This will be a total waste of time and money unless OpenPhil actually pushes the people it funds towards achieving real-world impact. The typical pattern in the past has been to launch yet another forecasting tournament to try to find better forecasts and forecasters. No one cares, we already know how to do this since at least 2012!
The unsolved problem is translating the research into real-world impact. Does the Forecasting Research Institute have any actual commercial paying clients? What is Metaculus’s revenue from actual clients rather than grants? Who are they working with and where is the evidence that they are helping high-stakes decision makers improve their thought processes?
Incidentally, I note that forecasting is not actually successful even within EA at changing anything: superforecasters are generally far more relaxed about Xrisk than the median EA, but has this made any kind of difference to how EA spends its money? It seems very unlikely.
At the risk of damaging my networks in EA, I am inclined to tentatively agree with some of your comment. Disclaimer here that I have very little interaction with forecasting for various reasons, so this is more of a general comment than anything else.
I think one of the major problems I see in EA as a whole is a fairly loose definition of ‘impact’. Often I see five or six groups using vast sums of money and talent to produce research or predictions that are shared and reviewed between each other and then hosted on the websites but never seem to actually be implemented anywhere. There’s no external (of EA) stakeholder participation, no follow-up to check for changed trends, no update on how this affects the real-world outside of EA circles.
I don’t always think paying clients are the best measurement system for impact, but I do think there needs to be a much higher focus on bridging the connection between high-quality forecasting and real-world decision-makers.
Obviously this doesn’t apply everywhere in EA, and there are lots and lots of exemptions, but I do think your comment has merit.
Obviously this comment is very true and correct, but it doesn’t say great things about the culture of EA that people preface the most milquetoast comments like this with disclaimers about not wanting to blow up their friendships!
I don’t think there’s actually a risk of CAISID damaging their EA networks here, fwiw, and I don’t think CAISID wanted to include their friendships in this statement.
My sense is that most humans are generally worried about disagreeing with what they perceive to be a social group’s opinion, so I spontaneously don’t think there’s much specific to EA to explain here.
You are correct in that I was referring more to the natural risks associated with disagreeing with a major funder in a public space (even though OP have a reputation for taking criticism very well), and wasn’t referring to friendships. I could well have been more clear, and that’s on me.
Oh really? Because in typical male-dominated social networks, there are usually pretty high levels of internal disagreement, some of it fairly sharp. Go on any other forum that isn’t moderated to within an inch of its life by a team that somehow costs 2 million a year, and where everyone isn’t chasing one billionaire’s money!
I’m confused about why you think forecasting orgs should be trying to acquire commercial clients.[1] How do you see this as being on the necessary path for forecasting initiatives to reduce x-risk, contribute to positive trajectory change, etc.? Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by “real-world impact”?
The main exception that comes to mind, for me, is AI labs. But I don’t think you’re talking about AI labs in particular as the commercial clients forecasting orgs should be aiming for?
What better test of the claim “we are producing useful/actionable information about the future, and/or developing workable processes for others to do the same” do we have than some of the thousands of organisations whose survival depends on this kind of information being willing to pay for it?
IMO if a forecasting org does manage to make money selling predictions to companies, that’s a good positive update, but if they fail, that’s only a weak negative update—my prior is that the vast majority of companies don’t care about getting good predictions even if those predictions would be valuable. (Execs might be exposed as making bad predictions; good predictions should increase the stock price, but individual execs only capture a small % of the upside to the stock price vs. 100% of the downside of looking stupid.)
I think if you extend this belief outwards it starts to look unwieldy and “proves too much”. Even if you think that executives don’t care about having access to good predictions the way that business owners do, then why not ask why business owners aren’t paying?
MW Story already said what I wanted to say in response to this, but it should be pretty obvious. If people think of something as more than just a cool parlor trick, but instead regard as useful and actionable, they should be willing to pay hand over fist for it at proper big boy consultancy rates. If they aren’t, that strongly suggests that they just don’t regard what you’re producing as useful.
And to be honest it often isn’t very useful. Tell someone “our forecasters think there’s a 26% chance Putin is out of power in 2 years” and the response will often be “so what?” That by itself doesn’t tell anything about what Putin leaving power might mean for Russia or Ukraine, which is almost certainly what we actually care about (or nuclear war risk, if we’re thinking X-risk). The same is true, to a degree, for all these forecasts about AI or pandemics or whatever: they often aren’t sharp enough and don’t cut to the meat of actual impacts in the real world.
But since you’re here, perhaps you can answer my question about your clients, or lack thereof? If I were funding Metaculus, I would definitely want it to be more than a cool science project.
It’s worth saying also that we already have 1 commercial forecasting organisation Good Judgment (I do a little bit of professional forecasting for them though it’s not my main job.) Not clear why we need another. (I don’t know who GJ clients actually are though, plus presumably I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you even if I did. EDIT: Actually, in some cases I think client info became public and/or we were internally told who they were, but I have just forgotten who.)
This will be a total waste of time and money unless OpenPhil actually pushes the people it funds towards achieving real-world impact. The typical pattern in the past has been to launch yet another forecasting tournament to try to find better forecasts and forecasters. No one cares, we already know how to do this since at least 2012!
The unsolved problem is translating the research into real-world impact. Does the Forecasting Research Institute have any actual commercial paying clients? What is Metaculus’s revenue from actual clients rather than grants? Who are they working with and where is the evidence that they are helping high-stakes decision makers improve their thought processes?
Incidentally, I note that forecasting is not actually successful even within EA at changing anything: superforecasters are generally far more relaxed about Xrisk than the median EA, but has this made any kind of difference to how EA spends its money? It seems very unlikely.
At the risk of damaging my networks in EA, I am inclined to tentatively agree with some of your comment. Disclaimer here that I have very little interaction with forecasting for various reasons, so this is more of a general comment than anything else.
I think one of the major problems I see in EA as a whole is a fairly loose definition of ‘impact’. Often I see five or six groups using vast sums of money and talent to produce research or predictions that are shared and reviewed between each other and then hosted on the websites but never seem to actually be implemented anywhere. There’s no external (of EA) stakeholder participation, no follow-up to check for changed trends, no update on how this affects the real-world outside of EA circles.
I don’t always think paying clients are the best measurement system for impact, but I do think there needs to be a much higher focus on bridging the connection between high-quality forecasting and real-world decision-makers.
Obviously this doesn’t apply everywhere in EA, and there are lots and lots of exemptions, but I do think your comment has merit.
I find the statement is more precise if you put “longtermism” where “EA” is. Is that your sense as well?
I think that’s a good modification of my initial point, you may well be right.
Obviously this comment is very true and correct, but it doesn’t say great things about the culture of EA that people preface the most milquetoast comments like this with disclaimers about not wanting to blow up their friendships!
I don’t think there’s actually a risk of CAISID damaging their EA networks here, fwiw, and I don’t think CAISID wanted to include their friendships in this statement.
My sense is that most humans are generally worried about disagreeing with what they perceive to be a social group’s opinion, so I spontaneously don’t think there’s much specific to EA to explain here.
You are correct in that I was referring more to the natural risks associated with disagreeing with a major funder in a public space (even though OP have a reputation for taking criticism very well), and wasn’t referring to friendships. I could well have been more clear, and that’s on me.
Oh really? Because in typical male-dominated social networks, there are usually pretty high levels of internal disagreement, some of it fairly sharp. Go on any other forum that isn’t moderated to within an inch of its life by a team that somehow costs 2 million a year, and where everyone isn’t chasing one billionaire’s money!
I’m confused about why you think forecasting orgs should be trying to acquire commercial clients.[1] How do you see this as being on the necessary path for forecasting initiatives to reduce x-risk, contribute to positive trajectory change, etc.? Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by “real-world impact”?
COI note: I work for Metaculus.
The main exception that comes to mind, for me, is AI labs. But I don’t think you’re talking about AI labs in particular as the commercial clients forecasting orgs should be aiming for?
What better test of the claim “we are producing useful/actionable information about the future, and/or developing workable processes for others to do the same” do we have than some of the thousands of organisations whose survival depends on this kind of information being willing to pay for it?
IMO if a forecasting org does manage to make money selling predictions to companies, that’s a good positive update, but if they fail, that’s only a weak negative update—my prior is that the vast majority of companies don’t care about getting good predictions even if those predictions would be valuable. (Execs might be exposed as making bad predictions; good predictions should increase the stock price, but individual execs only capture a small % of the upside to the stock price vs. 100% of the downside of looking stupid.)
I think if you extend this belief outwards it starts to look unwieldy and “proves too much”. Even if you think that executives don’t care about having access to good predictions the way that business owners do, then why not ask why business owners aren’t paying?
MW Story already said what I wanted to say in response to this, but it should be pretty obvious. If people think of something as more than just a cool parlor trick, but instead regard as useful and actionable, they should be willing to pay hand over fist for it at proper big boy consultancy rates. If they aren’t, that strongly suggests that they just don’t regard what you’re producing as useful.
And to be honest it often isn’t very useful. Tell someone “our forecasters think there’s a 26% chance Putin is out of power in 2 years” and the response will often be “so what?” That by itself doesn’t tell anything about what Putin leaving power might mean for Russia or Ukraine, which is almost certainly what we actually care about (or nuclear war risk, if we’re thinking X-risk). The same is true, to a degree, for all these forecasts about AI or pandemics or whatever: they often aren’t sharp enough and don’t cut to the meat of actual impacts in the real world.
But since you’re here, perhaps you can answer my question about your clients, or lack thereof? If I were funding Metaculus, I would definitely want it to be more than a cool science project.
It’s worth saying also that we already have 1 commercial forecasting organisation Good Judgment (I do a little bit of professional forecasting for them though it’s not my main job.) Not clear why we need another. (I don’t know who GJ clients actually are though, plus presumably I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you even if I did. EDIT: Actually, in some cases I think client info became public and/or we were internally told who they were, but I have just forgotten who.)