Long-range forecasting is forecasting involving long time horizons. Long-range forecasts are sometimes defined as involving events at least 10 years into the future,[1] although there is no generally agreed-upon definition.
Further reading
Goth, Aidan, Stephen Clare & Christian Ruhl (2022) Professor Philip Tetlock’s research on improving judgments of existential risk, Founders Pledge, March 8.
Karnofsky, Holden (2022) The track record of futurists seems … fine, Cold Takes, June 30.
Muehlhauser, Luke (2019) How feasible is long-range forecasting?, Open Philanthropy, October 10.
Sandberg, Anders (2021) Popper vs macrohistory: what can we say about the long-run future?, Oxford Karl Popper Society, January 25.
Related entries
AI forecasting | cluelessness | estimation of existential risk | forecasting | long-term future | longtermism
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Muehlhauser, Luke (2019) How feasible is long-range forecasting?, Open Philanthropy, October 10.
Should this tag be applied to posts that contain (links to) multiple thoughtful long-range forecasts but don’t explicitly discuss long-range forecasting as distinct from forecasting in general? E.g., did it make sense for me to apply it to this post?
(I say “thoughtful” as a rough way of ruling out cases in which someone just includes a few quick numbers merely to try to give a clearer sense of their views, or something.)
I think LessWrong have separate tags for posts about forecasting and posts that contain forecasts. Perhaps we should do the same?
Further to my previous message: What do you think about creating a long-range forecasts tag for posts that contain such forecasts, and to reserve long-range forecasting for posts that discuss the phenomenon? I don’t have a clear enough sense of how this problem manifests itself in other articles, so I’m not proposing any general solution for the time being. But this seems like an adequate way to address this particular manifestation.
Yeah, I think that that’d work for this. Or maybe to avoid proliferation of tags, we should have forecasting and forecasts, and then just long-range forecasting, and if people want to say something contains long-range forecasts they can use long-range forecasting along with forecasts.
This is a general problem: for many entries, posts can be potentially relevant by virtue of either discussing the topic of the entry or exemplifying the phenomenon the entry describes. So we probably want to think about possible general ways to deal with this problem rather than solutions for this specific instance. Still, it seems fine to discuss that here. I don’t think I have any insights to offer off the top of my head, but will try to think about this a bit more later.
Apparently an econ PhD student called Joel Becker will be working on (among other things) “[exploring] the accuracy of long-term forecasts in simulated environments (e.g. real history with blinded participants, games with different time horizons).” (source) He has been given funding from the LTFF.
I felt like it’d be good to jot that info down here to increase that chance that, if and when Joel has published something on that (or done a talk, been on a podcast, etc.), something about it can be tagged or included in the Bibliography here.
Cool. I’ve now “followed” the author on Google Scholar to be alerted whenever he publishes something new.
I think this entry/tag should “subsume”/”cover” the epistemic challenge to longtermism. I.e., I think that:
Once some kind soul writes text for this entry, that text should eventually include discussion of the epistemic challenge to longtermism
If a post is relevant to the epistemic challenge, it should get this tag
(Pablo and I discussed this here.)