#metaculus

The Forecasting Our World in Data tournament probes the long-term future, delivering predictions on topics like global investment in AI, world life expectancy, CO2 emissions, and more on time horizons from one to 100 years. This close collaboration with Our World In Data (OWID) collects predictions across 30 different measures of technological advancement, global development, and social progress.

I enjoy forecasting, pretty much in the same way other people enjoy video games, or stamp collecting. It’s also an activity broadly in line with my values. I think the world would be a much better place if people approached predicting the future with the same level of rigor they have when explaining the past. Yet incalculably more books have been written about the past than about the future, and the fact that studying the past is more tractable than studying the future only partly explains this asymmetry. I think most people approach forecasting in what some authors call "far mode": as an exercise whose primary purpose is not to describe reality accurately, but to signal our aspirations, or something along those lines. However, as Robin Hanson likes to say, the future is just another point in time.