Superforecaster

[Martin Hash]

Good Judgment 2.JPG

I'm an aspiring “Superforcaster.” I might even already be a Superforcaster, I'm not quite sure how the title is awarded, but whatever, if there's some forecasting, I want to be super at it. Luckily, an organization popped-up that's all about telling the future, in a good way. The idea is that crowds are prescient, and the way that statistics work, there's going to be a few folks at the extreme right tail of the distribution of predictions that are close to perfect seers & revelators. The more I learned, the larger the concept got, in fact, there's an entire Prediction Market, but specifically, my involvement is with the Good Judgment Project.

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I first heard about the Good Judgment research via a podcast interviewing Dr. Philip Tetlock. He sounded handsome, and I've always fancied myself handsome, so I Googled it and signed up. This was back at the end of 2015, and of the dozen or so questions, I answered a handful, yes or no, giving each a probability. The questions were topical, and not too hard to predict: most things continue as they are due to inertia, so I answered accordingly with some amount of confidence. One question was whether Trump would be the presidential nominee; this was early when everyone else still thought he was a joke candidate, but not me, “hell, yeah, Trump will win,” I thought. I gave that a 70% chance, even better if he ran for president. However, predicting actually isn't all that fun, so after the one engagement, I clicked Close on the webpage, and never attempting fortune-telling again: turns out I'm not much of an oracle.

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Occasionally, a “Good Judgment” email would show up in my Spam folder, and one caught my eye. It got me clicking the link to the results of my predictions of over a year ago. Turns out I got most of my predictions correct, albeit a small number, and because I'd placed such big bets, especially on Trump, I was on my way to becoming a “Superforcaster,” I think, can't really tell, maybe it was a scam and they just want money, but anybody who knows me can predict how that's going to turn out...

[Ex-California]

This is pretty cool. Can anyone sign up?

[DBTrek]

This is pretty cool. Can anyone sign up?

Use your predictive powers to answer that question.

Or Google.

[Ex-California]

I don’t use Google anymore because of James Damore

[Okeefenokee]

#remember