[HN Gopher] Metaculus
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       Metaculus
        
       Author : kqr
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2023-07-15 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.metaculus.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.metaculus.com)
        
       | log101 wrote:
       | It reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | pyentropy wrote:
       | You can gain reputation by simply forecasting the same outcome as
       | the (publicly available) average probability of everybody - so a
       | user that forgets to forecast on questions is gonna be worse off
       | than a bot who just follows the crowd.
       | 
       | However it gets more interesting when you try to beat the crowd -
       | because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You
       | will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one.
       | You can learn more about scoring functions and how to measure the
       | accuracy of everyone's forecasts:
       | https://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/
       | 
       | Personally I have opened one question, and it involves predicting
       | the net sales of Apple Vision Pro until 2025:
       | https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17407/apple-vision-pro-n...
        
         | ruuda wrote:
         | > because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses.
         | You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large
         | one.
         | 
         | A prediction market is a zero-sum game, and you should only
         | participate if you expect you can beat the market, which you
         | shouldn't expect to be able to on average. But this is not true
         | for Metaculus, which is a prediction aggregator and can create
         | more virtual internet points when there are more participants.
         | So even if you don't expect to do better than the community on
         | average, you can still earn positive points on average. You
         | have to be really confidently wrong to get a bad negative score
         | on Metaculus.
        
       | 7thaccount wrote:
       | There's a paper somewhere on these kinds of markets for
       | forecasting events. I hope someone can link to it.
       | 
       | I think Congress shut down funding for the research as they were
       | worried it would become self fulfilling. Like if there is a $50M
       | bet on some world leader being assassinated (or something
       | horrible like that), that could put pressure that would lead to
       | it occurring when it wouldn't otherwise.
        
         | efnx wrote:
         | That's a dead pool by another name.
        
       | hartator wrote:
       | I like their graphs. I wonder what they are using (not on my
       | macbook).
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-15 23:00 UTC)