PredictIt is a prediction platform restricted to US citizens or those who bother using a VPN. Anecdotically, it often has free energy, that is, places where one can earn money by having better probabilities, and where this is not too hard. However, due to fees & the hassle of setting it up, these inefficiencies don't get corrected.
In PredictIt, the world politics section...
Replication Markets is a project where volunteer forecasters try to predict whether a given study's results will be replicated with high power. Rewards are monetary, but only given out to the top N forecasters, and markets suffer from sometimes being dull. They have added two market-maker bots and commenced and conclude their 6th round. They also added a sleek new widget to visualize the price of shares better.
For those who want to put their money where their mouth is, there is now a prediction market for coronavirus related information. The number of questions is small, and the current trading volume started at $8000, but may increase. Another similar platform is waves.exchange/prediction, which seems to be just a wallet to which a prediction market has been grafted on.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make a transaction in these markets with ~30 mins; the time needed to be included in an ethereum block is longer and I may have been too stingy with my gas fee.
Metaculus is a forecasting platform with an active community and lots of interesting questions. They bring us a series of tournaments and question series:
The Lightning Round Tournament: Comparing Metaculus Forecasters to Infectious Disease Experts. "Each week you will have exactly 30 hours to lock in your prediction on a short series of important questions, which will simultaneously be posed to different groups of forecasters. This provides a unique opportunity to directly compare the Metaculus community prediction with other forecasting methods." Furthermore, Metaculus swag will be given out to the top forecasters.
Good Judgement Inc. is the organization which grew out of Tetlock's research on forecasting, and out of the Good Judgement Project, which won the IARPA ACE forecasting competition, and resulted in the research covered in the Superforecasting book.
The Open Philantropy Project has funded this covid dashboard by their (Good Judgement Inc.'s) Superforecasting Analytics Service, with predictions solely from superforecasters; see more on this blogpost.
Good Judgement Inc. also organizes the Good Judgement Open (gjopen.com)[https://www.gjopen.com/], a forecasting platform open to all, with a focus on serious geopolitical questions. They structure their questions in challenges, to which they have recently added one on the Coronavirus Outbreak; some of these questions are similar in spirit to the short-fuse Metaculus Tournament.
Of the questions which have been added recently to the Good Judgment Open, the crowd doesn't buy that Tesla will release an autopilot feature to navigate traffic lights, despite announcements to the contrary. Further, the aggregate...
is extremely confident that, before 1 January 2021, the Russian constitution will be amended to allow Vladimir Putin to remain president after his current term.
Of particular interest is that GJOpen didn't see the upsurge in tests (and thus positives) in the US until until the day before they happened, for this question. Forecasters, including superforecasters, went with a linear extrapolation from the previous n (usually 7) days. However, even though the number of cases looks locally linear, it's also globally exponential, as this 3Blue1Brown video shows. On the other hand, an enterprising forecaster tried to fit a Gompertz distribution, but then fared pretty badly.
In the News
Forecasts in the time of coronavirus: The Financial times runs into difficulties trying to estimate whether some companies are overvalued, because the stock value/earnings ratio, which is otherwise an useful tool, is going to infinity as earnings go to 0 during the pandemic.
COVID-19: Forecasting with Slow and Fast Data. A short and crisp overview by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis on lagging economic measurement instruments, which have historically been quite accurate, and on the faster instruments which are available right now. Highlight: "As of March 31, the WEI [a faster, weekly economic index] indicated that GDP would decline by 3.04% at an annualized rate in the first quarter, a much more sensible forecast than that which is currently indicated by the ENI (a lagging measure which predicts 2.26% growth on an annualized basis in the first quarter)".
Forbes brings us this terrible, terrible opinion piece which mentions Tetlock, goes on about how humans are terrible forecasters, and then predicts that there will be no social changes because of covid with extreme confidence.
The Challenges of Forecasting the Spread and Mortality of COVID-19. The Heritage foundation brings us a report with takeaways of particular interest to policymakers. It has great illustrations of how the overall mortality changes with different assumptions. Note that criticisms of and suggestions for the current US administration are worded kindly, as the Heritage Foundation is a conservative organization.
Banks are forecasting on gut instinct — just like the rest of us. Financial Times article starts with "We all cling to the belief that somebody out there, somewhere, knows what the heck is going on. Someone — well-connected insider, evil mastermind — must hold the details on the coming market crash, the election in November, or when the messiah will return. In moments of crisis, this delusion tightens its grip," and it only gets better.
Some MMA forecasting. The analysis surprised me; it could well have been a comment in a GJOpen challenge.
Self-reported COVID-19 Symptoms Show Promise for Disease Forecasts. "Thus far, CMU is receiving about one million responses per week from Facebook users. Last week, almost 600,000 users of the Google Opinion Rewards and AdMob apps were answering another CMU survey each day."
Assessing Kurzweil's 1999 predictions for 2019. Kurzweil made on the order of 100 predictions for 2019 in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. How did they fare? We'll find out, next month.
Zvi on Evaluating Predictions in Hindsight. A fun read. Of course, the dissing of Scott Alexander's prediction is fun to read, but I really want to see how a list of Zvi's predictions fares.
A forecasting digest with a focus on experimental forecasting.
The newsletter itself is experimental, but there will be at least five more iterations. Feel free to use this post as a forecasting open thread.
Conflict of interest: With Foretold in general and Jacob Laguerros in particular. This is marked as (c.o.i) throughout the text.
Index
Prediction Markets & Forecasting platforms.
Forecasters may now choose to forecast any of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, Pestilence and War.
Augur: augur.net
Augur is a decentralized prediction market. It will be undergoing its first major update.
Predict It & Election Betting Odds: predictIt.org & electionBettingOdds.com
PredictIt is a prediction platform restricted to US citizens or those who bother using a VPN. Anecdotically, it often has free energy, that is, places where one can earn money by having better probabilities, and where this is not too hard. However, due to fees & the hassle of setting it up, these inefficiencies don't get corrected. In PredictIt, the world politics section...
The question on which Asian/Pacific leaders will leave office next? also looks like it has a lot of free energy, as it overestimates low probability events.
Election Betting Odds aggregates PredictIt with other such services for the US presidential elections.
Replication Markets: replicationmarkets.com
Replication Markets is a project where volunteer forecasters try to predict whether a given study's results will be replicated with high power. Rewards are monetary, but only given out to the top N forecasters, and markets suffer from sometimes being dull. They have added two market-maker bots and commenced and conclude their 6th round. They also added a sleek new widget to visualize the price of shares better.
Coronavirus Information Markets: coronainformationmarkets.com
For those who want to put their money where their mouth is, there is now a prediction market for coronavirus related information. The number of questions is small, and the current trading volume started at $8000, but may increase. Another similar platform is waves.exchange/prediction, which seems to be just a wallet to which a prediction market has been grafted on.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make a transaction in these markets with ~30 mins; the time needed to be included in an ethereum block is longer and I may have been too stingy with my gas fee.
Foretold: foretold.io (c.o.i)
Foretold is an forecasting platform which has experimentation and exploration of forecasting methods in mind. They bring us:
Metaculus: metaculus.com
Metaculus is a forecasting platform with an active community and lots of interesting questions. They bring us a series of tournaments and question series:
Good Judgement Inc. & Good Judgement Open.
Good Judgement Inc. is the organization which grew out of Tetlock's research on forecasting, and out of the Good Judgement Project, which won the IARPA ACE forecasting competition, and resulted in the research covered in the Superforecasting book.
The Open Philantropy Project has funded this covid dashboard by their (Good Judgement Inc.'s) Superforecasting Analytics Service, with predictions solely from superforecasters; see more on this blogpost.
Good Judgement Inc. also organizes the Good Judgement Open (gjopen.com)[https://www.gjopen.com/], a forecasting platform open to all, with a focus on serious geopolitical questions. They structure their questions in challenges, to which they have recently added one on the Coronavirus Outbreak; some of these questions are similar in spirit to the short-fuse Metaculus Tournament.
Of the questions which have been added recently to the Good Judgment Open, the crowd doesn't buy that Tesla will release an autopilot feature to navigate traffic lights, despite announcements to the contrary. Further, the aggregate...
In the News
Long Content