Manifest X DC was this weekend, hopefully the first of many local spin-offs of Manifest. Despite a late prediction market surge, there were no fires. An attendee wrote a nice post of observations, though he left the afterparty before the lights dimmed and the duels began.

I gave an opening talk, which ended up being more personal and emotional than I'd set out to write. Several attendees asked for the text, so I am posting a lightly edited version of my draft. This is not the version as delivered, I improvised a fair amount, and I think the tone in delivery did a lot of the work. Still, I'm sharing here for those curious.

Good morning. I wanted to say a few words to set the tone for today. I decided to tell a story about a book club that got out of hand.

In college or group houses, community is easy. Years ago, after grad school, I got my own apartment and lived alone for the first time in my life. As my college friends grew up, I noticed that I’d have to be more deliberate about finding community. 

I tried out several groups, for board games, various hobbies. But the one that stuck was a community based on some blogs with good epistemics. They had fun parties and loved arguing about speculative fiction full of strange metaphors. They were definitely weirdos, but they’re my kind of weirdos. I was happy to have found my tribe.

After a while I started to worry my friends weren’t treating these metaphors as metaphors. Some read Meditations on Moloch and took it a bit too seriously. But there was a charge in the air, I liked the feeling, when in January 2020 someone casually mentioned “of course that’s a few months away, several COVID doublings later, so I’m not counting on that.” I remember my reaction distinctly. I liked the ambition, the impressive sanity of taking the abstract seriously, the sense of being in the know on a secret metaphor. But I didn’t think of it as a secret truth, because I didn’t believe it. I scoffed at such a naïve extrapolation of a straight line on a log-scale graph. 

I got that one wrong.

After a couple very strange years, I finally took a trip again. I went to a solstice, and watched with growing concern as my friends sang, “I want it so much. Close my eyes I can taste the Mars dust in the air. In the darkness the space stations shimmer in orbits that I’ll never share.” I’ll be honest, I was pretty shook to discover that my nerdy book club had earnest hymns about space stations at all. I use the plural cause that’s not even the only one about an earnest love for space stations. Again, points for ambition, I loved the vibes. But y'all understand this is metaphorical, right? 

But as I thought that, friends of friends were taking straight line projections on a log-scale graph a bit too seriously. One friend group kinda took over a country, became billionaires for a bit, [looks around] flew out several people in this room to chill, then befriended Michael Lewis just in time for him to write about the fall. Another comparatively sane group bought a hotel that was falling apart for… their blog. You're laughing, but you don't know which of at least three examples I'm referring to. Yet another took an 11-page research paper way too literally and spent an unfathomable sum of VC money, a hundred million dollars, to inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass, with some loops. 

Guys, what the fuck, I started to think... as the piece of glass also started to think... and seem… alive.

I’ve learned from these lessons. My emotions aren’t the reliable signal that I thought they were. There were obviously some better epistemics to be had. But, my emotions also changed. Those two earnest hymns about space stations that so concerned me years ago, now reliably bring me to tears, though each for different reasons. Our community is good at finding terms for concepts I didn’t notice I was missing. That one’s called “value drift,” and can be pretty dangerous. When you notice it, it’s important to stop and ask yourself if the path you’re going down is one you want to take. If you’re becoming a kind of person you want to be.

I thought about this a lot. I decided yes. My friends are smarter than me, and measurably, predictably, less wrong about the future. Some of their friends get pretty off the rails, so it’s important to keep your head… but my friends, they take the implications of their ideas seriously. They turned the number of bednets donated into a niche status symbol, then started to make bednets obsolete. And they’re good people too. I've been a bit annoyed when a friend declines an event because a spreadsheet says it's not the most effective use of time. But when I was unexpectedly in the hospital for a bit last year, they all came to sit with me, without another thought. I’m the one who caved in the end, asking them to make a visitation schedule, cause I got a bit too over-socialized.

I’ve decided I endorse drifting towards their values. I want to be more like my friends.

So now I’m taking the implications of straight lines on a log-scale graph a bit more seriously. They imply there’s promise, and peril, and work to do. I made a manifold markets account. It did not go well at first. But after a few years, I'm managing a consistently positive slope on the graph. I did a bunch of research into how policy and political change tends to work, started giving some advice. I went to New York last month to tell EAs about how this town works. I told them to be specific, take credit when you get something right, be concrete about the outcomes you want, and clear about what your end goals are. That all of that grounding and precision improves the work.

We each have our reasons for being here today, but they all route through an excitement about prediction markets, or better epistemic technology in general. Technology is always a means to an end, though, a better way to do something. In this case that’s a better understanding of truth and an ability to predict the future. But seeing the future is still an intermediate goal. See the future so that you might better do… what? Be concrete, specific. This analysis can repeat a few times, but it should ultimately cache out to some terminal values. 

I'm impatient with drift. What would a better me want, in the end? I introspected for a bit, but then I remembered my lesson and I asked my friends. They said a lot, brevity is not our strength, but it boils down to two things: Conquer death and the stars. So now we have a quest, something to organize our energies and skills, something we’ll need to learn and do the impossible to achieve. I'm excited, I haven't had many quests before. But that’s a lot for 60 people in a group house, it’s more than we can do alone. 

The lesson to take from this story is regardless of how hard what you’re working on is, regardless of whatever quest brought you here today, don’t forget to make friends along the way. 

And with that, some of my friends will now tell you about the sessions they have planned.