Nice! Two questions that came to mind while reading:
I wonder how much you’d consider “changing governance culture” as part of the potential impact, e.g. I hope that Metaculus and co. will stay clear success stories and motivate government institutions to adopt and make probabilistic and evaluable predictions for important projects
How much do you think forecasting well on given questions is different from the skill of creating new questions? I notice that I’m trending to be increasingly impressed by people who are able to ask questions that seem important but that I wouldn’t even have thought about
How much do you think forecasting well on given questions is different from the skill of creating new questions? I notice that I’m trending to be increasingly impressed by people who are able to ask questions that seem important but that I wouldn’t even have thought about
They seem similar because being able to orient oneself in a new domain would feed into both things. One can probably use (potentially uncalibrated) domain experts to ask questions which forecasters then solve. Overall I have not thought all that much about this.
I wonder how much you’d consider “changing governance culture” as part of the potential impact, e.g. I hope that Metaculus and co. will stay clear success stories and motivate government institutions to adopt and make probabilistic and evaluable predictions for important projects
I’m fairly skeptical about this for e.g., national governments. For the US government in particular, the base rate seems low; people were trying to do things like this since at least 1964 and mostly failing.
Nice! Two questions that came to mind while reading:
I wonder how much you’d consider “changing governance culture” as part of the potential impact, e.g. I hope that Metaculus and co. will stay clear success stories and motivate government institutions to adopt and make probabilistic and evaluable predictions for important projects
How much do you think forecasting well on given questions is different from the skill of creating new questions? I notice that I’m trending to be increasingly impressed by people who are able to ask questions that seem important but that I wouldn’t even have thought about
They seem similar because being able to orient oneself in a new domain would feed into both things. One can probably use (potentially uncalibrated) domain experts to ask questions which forecasters then solve. Overall I have not thought all that much about this.
I’m fairly skeptical about this for e.g., national governments. For the US government in particular, the base rate seems low; people were trying to do things like this since at least 1964 and mostly failing.