BROADCASTS.com

Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contest I. The Annual Forecasting Contest

\u2026is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - \u201cRussia is totally going to win the war this year\u201d, \u201cThere\u2019s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down\u201d. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get better takes. There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people\u2019s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them.

Why is this interesting, when a handful of people still beat the math? Because we want something that can be applied prospectively and reliably. If John Smith from Townsville was the highest scoring participant, it matters a lot whether he\u2019s a genius who can see the future, or if he just got lucky. Part of the goal of this contest was to figure that out. To figure out if the most reliable way to determine the future was to trust one identifiable guy, to trust some mathematical aggregation across guys, or something else.

Here\u2019s how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like \u201cWill Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?\u201d in the form of a probability (eg \u201c90% chance\u201d). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (\u201cBlind Mode\u201d).

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023\xa0