The thing that I was more surprised by, looking at the scoring system, is that Metaculus is set up as a platform for maintaining a forecast rather than as a place where you make a forecast at a particular time. (If I’m understanding the scoring correctly.)
Metaculus scores your current forecast at each moment, from the moment you first enter a forecast on the question until the moment the question closes. Where “your current forecast” at each moment is the most recent number that you entered, and the only thing that happens when you enter an updated prediction is that for the rest of the moments (until you update it again) “your current forecast” will be a different number. Every moment gets equal weight regardless of whether you last entered a number just now or three weeks ago (except that the very last moment when the question closes gets extra weight).
So it’s not like a literal betting market where you’re buying at the current market price at the moment that you make your forecast. If you don’t keep updating your forecast, then you-at-that-moment is going up against the future consensus forecast.
So the scoring system rewards the activity of entering more questions, and also the activity of updating your forecasts on each of those questions again and again to keep them up-to-date.
The thing that I was more surprised by, looking at the scoring system, is that Metaculus is set up as a platform for maintaining a forecast rather than as a place where you make a forecast at a particular time. (If I’m understanding the scoring correctly.)
Metaculus scores your current forecast at each moment, from the moment you first enter a forecast on the question until the moment the question closes. Where “your current forecast” at each moment is the most recent number that you entered, and the only thing that happens when you enter an updated prediction is that for the rest of the moments (until you update it again) “your current forecast” will be a different number. Every moment gets equal weight regardless of whether you last entered a number just now or three weeks ago (except that the very last moment when the question closes gets extra weight).
So it’s not like a literal betting market where you’re buying at the current market price at the moment that you make your forecast. If you don’t keep updating your forecast, then you-at-that-moment is going up against the future consensus forecast.
So the scoring system rewards the activity of entering more questions, and also the activity of updating your forecasts on each of those questions again and again to keep them up-to-date.