Sam Bogerd
Comments34
Im missing two of my personal top recommendations here:
- The EA Focusmate group. I have made some good connections there, somehow I feel it works better if I am matched with someone from this community.
- Confido.institute . A forecasting tool for during meetings or for within organisation! Potentially makes meetings faster and it is a simple way to get some groups forecasts.
I feel like there is a lot of content about getting the most out of an EAG on the forum, but not that much on who should go (again). I understand that this is going to depend a lot on personal circumstances, but I am wondering whether there are any guidelines / tips on who should apply to EAGs? And how many EAGs are too many?
I have never gone to an EAG and felt I wasted my time, and have always come back with new valuable connections, but obviously going to all EAGs is too much, and you are taking away a spot from someone else who might need it more. Deciding where to draw the line is something I am struggling with a bit.
Hi Lizka,
Thank you for your response! I will contact OWID about this as well, that seems like a great idea!
On your sixth point: I am sorry for not explaining it well initially, my concern would be something like this:
- A government opens a forecasting questions on whether it will achieve its emissions target for 2030 (Or a target for anything else).
- Forecasters in aggregate predict that there is only an 5% chance of success.
- This is seen as unacceptably low by policy-makers and new policy is announced and implemented.
- Forecasters adjust and now think there is a 60% chance of success.
- This happens several times.
- Smart forecasters now understand that low aggregate forecasts will result in new policy initiatives, so a good strategy would be to consistently predict higher chances of success than their true belief under current policy.
I think this is roughly similar to the concern you expressed here under "Causality might diverge from conditionality".
And of course I also doubt there are currently any governments responding enough to a prediction market / forecasting tournament for this to become a problem, but I am hoping that in future we might see a lot more government interest.
Hi all!
Nice to see that there is now a sub-forum dedicated to Forecasting, this seems like a good place to ask what might be a silly question.
I am doing some work on integrating forecasting with government decision making. There are several roadblocks to this, but one of them is generating good questions (See Rigor-Relevance trade-off among other things).
One way to avoid this might be to simple ask questions about the targets the government has already set for itself, a lot of these are formulated in a SMART [1] way and are thus pretty forecastable. Forecasts on whether the government will reach its target also seem like they will be immediately actionable for decision makers. This seemed like a decent strategy to me, but I think I have not seen them mentioned very often. So my question is simple: Is there some sort of major problem here I am overlooking?
The one major problem I could think of is that there might be an incentive for a sort of circular reasoning: If forecasters in aggregate think that the government might not be on its way to achieve a certain target then the gov might announce new policy to remedy the situation. Smart Forecasters might see this coming and start their initial forecast higher.
I think you can balance this by having forecasters forecast on intermediate targets as well. For example: Most countries have international obligations to reduce their CO2 emissions by X% by 2030, instead of just forecasting the 2030 target you could forecasts on all the intermediate years as well.
- ^
SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time-related - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria
The point about ongoing work seems fair enough!
On Gather Town: My problem with it is that to me Gather Town is too much fun, you are right it is a warmer place and more fun place, but I want to spend my time on a service like this working, not having casual chats with EAs, racing on a racetrack or just exploring the space!