Co-Founder and CTO at Empiricast
yhoiseth
Karma: 96
An idea for Task Y: Mentoring people a bit younger than oneself.
Tyler Cowen writes in The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations:
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.
I think many young people today lack good mentors. Their peers are their own age, and the last person you want advice from as a 14-year-old is another 14-year-old. And parents, teachers and other grown-ups may not have the time, inclination, knowledge and/or skills to be very effective mentors. In any case, the age gap is often a bit too large.
A program where EAs systematically mentored, nudged and helped people up to, say, 15 years younger than themselves, could (I think) scale and be effective.
Hmm… I think the legal thing is a big one. If they were legal, then entrepreneurs could get them going and increased trendiness and accessibility would likely follow. For example, some of the effort people put into sports betting could be put into prediction markets.
I don’t have any definite answers to how to make them more legal, other than activism/lobbying.
Another way to approach the goal of improved decision-making is using other mechanisms to improve predictions. We’re trying a simpler variant at Empiricast. This is similar to Metaculus, but (currently) for internal use in organizations.
[Startup to improve predictions]
I’m currently working on the startup https://www.primeprediction.com/. We aim to help organizations make better decisions by improving their prediction capabilities.
We’re currently very early stage and are learning more about the problems people face when making predictions/forecasts.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have. I’d also love to hear your feedback, especially about concrete problems you have faced in your line of work for our product could be relevant.
I’d just like to mention I’ve co-founded Empiricast, which would be helpful in this step. The software is already being used by some EAs. I’d be happy to answer any questions or discuss further how we can help.