If this gained enough traction we could be dealing with so-called 'self-fulfilling prophecies'.
Metaculus
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Metaculus
#22If this gained enough traction we could be dealing with so-called 'self-fulfilling prophecies'.
Would you mind outlining the details of how that might happen in the case of Metaculus?
For prediction markets I understand it, but not for a forecasting community like Metaculus.
Re: Metaculus
#23There'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.
> Congress ... worried "The media storm hit on July 28, 2003, when two senators (falsely) complained that we were planning to let people bet on individual terrorist attacks. The next morning the secretary of defense announced that FutureMAP was cancelled. In the intervening day, no one from Congress asked us if the accusations were correct, or if the more offending aspects could be cut from the project. DARPA said no…
*prediction markets was the term I was searching for and this was the story I was referring to. Thanks!
Re: Metaculus
#24You 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…
Forecasting in tournaments — head-to-head on the same set of questions — is the true test of forecasting ability.
Re: Metaculus
#25James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds" explores this the idea of harnessing collective intelligence in detail. The basic idea is that when everyone in a crowd makes a prediction or an estimate, the average of all those guesses will often be more accurate than any individual's opinion because individual errors, biases, and idiosyncrasies tend to cancel each other out in a large enough group.
There's also the related idea of Superforecasting (explored initially by Tetlock): some people seem to just be really damn good at assigning probabilities to events. A platform like Metaculus allows finding those people and, at least to some extent, training them.
Yeah, Metaculus trains, identifies, and hires "Metaculus Pro Forecasters" for particular projects: https://www.metaculus.com/help/faq/#what-are-pros