[HN Gopher] What the "superforecasters" predict for major events...
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What the "superforecasters" predict for major events in 2023
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-11-19 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| aaron695 wrote:
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Crystal balls are back in fashion, along with smoke, mirrors and
| ectoplasm. Centennial recurrence perhaps.
|
| Note the disclaimer of all practitioners who dabble in the dark
| arts; this is for entertainment purposes only.
|
| An artist friend recently wrote an essay [1] associating AI art
| with "soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction". An
| interesting phrase I thought. Is prediction an ideology? Is blind
| faith in "AI" ushering in secular denominations of crystal
| botherers?
|
| It's a feature of the interregnum, similar to that of the 1920's
| perhaps, that we grow ever more desperate to peer around the
| corner of time, and so ever more credulous of techo-
| spiritualists, mechanical mediums and silicon psychics.
|
| [1] https://hyperallergic.com/772848/ai-art-is-soft-
| propaganda-f...
| achrono wrote:
| If they're providing better results than actual crystal balls
| or tarot cards, isn't that progress to be (cautiously)
| celebrated?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's actually a really good question about the nature of
| progress.
|
| I suspect there's something more to finding yourself in the
| tent of Madame Mystic Meg than a simple wish for foresight.
| Machines that are eminently successful at foretelling might
| only amplify that pathology (minus the incense, elegant
| dress, mood lighting and arabesque panache).
| kzrdude wrote:
| Even if 2023 is not far away, it's important that we as a
| culture look forward towards the future and not get bogged down
| in the drama of the day (be it twitter, covid, or inflation),
| it robs us of time to plan to grow for the future and prepare
| for future challenges.
|
| Looking even one year ahead is good.
| nathan_phoenix wrote:
| They got 5/8 correct for the last year, so basically a bit better
| than a random guess. Seems like the future is still hard to
| predict...
|
| Edit: As some people have pointed out, around half weren't binary
| choices (which I didn't notice) so 5/8 is actually good!
| achrono wrote:
| The incorrect 3 were related to the Omicron variant -- not bad
| for armchair* analysis!
|
| * My take from reading Tetlock's book is that superforecasting
| is essentially painstaking analysis by laypersons based on
| common rationality followed through diligently. If among the
| only things this process fails to predict is mutations then
| this is actually very encouraging.
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| If you guess 5/8 dice rolls correctly, that's way better than a
| random guess
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Not for 8 rolls.
| achrono wrote:
| Why not? We're talking dice, not coins. (Unless you're
| saying the superforecasters are doing coins and not dice,
| which makes sense.)
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| Wouldn't the expected number of correct answers for random
| guesses of rolling dice a number of times be
| (1/sides)*rolls?
| aussiesnack wrote:
| I read Tetlock's _Expert Political Judgement_ many years ago,
| and though I can 't guarantee my memory of it, I think one
| upshot of some pretty detailed empirical work was that no-one's
| any good at predicting political and economic futures. Foxes
| (in Isiah Berlin's sense, ie. who approach problems without an
| overarching conceptual framework) were marginally better than
| Hedgehogs (who have a central big idea), but no-one was up to
| much.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I think the trick, if there is one beyond luck, involves the
| ability to draw conspicuous attention to the occasion one is
| "right", while distracting from the all the other off-target
| pronouncements.
| inthemiddle wrote:
| These aren't binary choices, so 5/8 doesn't seem too bad to me.
|
| 2022's bets: https://www.economist.com/the-world-
| ahead/2021/11/10/the-exp... https://archive.ph/bam31
| diab0lic wrote:
| I don't generally place much stock in forecasts but... I'm
| unaware of what the 8 questions were last year but this years
| includes a few non binary outcomes. If this was the case last
| year then their performance was a fair bit better than random.
| orwin wrote:
| "Republican will control the house, Democrats the Senate" is
| a really, really impressive prediction.
| diab0lic wrote:
| I am a little disappointed to see that the results of "super
| forecasters" in the economist and on the underlying Good
| Judgement open website does not present a 95% credible interval,
| or even a good old fashioned confidence interval.
|
| Would love to see results presented with the uncertainty
| quantified. Especially given that the yes/no questions are
| aggregated binarized predictions from what is almost certainly a
| collection of continuous models. A lot of information is lost
| between the people performing the analysis and either of these
| pages.
| fddr wrote:
| They are giving probabilities for discrete events, which
| already captures their level of uncertainty. Probabilities of
| probabilities (i.e., a probability distribution of a
| probability) are not very useful concepts.
| operator-name wrote:
| It's definitely an odd emission since the original research
| project used such a calculation. Metaculus, which uses a
| similar technique provides such a confidence interval, along
| with a nice history graph.
|
| As some wild speculation, I suspect that since the GJP only
| employs a handful of Superforcasters, the initial confidence
| intervals for these broad questions may be quite large. That's
| to be expected when predicting a year in advance, but
| publically admitting to have such a broad confidence interval
| is probably not very good for marketing.
| mihau wrote:
| Do these "superforecasters" lose something when they are wrong?
| Do they have "skin in the game"?
|
| I'm a big fan of predication markets (e.g. Polymarket, PredictIt)
| for exactly that reason - proper incentives are there.
| ollien wrote:
| Maybe I'm just not getting it, but this just seems like
| gambling by any other name.
| rocqua wrote:
| It's gambling for information discovery. Rather than gambling
| for fun.
|
| You see some of this in sports betting, but it is distorted
| by fans, and sport-outcomes are not really important.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > big fan of predication markets
|
| I'd love to see a predication market
| acover wrote:
| > Good Judgment maintains a global network of elite
| Superforecasters who collaborate to tackle our clients'
| forecasting questions with unparalleled accuracy. We continue
| to grow this network by identifying and recruiting fresh talent
| from our public forecasting platform, Good Judgment Open. And,
| we train others to apply the methods that make our
| Superforecasters so accurate.
|
| https://goodjudgment.com/about/
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| LMAO. Amazing to see this trash (the OP's link) posted on HN.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I enrolled with the Good Judgement project for awhile. Most
| of these super high-level assessments are useless, and may
| even be put out as a bit of disinformation. What they
| really get is a lot of text from the participants which is
| essentially free amalgamation of OSINT that they turn over
| to the sponsors.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| A lot of the comments are dismissive. I read the book on this
| superforecasters project / people / studies. Turns out (some)
| people can learn about the world enough to build probabilistic
| weighted trees for the different outcomes.
|
| Their predictions are benchmarked using a statistical tool named
| Brier Score.
|
| They fare pretty well, this is totally legit.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/mhuGK
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