Hide table of contents

Original post by Hamish Huggard


Podcast Description

Narration & editing by: Garrett Baker

*This post describes a simple forecasting tournament I ran during the 2021 Effective Altruism New Zealand retreat as an experimental exercise in improving judgement and decision making. I asked players to predict whether certain events would occur within the span of the retreat, like whether Peter Singer would post to Instagram, or whether anyone would lose their hat.

The tournament was surprisingly fun, and went in many unexpected directions. I would strongly encourage other EA retreats and similar gatherings to run their own prediction tournaments, and I provide some resources to get started.

A summary of this post:

  1. Motivation for the tournament.
  2. Summary of the rules, questions, and scoring system I used.
  3. Outcomes of the tournament: strategies used by players and the scores obtained.
  4. Discussion of stuff I found interesting or surprising, and changes I would make to future iterations of the tournament.
  5. Conclusion and promises for follow-up posts.
  6. Appendix: the outcomes of the prediction questions.*

Motivation

The art of forecasting is an important part of the Effective Altruism extended universe. There are at least three reasons for this. First, if you can predict which problems are going to be important in the future, then you can start preparing solutions now (unaligned AI, runaway nanotech, engineered pandemics...) Secondly, if you can predict the future conditional on your actions, then you can choose interventions which do more good for longer (if we transfer cash to poor countries, will this help them build a self-sustaining economy, or will it foster dependence and fragility?) Thirdly, in a broad sense, good forecasting requires clear thinking and improves decision-making, which are virtues we want to cultivate in building a wiser society. In other words, cultivating forecasting skills is an act of everyday longtermism.


Subscribe to the podcast if you'd like more narrations of particularly interesting forum posts.

Anchor link to podcast page: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast

RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/62cbeec4/podcast/rss

If you are interested in narrating posts yourself, editing, organizing, or anything else which could help with production, sign up using this form. Alternatively, you can comment on this post, or simply message me or @david_reinstein if perchance you dislike filling out forms.

Also listen to David's podcast Found in the Struce (RSS), where he narrates, and adds additional commentary to interesting EA Forum posts.

Comments
No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
Relevant opportunities