Hi all, On the reading thread, I talked about the book Superforecasters. (https://www.degreeinfo.com/index.php?threads/so-what-are-you-reading.42566/page-73#post-549769) I recently signed up with Good Judgement Open (GJPO), which is an online platform that duplicates what the original forecasters did, except now it's open to the public. You can make forecasts/predictions, assign them probabilities, provide your rationale and then see if you're right. Examples of new questions (they usually add new ones on Friday) What will be the closing yield for the 10-year US Treasury on 16 September 2021? What will be the end-of-day price of Cardano's Ada cryptocurrency on 1 July 2021? Will California hold a recall election for Governor Gavin Newsom before 1 January 2022? What will be the US civilian unemployment rate (U3) for August 2021? I decided to answer the Ada cryptocurrency and the California recall election. The people who pose the questions also provide "buckets" for the answers. Some will be "yes" or "no", but most will involve a few options. For example, the Ada cryptocurrency provides 4 options: Less than $0.50 Between $0.50 and $1.00, inclusive More than $1.00 but less than $2.50 Between $2.50 and $5.00 inclusive More than $5.00 While the question on Newsom provides three options: Yes and Newsom will be recalled Yes, but Newsom won't be recalled No [there will be no recall] If any of you are interested in participating, let me know and we can follow each other. They say providing feedback on each others answers (especially in areas like counterfactuals - what would need to exist for this prediction NOT to happen, what assumptions am I making, etc.) can be very helpful.
No, because there's no money exchanged - just bragging rights. The book actually mentions the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) which is a futures market where you can exchange real money for the outcome of topics, mostly political (e.g. the party control of the US House and Senate or the outcome of elections.) Despite living in Iowa I'd never heard of it. It's run out of the University of Iowa business school: https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/
This probably belongs in the "So, What Are You Reading" thread, but there's a sci-fi book in which idea futures are an important plot element. It's by Marc Stiegler and called "Earthweb": https://www.amazon.com/Earthweb-Second-Mark-Stiegler-ebook/dp/B079BKBHJ2/
Because Brier scores can only be compared when looking at the same types of questions (e.g. a meteorologist wouldn't compare their weather forecasting with someone else predicting political events because those things are totally different), GJPO allows you to forecast in a number of different areas and then has leaderboards for each of them. Because questions can take a year or longer to close (and you get a better score for having a longer time window of having a "correct" prediction), I won't have a Brier score for a while. They do have an upvotes leaderboard though, for people to upvote each others forecasts. When I joined I was 98,000 or so, exactly at the end of the list. After receiving 6 upvotes, I've catapulted to #2381. The vast majority of the 98,000 haven't actually participated at all, or made a single prediction and then left. To hit the top 1000, you need 15 upvotes. But #1 on the leaderboard has 8013 upvotes. Quite a distribution.
2 more upvotes and I've moved up to #1802 (can you tell I'm competitive.) I've forecasted on 7 questions that close in the next 12 months or so.
I'm now up to 81 upvotes, putting me at under 300 on the leaderboard! And a few questions have resolved in my favor so far.