2 months ago
- Manifest is a conference for the rationalist community, focusing on topics like AI, prediction markets, and self-improvement.
- Sessions included unusual exercises, such as a 'reinforcement learning' workshop where men attempted to become more desirable by receiving feedback, but it often ended in failure.
- Attendees aim to optimize their lives, treating social interactions and even reproduction as problems to be solved through data and markets, like selecting embryos for higher IQ.
- Prediction markets are central to the community, with advocates like Robin Hanson promoting 'futarchy'—using markets to make political and personal decisions.
- The culture combines hedonism (e.g., public cuddling, ketamine use) with a distrust of traditional institutions, seeking to replace expert control with market-driven knowledge.
- Despite its anti-establishment vibe, Manifest has ties to power, including figures from tech and finance, and aspires to become a more influential version of elite gatherings like Davos.
- The movement believes in radical transparency, using markets to reveal personal information (e.g., relationship odds, sexual desires), which is seen as a way to improve outcomes through 'annealing.'