In the recent craze about the discovery of a new superconductor, there’s a bunch of tweets that stood out around that story (yeah, I refuse to call them x’s for now). Those were tweets about some site called Manifold Markets.

At first I thought it was some kind of crypto bullshit so didn’t pay much attention to it. I’m actually interested in crypto, but I’m really wary of anything that smells like it, because of all the shady stuff that orbits around it.

Turns out Manifold Markets has nothing to do with that. This site is more like some sort of game. You get fake money (called Mana), and are supposed to bet it by answering all kinds of questions suggested by other users.

There is no way to redeem or get any goods for that money, so ultimately it’s not about the money at all. The idea is that by playing the game users will try to optimize their answers to make as much mana as possible. You get to test your prediction skills against reality itself.

If you get the correct answer to a question, for example, Will the LK-99 room temp, ambient pressure superconductivity pre-print replicate before 2025? then you will get more mana in exchange. If you got it wrong, you lose it all. More interestingly: if you bet against what most people answered, you’ll get even more mana.

Every question in the app behaves like a market, and in the end the answers are supposed to converge to the actual chances of that question answer being «yes» or «no». By betting more mana you increase your risk, and by doing so the market updates to reflect your decision. By observing how the markets evolve you can either increase your stakes or get out of it and search another question in which to bet.

I’ve become absolutely addicted to the site. It’s extremely rewarding to get right the answer of a question that many people got wrong, and also humbling to realize that my vision in many questions was not as precise as I thought. Observing the convergence of answers and how they update when new information appears is a great way to get informed and have a glimpse into potential futures.