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Metaculus

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Re: Metaculus

#3
You can gain reputation by simply forecasting the same outcome as the (publicly available) average probability of everybody - so a user that forgets to forecast on questions is gonna be worse off than a bot who just follows the crowd.

However it gets more interesting when you try to beat the crowd - because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one. You can learn more about scoring functions and how to measure the accuracy of everyone's forecasts: https://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/

Personally I have opened one question, and it involves predicting the net sales of Apple Vision Pro until 2025: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17407/apple-vision-pro-n...

Re: Metaculus

#4
There's a paper somewhere on these kinds of markets for forecasting events. I hope someone can link to it.

I think Congress shut down funding for the research as they were worried it would become self fulfilling. Like if there is a $50M bet on some world leader being assassinated (or something horrible like that), that could put pressure that would lead to it occurring when it wouldn't otherwise.

Re: Metaculus

#5

There's a paper somewhere on these kinds of markets for forecasting events. I hope someone can link to it. I think Congress shut down funding for the research as they were worried it would become self fulfilling. Like if there is a $50M bet on some world leader being assassinated (or something horrible like that), that could put pressure that would lead to it occurring when it wouldn't otherwise.

That’s a dead pool by another name.

Re: Metaculus

#8

You can gain reputation by simply forecasting the same outcome as the (publicly available) average probability of everybody - so a user that forgets to forecast on questions is gonna be worse off than a bot who just follows the crowd. However it gets more interesting when you try to beat the crowd - because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very l…

> because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one.

A prediction market is a zero-sum game, and you should only participate if you expect you can beat the market, which you shouldn't expect to be able to on average. But this is not true for Metaculus, which is a prediction aggregator and can create more virtual internet points when there are more participants. So even if you don't expect to do better than the community on average, you can still earn positive points on average. You have to be really confidently wrong to get a bad negative score on Metaculus.

Re: Metaculus

#9

There's a paper somewhere on these kinds of markets for forecasting events. I hope someone can link to it. I think Congress shut down funding for the research as they were worried it would become self fulfilling. Like if there is a $50M bet on some world leader being assassinated (or something horrible like that), that could put pressure that would lead to it occurring when it wouldn't otherwise.

> Like if there is a $50M bet on some world leader being assassinated

Such bets would be (and are) obviously not allowed, so this isn't an argument against prediction markets in general.

But unfortunately they are indeed banned in the US, which prevents them from becoming mainstream. They have a lot of big potential applications. I recommend this article for an overview:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq

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