The Metaculus Platform
Metaculus is an online forecasting platform and aggregation engine that brings together a global reasoning community and keeps score for thousands of forecasters, delivering machine learning-optimized aggregate forecasts on topics of global importance. The Metaculus forecasting community is often inspired by altruistic causes, and Metaculus has a long history of partnering with nonprofit organizations, university researchers and companies to increase the positive impact of its forecasts.
Metaculus therefore poses questions about the occurrence of a variety of future events, on many timescales, to a community of participating forecasters — you!
Forecasting
Forecasting is a systematic practice of attempting to answer questions about future events. On Metaculus, we follow a few principles to elevate forecasting above simple guesswork:
First, questions are carefully specified so that everyone understands beforehand and afterward which kinds of outcomes are included in the resolution, and which are not. Forecasters then give precise probabilities that measure their uncertainty about the outcome.
Second, Metaculus aggregates the forecasts into a simple median (community) prediction, and an advanced Metaculus Prediction. The Community Prediction is simple to calculate: it finds the value for which half of predictors predict a higher value, and half predict lower. Surprisingly, the Community Prediction is often better than any individual predictor! This principle is known as the wisdom of the crowd, and has been demonstrated on Metaculus and by other researchers. Intuitively it makes sense, as each individual has separate information and biases which in general balance each other out (provided the whole group is not biased in the same way).
Third, we measure the relative skill of each forecaster, using their quantified forecasts. When we know the outcome of the question, the question is “resolved”, and forecasters receive their scores. By tracking these scores from many forecasts on different topics over a long period of time, they become an increasingly better metric of how good a given forecaster is. We use this data for our Metaculus Prediction, which gives greater weight to predictions by forecasters with better track records. These scores also provide aspiring forecasters with important feedback on how they did and where they can improve.
The Value of Forecasting
Forecasting is uniquely valuable primarily in complex, multi-variable problems or in situations where a lack of data makes it difficult to predict using explicit or exact models.
In these and other scenarios, aggregated predictions of strong forecasters offer one of the best ways of predicting future events. In fact, work by the political scientist Philip Tetlock demonstrated that aggregated predictions were able to outperform professional intelligence analysts with access to classified information when forecasting various geopolitical outcomes.
Reasons to Forecast
Research has shown that great forecasters come from various backgrounds—and oftentimes from fields that have nothing to do with predicting the future. Like many mental capabilities, prediction is a talent that persists over time and is a skill that can be developed. Steady quantitative feedback and regular practice can greatly improve a forecaster's accuracy.
Some events — such as eclipse timing and well-polled elections, can often be predicted with high resolution, e.g. 99.9% likely or 3% likely. Others — such as the flip of a coin or a close horse-race — cannot be accurately predicted; but their odds still can be. Metaculus aims at both: to provide a central generation and aggregation point for predictions. With these in hand, we believe that individuals, groups, corporations, governments, and humanity as a whole will make better decisions.
As well as being worthwhile, Metaculus aims to be interesting and fun, while allowing participants to hone their prediction prowess and amass a track-record to prove it.
How Metaculus Started
Metaculus originated with two researcher scientists, Anthony Aguirre and Greg Laughlin. Aguirre, a physicist, is a co-founder of The Foundational Questions Institute, which catalyzes breakthrough research in fundamental physics, and of The Future of Life Institute, which aims to increase the benefit and safety of disruptive technologies like AI. Laughlin, an astrophysicist, is an expert at predictions from the millisecond predictions relevant to high-frequency trading to the ultra-long-term stability of the solar system.