I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the forecasting space playing w/ different tools, and I never found one that I could reliably use for personal prediction tracking.
Ultimately for me it comes down to:
1.) Friction: the predictions I’m most interested in tracking are “5-second-level” predictions—“do I think this person is right”, “is the fact that I have a cough and am tired a sign that I’m getting sick” etc. - and I need to be able to jot that down quickly.
2.) “Routine”: There are certain sites that are toothbrush sites, aka I use them everyday. I’m much more likely to adopt a digital habit if I can use one of those sites to fulfill the function.
So my current workflow for private predictions is to use a textexpander snippet w/ Roam.
For those reading, the main thing I’m optimizing Foretold for right now, is for forecasting experiments and projects with 2-100 forecasters. The spirit of making “quick and dirty” questions for personal use conflicts a bit with that of making “well thought out and clear” questions for group use. The latter are messy to change, because it would confuse everyone involved.
Note that Foretold does support full probability distributions with the guesstimate-like syntax, which prediction book doesn’t. But it’s less focused on the quick individual use case in general.
If there are recommendations for simple ways to make it better for individuals; maybe other workflows, I’d be up for adding some support or integrations.
I think I might have phrased the OP “hey, is there a reason to use Foretold or Metaculus over Prediction Book?”, and it sounds in both cases like they’re really optimized for a different thing.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the forecasting space playing w/ different tools, and I never found one that I could reliably use for personal prediction tracking.
Ultimately for me it comes down to:
1.) Friction: the predictions I’m most interested in tracking are “5-second-level” predictions—“do I think this person is right”, “is the fact that I have a cough and am tired a sign that I’m getting sick” etc. - and I need to be able to jot that down quickly.
2.) “Routine”: There are certain sites that are toothbrush sites, aka I use them everyday. I’m much more likely to adopt a digital habit if I can use one of those sites to fulfill the function.
So my current workflow for private predictions is to use a textexpander snippet w/ Roam.
- [[Predictions]]
- {percentage}%
- [[operationalized]]:
- [[{date}]]
- {{[[TODO]]}} [[outcome]]:
It doesn’t have graphs, but I can get a pretty good sense of how calibrated I am, and if I want I could quickly export the markdown and evaluate it.
Of course I want to mention foretold.io as another good site—if you want to distributions that’s definitely the way to go.
For those reading, the main thing I’m optimizing Foretold for right now, is for forecasting experiments and projects with 2-100 forecasters. The spirit of making “quick and dirty” questions for personal use conflicts a bit with that of making “well thought out and clear” questions for group use. The latter are messy to change, because it would confuse everyone involved.
Note that Foretold does support full probability distributions with the guesstimate-like syntax, which prediction book doesn’t. But it’s less focused on the quick individual use case in general.
If there are recommendations for simple ways to make it better for individuals; maybe other workflows, I’d be up for adding some support or integrations.
That makes sense. Thanks for chiming in.
I think I might have phrased the OP “hey, is there a reason to use Foretold or Metaculus over Prediction Book?”, and it sounds in both cases like they’re really optimized for a different thing.
Is there an option for foretold to become Very Low Friction somehow? I agree with the “5 second level predictions” thing being a key issue.
Foretold has a public API; requests can be made to it from anything that sends requests. This would require some work.
I know Ozzie has been thinking about this, because we were chatting about how to use an Alfred workflow to post to it. Which I think would be great!