My guess is that the crowds are similar and thus the surveys and the initial forecasts were also similar.
Iirc(?) the report states that there wasn’t much updating of forecasts, so the final and initial average also are naturally close.
Besides that, there was also some deference to literature/group averages, and also some participants imitated e.g. the Carlsmith forecast but with their own numbers (I think it was 1/8th of my group, but I’d need to check my notes).
I kinda speculate that Carlsmith’s model may be biased towards producing numbers around ~5% (sth about how making long chains of conditional probabilities doesn’t work because humans fail to imagine each step correctly and thus end up biased towards default probabilities closer to 50% at each step).
My guess is that the crowds are similar and thus the surveys and the initial forecasts were also similar.
Iirc(?) the report states that there wasn’t much updating of forecasts, so the final and initial average also are naturally close.
Besides that, there was also some deference to literature/group averages, and also some participants imitated e.g. the Carlsmith forecast but with their own numbers (I think it was 1/8th of my group, but I’d need to check my notes).
I kinda speculate that Carlsmith’s model may be biased towards producing numbers around ~5% (sth about how making long chains of conditional probabilities doesn’t work because humans fail to imagine each step correctly and thus end up biased towards default probabilities closer to 50% at each step).