This is more a ‘skill I’d like to see more of in the EA community’, rather than a career track. It seems a generally valuable skill set for a lot of EA work, and having some people develop expertise/very high performance in it (e.g. becoming a superforecaster) looks beneficial to me.
Do you see this as a niche skill for a few people to highly develop (like software development), or a skill all EAs should ideally develop (like statistics)?
I’d like to see more forecasting skills/literacy ‘in the water’ of the EA community, in the same way statistical literacy is commonplace. A lot of EA is about making the world go better, and so a lot of (implicit) forecasting is done when deciding what to do. I’d generally recommend most people consider things like opening a Metaculus account, reading superforecasting, etc.
This doesn’t mean everyone should be spending (e.g.) 3 hours a day on this, given the usual story about opportunity costs. But I think (per the question topic) there’s also a benefit of a few people highly developing this skill (again, a bit like stats: it’s generally harder to design and conduct statistical analysis than to critique one already done, but you’d want some folks in EA who can do the former).
Ozzie Gooen has got funding “to build an online community of EA forecasters, researchers, and data scientists to predict variables of interest to the EA community”. Excited to see the outcome of this.
Forecasting
This is more a ‘skill I’d like to see more of in the EA community’, rather than a career track. It seems a generally valuable skill set for a lot of EA work, and having some people develop expertise/very high performance in it (e.g. becoming a superforecaster) looks beneficial to me.
+1
To those interested in becoming better forecasters: I strongly recommend the list of prediction resources that Metaculus has put together.
Do you see this as a niche skill for a few people to highly develop (like software development), or a skill all EAs should ideally develop (like statistics)?
A bit of both:
I’d like to see more forecasting skills/literacy ‘in the water’ of the EA community, in the same way statistical literacy is commonplace. A lot of EA is about making the world go better, and so a lot of (implicit) forecasting is done when deciding what to do. I’d generally recommend most people consider things like opening a Metaculus account, reading superforecasting, etc.
This doesn’t mean everyone should be spending (e.g.) 3 hours a day on this, given the usual story about opportunity costs. But I think (per the question topic) there’s also a benefit of a few people highly developing this skill (again, a bit like stats: it’s generally harder to design and conduct statistical analysis than to critique one already done, but you’d want some folks in EA who can do the former).
Ozzie Gooen has got funding “to build an online community of EA forecasters, researchers, and data scientists to predict variables of interest to the EA community”. Excited to see the outcome of this.