a belated review of two manifests

thoughts from going to manifest 2024 and manifest 2025

I went to LessOnline + Manifest last year, and I went again this year. Manifest is a conference/festival on “predictions, markets, and mechanisms.” On the other hand, LessOnline is pitched as a “a celebration of blogging, truthseeking, and original seeing,” and they invited many people who write on the internet to attend. Both were at LightHaven, a hotel-turned-event-space optimized for small group conversations.

I had a wildly positive experience at Manifest last year, and here’s a snippet of what I wrote in my `6 Months after Manifest` draft, which I never published.

Manifest + LessOnline was probably the most transformative 10 days of my life. I went to LessOnline which happened the weekend before, hung around during the week, and Manifest was during the second weekend.

One of the concerns [with conferences] is that attendees experience a high, expect to change their lives, and nothing actually happens. So here’s a list of things that occurred because I went to Manifest:

• Metaculus nerd-sniped me into running an LLM bot in their AI benchmarking tournament, and I finished in the top 10 despite knowing very little about prediction markets going in.

• Found my dissertation topic: LLMs and forecasting

• Met my boyfriend

• Unofficially moved to SF

A year later, I have officially moved to SF. Forecasting with LLMs is one of the three chapters (articles) in my dissertation. The relationship didn’t work out, but I was deliriously happy for a few months.

I went again this year, expecting the same magic.

Tell me that this doesn’t look like it’s from the hobbit

Sadly I was disappointed. Maybe because I currently live in SF and many house parties offer a high caliber of conversation so I’ve been spoiled. The density of people working on cool things is just really high in SF. One of my grad school friends from DC came and thoroughly enjoyed it, rating it one of the best weeks of his life.

There were people that I hung out with last year that I found unpalatable this year. Maybe I’ve been more SF-ied, and thus less interested in the DC policy world norms. I said hi, but mostly avoided them.

Prediction markets have gotten much larger since the Trump inauguration. Attendees were more edgy. There were the Aella polycule shirts, in t-shirt and hoodie form. The t-shirt fabric wasn’t that nice, but the sweatshirts were actually comfy and thick. I’m tempted to wear them, but the print is too egregious. Maybe in NYC or something. Claude tells me that I could scrape off the print without damaging the shirt.

Some attendees asked me why I haven’t frozen eggs and told me that I should (they were young men, one of whom was dating two women at the same time in Japan; I’m still unsure if this is real or just a bit). Then they said that there are places that would let you do IVF for free if you donated half of your eggs, and I jokingly said that I could probably get more money for donating one egg retrieval, and they jokingly started an “auction.” I was too tired to walk away from the conversation, and I should have left sooner.

Another attendee tried to argue with me about how everyone should be able to run their own evals for their specific use-case while not knowing anything about how evals were currently run and had no interest in learning how they currently work. He then kept questioning why I wanted to know the answer for something in an aggravating manner in a later conversation, and I straight-up just walked away from that conversation.

I became better friends with some acquaintances (and seriously considered moving to Berkeley because I wanted to become better friends with them). I learned a lot about writing and LLMs, or how the Federal Reserve is essentially self-regulating—they tell Congress the types of laws that should be passed, and work with committees to draft them. I also met some cool internet people.

LessOnline last year was less interesting to me than Manifest, but the opposite occurred this year. LessOnline had about the same number of attendees this year as Manifest last year (~600). I suspect they also drew a more thoughtful crowd of people. Manifest also stretched Lighthaven to its limits with close to 700 attendees, and the sessions were extremely full too.

One of my friends only got a day pass, and I might do this going forward.