EA Uni Group Forecasting Tournament!

[avshah]

A group of university EAs are planning a forecasting tournament. We would love to hear recommendations and comments from the community at large.

In the spirit of fostering community and becoming better forecasters, UChicago Effective Altruism is hosting a forecasting tournament between all interested EA college groups starting October 12th, 2020. We already have 10+ schools signed up to participate, and we’re super excited to run the tournament! In addition to making sure this year’s tournament is run well, we have an ambition to turn this into an annual tournament; in order to set a good base for the coming years, we wanted to reach out to the community. We’ve written some questions/​comments below.

To university students:

We’d love to have you join us! If you’re interested, here is a document that describes the event in greater detail, and here is a google form that you should use to indicate your school’s interest in the event. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us at [e-mail].

To event organizers and more invested well-wishers:

What do you think are the existential risks of this tournament, and how should we insure against them? What do you think are creative ideas we could implement that would make the tournament exceptional (e.g. prize ideas for winning teams, speakers to call for weekly debriefs with the university groups, or norms to implement should this successfully become an annual tournament)? Is there anything else you’d like to comment on? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

To everyone else:

If you would like to submit prediction questions for the teams to work on during the tournament, use this form. Our coordinators team is curating the questions with some outside support, and the more questions we have to choose from, the better. We especially like questions that are creative, interesting to university students, and which have the ability to be repeated for future years. If you’re interested in what we’re doing and want to keep up with it, we’re planning on writing another forum post with our reflections at the midpoint of the tournament, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading. In particular, we’d like to thank Catherine Low at CEA and Ozzie Gooen at FHI for being super helpful in the planning of this tournament so far. We appreciate all the help, and we look forward to reading your responses.

Cheers,

The Coordinating Team

[Buck]

I think this is a great idea, and I’m excited that you’re doing it.

[ClaireZabel]

Me too!

[Tsunayoshi]

Great idea, since you asked for suggestions, here are some:

• I have been involved in many soccer prediction tournaments at work places or among friends. A frequent problem is that as the tournament goes on, many participants clearly have no chance of winning anymore, lose interest and drop out. Having alternative/​intermediate awards (that can be purely symbolical) like “best predictions in December” or “fastest learner”(for most improved predictions) could be a fun way to mitigate that.

• Depending on the number of people who sign up but are not associated with a university group, it might make sense to have the “People” category split by countries/​regions. This would also facilitate some networking in countries where EAs have a hard time getting to know each other.

[NunoSempere]

One idea you might want to consider is to steal questions from some more established forecasting platforms, like Metaculus or Good Judgment Open. You could also join foretell, which has a really nice team interface, and compete on their questions.

[PabloAMC]

I’d like to know if we could inscribe a bit latter than the 12th of October. In Madrid we are opening an university group but it is not set up yet.

[avshah]

There are two names that we’re in between for the tournament. Please upvote the name that you like more.

[avshah]

The Delphi Tournament

[avshah]

FEAT (Forecasting EA Tournament)