In responses to James’ plan for a manifold dating site, I just wrote tho following comment.
I think this needs a new kind of market UI, to setup multiple conditional markets in parallel. I think this would be useful in general, and also the natural way to do romance markets, in particular.
What I want is for a user to be able to create a master (conditional) prompt that includes a blank to be filled in. eg “If I go on a date with ____, will we end up in a relationship 2 months later?” or “If I read ____ physics textbook, will I be impressed with it?” or “Will I think the restaurant ____, is better than the Butchers Son, if I eat there?” The creator of this master question can include resolution details in the description, as always.
Then other users can come and submit specific values of for the blank. In these cases, they suggest people, physics textbooks, or restaurants.
However (and this is the key thing that makes this market different from the existing multiple choice markets), every suggestion becomes it’s own market. Each suggestion gets a price between 100% and 0%, rather than all of the suggestions in total having adding up to a probability of 100%.
After all, it’s totally possible that someone would end up in a relationship with Jenny (if they end up going on a date with Jenny) and end up in a relationship with George (if they go on a date with George). And it’s likely that there there are multiple restaurants that one would like better than the Butcher’s Son. There’s no constraint that all the answers have to sum to 100%.
(There are other existing markets that would make more sense with this format. Aella’s one-night stand market for one, or this one about leading AI labs. It’s pretty common for multiple choice questions to not need to sum to 100% probability, because multiple answers can be correct.)
Currently, you can create a bunch of conditional markets yourself. But that doesn’t work well for romance markets in particular, for two reasons.
1. Most of the value of these markets is in discovery. Are there people who the market thinks that I should go on a date with, who I’ve never met?
2. It is very socially forward to create a market “Will I be in a relationship with [Jenny], if we go on one date?” That means that I reveal that I’m thinking about Jenny enough to make a market, to Jenny, and to all the onlookers, which could be embarrassing to her. It’s important that the pairings are suggested by other people, and mixed in with a bunch of other suggestions, instead of highlighted in a single top-level market. Otherwise it seems like this is pushing someone’s personal life into a public limelight too much.
If this kind of market UI existed, I would immediately create a “If Eli goes on a date with ____, will the be in a relationship 3 months later?”, and a link to my existing dating doc, and a large subsidy (we’d have to think about to allocate subsidies across all the markets in a set).
In fact, if it were possible and legal to do this with real money, I would probably prefer spending $10,000 subsidizing a set of real money prediction markets of this form, compared to would spending $10,000 on a matchmaker. I just expect the market (and especially “the market” when it is composed of people who are one or two degrees removed from people that I might like to date), to be much better at suggesting successful pairings.
musings and rough drafts 