The “metaculus” forecast weights users’ forecasts by their track record and corrects for calibration, I don’t think the details for how are public. Yes you can only see the community one on open questions.
I’d recommend against drawing the conclusion you did from the second paragraph (or at least, against putting too much weight on it). Community predictions on different questions about the same topic on Metaculus can be fairly inconsistent, due to different users predicting on each.
—basically one has to be of a sufficient “level”, and then pay out some tachyons (the coin of the realm) to unlock the Metaculus Prediction for that question. That said, in this case, we’re happy to share the current MP with you. (I’ll message you here in a moment.)
To your question about catastrophic risk from an unknown source, the table in the post doesn’t include that bit, as it’s only summing the %s of the different catastrophic risk questions, but you’re right that you can get something like it from the question you link to:
Which just refers to that 10% decrease by any means, full stop. The Metaculus Prediction there is lower than the Community Prediction, FYI, but is indeed above the 14% you get from summing the other questions. So that makes some sense given that there are the other possibilities, however remote, that are not explicitly named. But it’s also true that there are different predictors on each question, and also the linked to forecast is not explicitly pitched as “summing the other catastrophes up gives you 14% and so this linked to question is meant to produce a forecast of 14+X%, where X is the probability of unnamed catastrophes.”
I hope that was useful. Please do reach out if you’d like to continue the conversation.
Late to the thread, but one further thing I’d note is that it’s entirely possible for multiple different global catastrophe scenarios to occur by 2100. E.g., a global catastrophe in 2030 due to nuclear conflict and another in 2060 due to bioengineering. From a skim, I think the relevant Metaculus questions are about “by 2100” rather than “the first global catastrophe by 2100″, so they’re not mutually exclusive.
So if it was the case that the individual questions added to 14% and the total question added to 14% (which Christian’s answer suggests it isn’t, but I haven’t checked), that wouldn’t necessarily mean a ~0% chance of catastrophe from something else (though it’s at least weak evidence of that, e.g. because if the total question had a forecast twice as high as the sum of the individual questions, that would be evidence in favour of the likelihood of some other catastrophe).
The “metaculus” forecast weights users’ forecasts by their track record and corrects for calibration, I don’t think the details for how are public. Yes you can only see the community one on open questions.
I’d recommend against drawing the conclusion you did from the second paragraph (or at least, against putting too much weight on it). Community predictions on different questions about the same topic on Metaculus can be fairly inconsistent, due to different users predicting on each.
Ah thanks for clarifying (that’s a shame!).
Maybe we could add another question like “what’s the chance it’s caused by something that’s not one of the others listed?”
Or maybe there’s a better way at getting at the issue?
Hi Benjamin, these are great questions! I work with Metaculus and wanted to add a bit of color here:
To your question about how to see the Metaculus Prediction, that’s located: https://www.metaculus.com/help/faq/#tachyon-costs
—basically one has to be of a sufficient “level”, and then pay out some tachyons (the coin of the realm) to unlock the Metaculus Prediction for that question. That said, in this case, we’re happy to share the current MP with you. (I’ll message you here in a moment.)
And as to how the MP is calculated, the best resource there was written by one of the founders, and lives in this blog post: https://metaculus.medium.com/a-primer-on-the-metaculus-scoring-rule-eb9a974cd204
To your question about catastrophic risk from an unknown source, the table in the post doesn’t include that bit, as it’s only summing the %s of the different catastrophic risk questions, but you’re right that you can get something like it from the question you link to:
Which just refers to that 10% decrease by any means, full stop. The Metaculus Prediction there is lower than the Community Prediction, FYI, but is indeed above the 14% you get from summing the other questions. So that makes some sense given that there are the other possibilities, however remote, that are not explicitly named. But it’s also true that there are different predictors on each question, and also the linked to forecast is not explicitly pitched as “summing the other catastrophes up gives you 14% and so this linked to question is meant to produce a forecast of 14+X%, where X is the probability of unnamed catastrophes.”
I hope that was useful. Please do reach out if you’d like to continue the conversation.
That’s really helpful thank you!
Late to the thread, but one further thing I’d note is that it’s entirely possible for multiple different global catastrophe scenarios to occur by 2100. E.g., a global catastrophe in 2030 due to nuclear conflict and another in 2060 due to bioengineering. From a skim, I think the relevant Metaculus questions are about “by 2100” rather than “the first global catastrophe by 2100″, so they’re not mutually exclusive.
So if it was the case that the individual questions added to 14% and the total question added to 14% (which Christian’s answer suggests it isn’t, but I haven’t checked), that wouldn’t necessarily mean a ~0% chance of catastrophe from something else (though it’s at least weak evidence of that, e.g. because if the total question had a forecast twice as high as the sum of the individual questions, that would be evidence in favour of the likelihood of some other catastrophe).