There are way too many “shoulds” in this post. If anyone can have fun predicting important events at all, then it would probably be people in this forum. Can we make something like this happen? Would we actually want to participate? I’m not sure that I do.
I’d definitely want to participate, and looking at the yearly predictions SSC and others do, I’m surely not the only one.
But someone would have to set it up, run it and advertise it. You don’t even strictly need to write software for it. It could be done on any forum, as a thread or series of threads. It could be done here, if this place wasn’t so empty nowadays.
Well, I can imagine a post on SSC with 5 statements about the next week, where other users would reply with probabilities of each becoming true, and arguments for that. Then, after the week, you could count the scores and name the winners in the OP. It would probably get a positive reaction. Why not give it a try?
I’m not sure what the 5 statements should be though. I think it must be “next week” not “next year”, because you can’t enjoy a game if you’ve forgotten you’re playing it. Also, for it to be a game, it has to be repeatable, but if you start predicting the most important events of the year, you’ll run out very fast. On the other hand, weekly events tend to be unimportant random fluctuations. I think that’s a big problem with the whole idea.
One possible solution could be to do experiments rather than predict natural events, i.e. “On day X I will try to do Y. Will it work?”.
There are way too many “shoulds” in this post. If anyone can have fun predicting important events at all, then it would probably be people in this forum. Can we make something like this happen? Would we actually want to participate? I’m not sure that I do.
I’d definitely want to participate, and looking at the yearly predictions SSC and others do, I’m surely not the only one.
But someone would have to set it up, run it and advertise it. You don’t even strictly need to write software for it. It could be done on any forum, as a thread or series of threads. It could be done here, if this place wasn’t so empty nowadays.
Well, I can imagine a post on SSC with 5 statements about the next week, where other users would reply with probabilities of each becoming true, and arguments for that. Then, after the week, you could count the scores and name the winners in the OP. It would probably get a positive reaction. Why not give it a try?
I’m not sure what the 5 statements should be though. I think it must be “next week” not “next year”, because you can’t enjoy a game if you’ve forgotten you’re playing it. Also, for it to be a game, it has to be repeatable, but if you start predicting the most important events of the year, you’ll run out very fast. On the other hand, weekly events tend to be unimportant random fluctuations. I think that’s a big problem with the whole idea.
One possible solution could be to do experiments rather than predict natural events, i.e. “On day X I will try to do Y. Will it work?”.