Whether or not forecasting is a good use of funds, good decision-making is probably correlated with impact.
So I’m open to the idea that forecasting hasn’t been a good use of funds, but it seems it should be a priori. Forecasting in one sense is predicting how decisions will go. How could that not be a good idea in theory.
More robust cases in practice:
Forecasters have good track records and are provably good thinkers
They can red team institutional decisions “what will be the impacts of this”
In some sense this is similar to research
Forecasting is becoming a larger part of the discourse and this is probably good. It is much more common to see the Economist, the FT, Matt Yglesias, twitter discourse referencing specific testable predictions
In making AI policy specifically it seems very valuable to guess progress and guess the impact of changes.
To me it looks like Epoch and Metaculus do useful work here that people find valuable.
COI—I work in forecasting.
Whether or not forecasting is a good use of funds, good decision-making is probably correlated with impact.
So I’m open to the idea that forecasting hasn’t been a good use of funds, but it seems it should be a priori. Forecasting in one sense is predicting how decisions will go. How could that not be a good idea in theory.
More robust cases in practice:
Forecasters have good track records and are provably good thinkers
They can red team institutional decisions “what will be the impacts of this”
In some sense this is similar to research
Forecasting is becoming a larger part of the discourse and this is probably good. It is much more common to see the Economist, the FT, Matt Yglesias, twitter discourse referencing specific testable predictions
In making AI policy specifically it seems very valuable to guess progress and guess the impact of changes.
To me it looks like Epoch and Metaculus do useful work here that people find valuable.