Epistemic status: a random idea I got while taking a shower, would love to hear if other people have thought about this a bit more seriously.

Key idea: Longterm forecasts might be relevant for many longtermist interventions. However, we lack evidence about the accuracy of such forecasts. Could we maybe help future researchers to better understand how good or bad long-term forecasting is, by creating a database of long-term predictions today that they could then evaluate in maybe 500 years?

The starting point of my thoughts was this article that is skeptical of longtermist interventions because they are based on very speculative forecasts. The argument roughly is this: We can not really be confident in the forecasts that many longtermist interventions are - either explicitly or implicitly - based on. It seems reasonable to assume that our predictions about the very long-run are pretty bad. But it’s not just that they are bad. Maybe even more importantly, we also simply do not really know how bad our predictions are.

One way to presumably solve the issue of uncertainty in our predictions about the long-run is to resort to conservative order of magnitude estimates: something along the lines of “even if my predictions are wrong by a factor of 1000, cause xyz would still be a good thing to do”. The question is, maybe they are not just wrong by 3 orders of magnitude, but by 5. Or 10? Or 50? Really, who knows? We essentially have no empirical track record of how far off long-term forecasting actually is.

Yet, it seems like clarity on this would be extremely helpful in order to evaluate how realistic longtermist interventions are. This made me think of just how nice it would be if some people 500 years ago had created a huge number of predictions about the world of today. Then we could look at these forecasts now and compare them to the real world. The comparison could offer a good baseline estimate as to how feasible it is to make reasonably accurate forecasts about long-term trends.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge such a project has not been done 500 years ago, so we cannot use it today. But what about creating a database today in which skilled forecasters try to predict trends over the next 50-1000 years? Ideally, this would put researchers in 500 or 1000 years into a much better position to evaluate longterm forecasting accuracy because they could wo...

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