Hi Pablo, we’re accepting new writers on a rolling basis and we don’t have a planned date for when we’ll stop.
christian
We’ve recently received some excellent applications saying “I wasn’t sure if you were still hiring for this position.” If you’re reading this, know that we are!
Hey Nathan — currently, there are only plans to publish the forecasts on Metaculus. We’ll let you know if that changes, however.
It’s a great idea, and I like how you’ve fleshed it out. I’ll pass this along to our Product team.
For your calibration plot, you can actually use the ‘evaluated at’ dropdown and watch your plot adjust on the fly.
Hey @jackva, are you asking about adding more questions to this tournament or about creating a prize pool for some other set of questions of your choosing? If the latter, you can email us at hello@metaculus.com to discuss developing a new initiative!
New Metaculus Feature: Reaffirming Predictions
Now you can more easily find predictions that need updating and reaffirm those you stand by. Learn more about this new feature here.
🔬 Metaculus Officially Launches API
Metaculus has officially launched the Metaculus API, providing access to a rich, quantitative database of aggregate forecasts on 7000+ questions. Start exploring, analyzing, and building here.
Metaculus is conducting its first user survey in nearly three years. If you have read analyses, consumed forecasts, or made predictions on Metaculus, we want to hear from you! Your feedback helps us better meet the needs of the forecasting community and is incredibly important to us.
Take the short survey here — we truly appreciate it! (We’ll be sure to share what we learn.)
🕛 New Metaculus Feature: Now You Can Set Custom Forecast Notifications
Metaculus has upgraded its forecast notifications to make it easier to follow the questions you care about so you can keep your predictions fresh and stay up to date as stories develop. Set a single notification that alerts you whenever the Metaculus community’s prediction shifts, when new comments are made, when a question nears its close date, or at regular intervals over a question’s life. Learn more about forecast notifications and how you can use them here.
🔎 Discover More Questions Relevant to You With Metaculus’s New Filter & Sort Tools
Where do you disagree with other forecasters? Which community predictions have shifted the most? And what was that nanotech forecast you meant to update? Metaculus has introduced new filter & sort tools that provide more control over the forecast feed so you can find the questions that matter to you.
Learn more
Now You Can Submit Conditional Pair Questions on Metaculus
Curious to learn the likelihood of an event given the outcome of another? Now you can create conditional pairs of binary questions and invite the forecasting community to share their predictions to clarify the relationships between events.
Not yet familiar with Metaculus’s conditional pairs? Read the guide here or watch this introductory video to get up to speed.
Join Metaculus for Forecast Friday, April 28th at 12pm ET
Are you interested in how top forecasters predict the future? Curious how other people are reacting to the forecasts in the main feed?
Join us April 28th at 12pm ET/GMT-4 for Forecast Friday!
Click here to go to Gather Town. Then take the Metaculus portal.
This Friday
Seasoned forecaster and Product Manager for Metaculus Sylvain Chevalier will present for this week’s Forensic Friday session.
Metaculus is excited to announce the winners of the inaugural Keep Virginia Safe Tournament! This first-of-its kind collaboration with the University of Virginia (UVA) Biocomplexity Institute and the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) delivered forecasting and modeling resources to public health professionals and public policy experts as they have navigated critical decisions on COVID-19.
Congratulations to the top 3 prize winners!
“On behalf of the Virginia Department of Health, I’d like to offer our congratulations to Sergio, 2e10e122, mattvdm, and all the forecasters who participated in the Keep Virginia Safe Forecasting tournament! Because of your work, Virginia was better able to navigate the Delta and Omicron waves and prepare for the long-term impacts of COVID-19, helping us keep Virginians safe during a critical period.”
—Justin Crow, Foresight & Analytics Coordinator for the Virginia Department of Health
Thank you to forecasting community! Your predictions were integrated into VDH planning sessions and were shared with local health department staff, statewide epidemiologists, and even with the Virginia Governor’s office.
For more details on the tournament outcomes, visit the project summary.Our successful partnership with UVA and VDH continues through the Keep Virginia Safe II Tournament, where Metaculus forecasts continue to provide valuable information. Join to help protect Virginians and compete for $20,000 in prizes.
Find more information about the Keep Virginia Safe Tournament, including the complete leaderboard, here.
Embed Interactive Metaculus Forecasts on Your Website or Blog
Now you can share interactive Metaculus forecasts for all question types, including Question Groups and Conditional Pairs.
Just click the ‘Embed’ button at the top of a question page, customize the plot as needed, and copy the iframe html.
Improved Forecast Previews
Metaculus has also made it easier to share forecast preview images for more question types, on platforms like Twitter, Substack, Slack, and Facebook.
Just paste the question URL to generate a preview of the forecast plot on any platform that supports them.
To learn more about embedding forecasts & preview images, click here.
Hi Dawn, yes, Metaculus will ensure tournament winners receive their prizes.
Now you can explore more relationships between more forecast questions on Metaculus, with conditional pairs that feature question group subquestions. To submit your own:
Click ‘Write a Question’ on Metaculus
Select ‘conditional pair’ as the Question Type
Click ‘Select Parent’ and/or ‘Select Child’
Search for the subquestion name, which will be indicated in parentheses after the group name, or paste in the URL of the subquestion
Note: You can copy the URL of a subquestion by visiting the question group page, clicking the ‘...’ more options menu, and selecting the ‘Copy Link’ option next to the subquestion you’re focused on.
In addition to submitting a new conditional yourself, you can also request questions here in the new question discussion post.
Get Started
Here are some new subquestion conditional pairs to start forecasting on:
Enhanced Usability for Metaculus’s Binary Question Groups
We’ve upgraded Metaculus’s binary question groups to make forecasting faster and more efficient. Each question is equipped with its own slider, which means fewer steps to make your forecasts.
Try the new interface on one of these question groups:
Will China Invade Taiwan?
Who Will Be Elected To Be US President in 2024?
Will Israeli Forces Reach Gaza City Hall?
Will These Countries See Civil War by 2036?
This feature is temporarily hidden while we address a bug with the sliders. I’ll update once it’s live again.
All right, the feature is back up!
Hi Benjamin, these are great questions! I work with Metaculus and wanted to add a bit of color here:
To your question about how to see the Metaculus Prediction, that’s located: https://www.metaculus.com/help/faq/#tachyon-costs
—basically one has to be of a sufficient “level”, and then pay out some tachyons (the coin of the realm) to unlock the Metaculus Prediction for that question. That said, in this case, we’re happy to share the current MP with you. (I’ll message you here in a moment.)
And as to how the MP is calculated, the best resource there was written by one of the founders, and lives in this blog post: https://metaculus.medium.com/a-primer-on-the-metaculus-scoring-rule-eb9a974cd204
To your question about catastrophic risk from an unknown source, the table in the post doesn’t include that bit, as it’s only summing the %s of the different catastrophic risk questions, but you’re right that you can get something like it from the question you link to:
Which just refers to that 10% decrease by any means, full stop. The Metaculus Prediction there is lower than the Community Prediction, FYI, but is indeed above the 14% you get from summing the other questions. So that makes some sense given that there are the other possibilities, however remote, that are not explicitly named. But it’s also true that there are different predictors on each question, and also the linked to forecast is not explicitly pitched as “summing the other catastrophes up gives you 14% and so this linked to question is meant to produce a forecast of 14+X%, where X is the probability of unnamed catastrophes.”
I hope that was useful. Please do reach out if you’d like to continue the conversation.