As you say, there’s a tension between effortful vs informal forecasts: Out of humility / modesty / imposter syndrome, sometimes I don’t want to mess up a pool of expert forecasts by tossing out an ill-informed hunch.
I think Metaculus could benefit from adopting the more stock-market / prediction-market style mechanism of letting players stake different amounts of their total forecasting “budget” on individual questions… prediction-market style, experienced players or players who wanted to make a very confident prediction could pour lots of points into the system. Then I would be better able to distinguish my confident from my less-confident predictions, and small numbers of experts could bet their beliefs to overturn an ill-judged majority opinion.
Although I recognize that Metaculus’s current, more egalitarian style probably helps to grow the userbase and encourage participation.
As you say, there’s a tension between effortful vs informal forecasts: Out of humility / modesty / imposter syndrome, sometimes I don’t want to mess up a pool of expert forecasts by tossing out an ill-informed hunch.
I think Metaculus could benefit from adopting the more stock-market / prediction-market style mechanism of letting players stake different amounts of their total forecasting “budget” on individual questions… prediction-market style, experienced players or players who wanted to make a very confident prediction could pour lots of points into the system. Then I would be better able to distinguish my confident from my less-confident predictions, and small numbers of experts could bet their beliefs to overturn an ill-judged majority opinion.
Although I recognize that Metaculus’s current, more egalitarian style probably helps to grow the userbase and encourage participation.