I think the Metaculus crowd median is among the highest-quality predictions out there. Especially when someone goes through all the questions where they’re confident the median is off, and makes comments pointing this out. I used to do this, some months back when there were more short term questions on Metaculus and more questions where I differed from the community. When you made a bunch of comments of this type a month back on Metaculus, that covered most of the ‘holes’, in my opinion, and now there are only a few questions where I differ from the median prediction.
Another source of predictions is from the IARPA Geoforecasting Challenge, where if you’re competing you have access to hundreds of MTurk human predictions through an API. The quality of the predictions are not as great, and there are some questions where the MTurk crowd is way off. But they do have a question on whether Iran will execute or be targeted in a national military attack.
I agree that it’s quite possible to beat the best publicly available forecasts. I’ve been wanting to work together on a small team to do this (where I imagine the same set of people would debate and make the predictions). If anyone’s interested in this, I’m datscilly on Metaculus and can be reached at [my name] at gmail.
I think the Metaculus crowd median is among the highest-quality predictions out there. Especially when someone goes through all the questions where they’re confident the median is off, and makes comments pointing this out. I used to do this, some months back when there were more short term questions on Metaculus and more questions where I differed from the community. When you made a bunch of comments of this type a month back on Metaculus, that covered most of the ‘holes’, in my opinion, and now there are only a few questions where I differ from the median prediction.
Another source of predictions is from the IARPA Geoforecasting Challenge, where if you’re competing you have access to hundreds of MTurk human predictions through an API. The quality of the predictions are not as great, and there are some questions where the MTurk crowd is way off. But they do have a question on whether Iran will execute or be targeted in a national military attack.
I agree that it’s quite possible to beat the best publicly available forecasts. I’ve been wanting to work together on a small team to do this (where I imagine the same set of people would debate and make the predictions). If anyone’s interested in this, I’m datscilly on Metaculus and can be reached at [my name] at gmail.