Notebook for generating forecasting bets

We made a colab notebook that lets you generate a bet from two people’s Elicit distributions. You can edit the notebook to generate your bet (the changes won’t be saved). Here’s an example of a suggested bet between Ben Pace and SDM on AI timelines:

Comparison of predictions:

Snapshot link

What the notebook outputs:

If the event occurs between 24 Oct 2051 and 17 Sep 2059, Ben Pace should pay SDM $87. Otherwise, SDM should pay Ben Pace $13.

Disagreement: You disagree most between 24 Oct 2051 and 17 Sep 2059.

Probabilities: Ben Pace thinks the probability the event occurs in this range is 8%, while SDM thinks it’s 18%.

Odds: You should make a bet with 87:13 odds.

Expected Value: Given your beliefs, you each win $5 in expectation

What this is actually doing:

  • We search across the question range to find the interval (with a width of 10% of the total range) where your probabilities differ the most, including the probabilities outside of the bounds

  • We determine odds that create equal and positive expected value for each person using the method outlined in this blog post