mm regranting round last year.

I thought this was great. Thank you for writing this, Eli!

Meta: Thanks for your response! I recognize that you are under no obligation to comment here, which makes me all the more appreciative that you're continuing the conversation. <3

***

I've engaged with the Collins' content for about a minute or two in total, and with them personally for the equivalent of half an email chain and a tenth of a conversation. Interpersonally, I've found them quite friendly/reasonable people. Their shared panel at the last Manifest was one of the highest rated of the conference; multiple people came up to me to tell me that they really enjoyed it. On their actual content, I think Austin and/or Rachel have much more knowledge/takes/context — I deferred to them re: "does their content check out." Those were my reasons for inviting them back.

I'll add that there is a class of people who have strongly-worded, warped, and especially inflammatory headlines (or tweets, etc), but whose underlying perspectives/object-level views can often be much more reasonable — or at least I strongly respect the methods by which they go about their thoughts. There's a mental wince to reading one of their headlines, where in my head I go "...oh, god. Man, I know what you're trying to say, but couldn't you... I dunno, say it nicely? in a less inflammatory way, or something?" And I often find that these people are actually quite kind/nice IRL — but you read their Twitter, or something, and you think "...oh man, these are some pretty wild takes."

I'm not too sure how to act in these scenarios/how to react to these types of people. Still, the combination of [nice/bright IRL] + [high respect for Rachel & Austin's perspective on object-level things] = the Collins' probably fall into the category of "I really dislike the fact that they use clickbaity, inflammatory titles to farm engagement, but they (probably) have high-quality object-level takes and I know that they're reasonable people IRL."

I appreciate your bringing to attention their YouTube channel, which I hadn't seen before. I'm not heartened by the titles, though I haven't reviewed the content.

***

Again — thanks for your comments. I'm going to continue copying the note below in this and following comments, both for you & for posterity.

(To Ben & anyone else who’s reading this: I’d be happy to hop on a call with anyone who’d like to talk more about any of the decisions we’ve made, take notes on/recording of the call, then post the notes/recording publicly here. https://savvycal.com/saulmunn/manifest )

Hi Ben! Thanks for your comment.

I'm curious what you think the upsides and the downsides are?

I'll also add to what Austin said — in general, I think the strategy of [inviting highly accomplished person in field X to a conference about field Y] is underrated to cross-pollinate among and between fields. I think this is especially true of something like prediction markets, where by necessity they're applicable across disciplines; prediction markets are useless absent something on which to predict. This is the main reason I'm in favor of inviting e.g. Rob Miles, Patrick McKenzie, Evan Conrad, Xander Balwit & Nico McCarty, Dwarkesh Patel, etc — many of whom don't actively directly straightforwardly obviously clearly work in prediction markets/forecasting (the way that e.g. Robin Hanson, Nate Silver, or Allison Duettmann do). It's pretty valuable to import intellectual diversity into the prediction market/forecasting community, as well as to export the insights of prediction markets/forecasting to other fields.

(And also, a note to both Ben & anyone else who’s reading this: I’d be happy to hop on a call with anyone who’d like to talk more about any of the decisions we’ve made, take notes on/recording of the call, then post the notes/recording publicly here. https://savvycal.com/saulmunn/manifest )