I think this is only partly right. I’ve personally interfaced with most of the people on the top 20 -- some of them for 20+ hours; and I’ve generally been deeply impressed with them; and expect the tails of the Metaculus rankings to track important stuff about people’s cognition.
But yeah, I also found that I could get to like 70 by just predicting the same as the community a bunch, and finding questions that would resolve in just a few days and extremizing really hard.
(That said, I still think I’m a reasonable forecaster, and have practiced it a lot independently. But don’t think this Metaculus ranking is much evidence of that.)
You get metaculus points by being active on Metaculus. People who spent a lot of time on metaculus have thought a lot about about making predictions and that’s valuable but it’s not the same as it being a measure of calibration.
The the expection of jimrandomh all the people in the top 20 have more then 1000 predictions (jimrandomh has 800). I’m Rank 87 at the moment with 195 predictions I made.
If you go on GJOpen you can see the calibration of any user and use it to judge how well they are calibrated. Metaculus doesn’t make that information publically available (you need to have level 6 and pay Tachyons to access the track record of another user, 50 Tachyons also feels too expensive to just do it for the sake of a discussion like this).
I think this is only partly right. I’ve personally interfaced with most of the people on the top 20 -- some of them for 20+ hours; and I’ve generally been deeply impressed with them; and expect the tails of the Metaculus rankings to track important stuff about people’s cognition.
But yeah, I also found that I could get to like 70 by just predicting the same as the community a bunch, and finding questions that would resolve in just a few days and extremizing really hard.
(That said, I still think I’m a reasonable forecaster, and have practiced it a lot independently. But don’t think this Metaculus ranking is much evidence of that.)
You get metaculus points by being active on Metaculus. People who spent a lot of time on metaculus have thought a lot about about making predictions and that’s valuable but it’s not the same as it being a measure of calibration.
The the expection of jimrandomh all the people in the top 20 have more then 1000 predictions (jimrandomh has 800). I’m Rank 87 at the moment with 195 predictions I made.
If you go on GJOpen you can see the calibration of any user and use it to judge how well they are calibrated. Metaculus doesn’t make that information publically available (you need to have level 6 and pay Tachyons to access the track record of another user, 50 Tachyons also feels too expensive to just do it for the sake of a discussion like this).