“we’ve found people don’t know what issues they should be focusing on, and rather than a probability estimate, they want help to identify the most prescient questions”.
Interesting point. Curious whether this alludes to a broader bottleneck within forecasting around question generation itself, rather than question answering/calibration. My vague impression (though I don’t know anything about the practical workflows of forecasting organisations) is that a lot of attention/status accrues to producing forecasts, whereas identifying and specifying the right questions may be at least as important (and potentially harder?) I’d be interested to hear how much effort (as a rough %) forecasting orgs currently devote to question discovery/specification versus answering already-defined questions.
Also wondering at what “level” this problem mainly exists. Is the issue:
identifying the broad strategic questions institutions should care about in the first place (e.g., cause prioritisation, emerging risks, etc), or
the more granular forecasting-design questions like framing, timelines, resolution criteria, etc?
(or perhaps both of these are linked too tightly in practice to separate?)
Thank you for posting this!
Interesting point. Curious whether this alludes to a broader bottleneck within forecasting around question generation itself, rather than question answering/calibration. My vague impression (though I don’t know anything about the practical workflows of forecasting organisations) is that a lot of attention/status accrues to producing forecasts, whereas identifying and specifying the right questions may be at least as important (and potentially harder?)
I’d be interested to hear how much effort (as a rough %) forecasting orgs currently devote to question discovery/specification versus answering already-defined questions.
Also wondering at what “level” this problem mainly exists. Is the issue:
identifying the broad strategic questions institutions should care about in the first place (e.g., cause prioritisation, emerging risks, etc), or
the more granular forecasting-design questions like framing, timelines, resolution criteria, etc?
(or perhaps both of these are linked too tightly in practice to separate?)