This seems true that there’s a lot of way to utilize forecasts. In general forecasting tends to have an implicit and unstated connection to the decision making process—I think that has to do w/ the nature of operationalization (“a forecast needs to be on a very specific thing”) and because much of the popular literature on forecasting has come from business literature (e.g. How to Measure Anything).
That being said I think action-guidingness is still the correct bar to meet for evaluating the effect it has on the EA community. I would bite the bullet and say blogs should also be held to this standard, as should research literature. An important question for an EA blog—say, LW :) - is what positive decisions it’s creating (yes there are many other good things about having a central hub, but if the quality of intellectual content is part of it that should be trackable).
If in aggregate many forecasts can produce the same type of guidance or better as many good blog posts, that would be really positive.
I wonder whether you have any examples, or concrete case studies, of things that were successfully action-guiding to people/organisations? (Beyond forecasts and blog-posts, though those are fine to.)
From a 2 min brainstorm of “info products” I’d expect to be action guiding:
Metrics and dashboards reflecting the current state of the organization.
Vision statements (“what do we as an organization do and thus what things should we consider as part of our strategy”)
Trusted advisors
Market forces (e.g. price’s of goods)
One concrete example is from when I worked in a business intelligence role. What executives wanted was extremely trustworthy reliable data sources to track business performance over time. In a software environment (e.g. all the analytic companies constantly posting to Hacker News) that’s trivial, but in a non-software environment that’s very hard. It was very action-guiding to be able to see if your last initiative worked, because if it did you could put a lot more money into it and scale it up.
This seems true that there’s a lot of way to utilize forecasts. In general forecasting tends to have an implicit and unstated connection to the decision making process—I think that has to do w/ the nature of operationalization (“a forecast needs to be on a very specific thing”) and because much of the popular literature on forecasting has come from business literature (e.g. How to Measure Anything).
That being said I think action-guidingness is still the correct bar to meet for evaluating the effect it has on the EA community. I would bite the bullet and say blogs should also be held to this standard, as should research literature. An important question for an EA blog—say, LW :) - is what positive decisions it’s creating (yes there are many other good things about having a central hub, but if the quality of intellectual content is part of it that should be trackable).
If in aggregate many forecasts can produce the same type of guidance or better as many good blog posts, that would be really positive.
I wonder whether you have any examples, or concrete case studies, of things that were successfully action-guiding to people/organisations? (Beyond forecasts and blog-posts, though those are fine to.)
From a 2 min brainstorm of “info products” I’d expect to be action guiding:
Metrics and dashboards reflecting the current state of the organization.
Vision statements (“what do we as an organization do and thus what things should we consider as part of our strategy”)
Trusted advisors
Market forces (e.g. price’s of goods)
One concrete example is from when I worked in a business intelligence role. What executives wanted was extremely trustworthy reliable data sources to track business performance over time. In a software environment (e.g. all the analytic companies constantly posting to Hacker News) that’s trivial, but in a non-software environment that’s very hard. It was very action-guiding to be able to see if your last initiative worked, because if it did you could put a lot more money into it and scale it up.