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NunoSempere  2yr ago (forecasting.substack.com)   Edited 2yr ago   1353 thread views

Forecasting Newsletter August 2022

forecasting.substack.com

Highlights

I'd prefer comments or questions here on account of themotte.org site being pretty young. Long live The Motte!

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I regret to say, my only view on the PredictIt situation is that they couldn't have been very good forecasters if they didn't see that one coming 😀

$25k tournament by Richard Hanania on Manifold Markets.

A lot of stuff in the 30-60% range which means few have any idea. I think predicting political stuff is hopeless . I have yet to see anyone who can do it well

A lot of stuff in the 30-60% range which means few have any idea

the "steelman" here is that it's evidence of some form that either it's up to chance or it's hard to predict.

They'll also claim that a 30% and a 70% really are different, and that's useful

afaict forecasting sucks because the reasons for believing things are complicated, and those reasons and understanding the complexities involved is much more worthwhile than trading for numbers. A SSC post >> a forecast! Forecasters aren't gonna succeed at guessing 'will the big image generation models be based on diffusion models or VAE or GAN' (and will fail much worse at 'what architecture will image generation models be using in 5 years' five years ago, or even at caring about image generation) because ... well, the people working on it didn't know either. Essentially making good predictions is as hard as understanding the thing being predicted, so sticking a layer of 'vote for number' on top of it gets you essentially nothing versus 'talking to smart people or people involved' or 'reading and writing papers' or 'doing research'

which means few have any idea

...which means that questions were selected for being uncertaint

I have yet to see anyone who can do it well

maybe you're not hanging out in the right places

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