Two months ago I said I’d be creating a list of predictions about the future in honor of my baby daughter Artemis. Well, I’ve done it, in spreadsheet form. The prediction questions all have a theme: “Cyberpunk.” I intend to make it a fun new year’s activity to go through and make my guesses, and then every five years on her birthdays I’ll dig up the spreadsheet and compare prediction to reality.
I hereby invite anybody who is interested to go in and add their own predictions to the spreadsheet. Also feel free to leave comments asking for clarifications and proposing new questions or resolution conditions.
I’m thinking about making a version in Foretold.io, since that’s where people who are excited about making predictions live. But the spreadsheet I have is fine as far as I’m concerned. Let me know if you have an opinion one way or another.
(Thanks to Kavana Ramaswamy and Ramana Kumar for helping out!)
We (Foretold) have been recently experimenting with “notebooks”, which help structure tables for things like this.
I think a notebook/table setup for your spreadsheet could be a decent fit. These take a bit of time to set up now (because we need to generate each cell using a separate tool), but we could help with that if this looks interesting to you.
You can click on cells to add predictions to them.
Foretold is more experimental than Metaculus and doesn’t have as large a community. But it could be a decent fit for this (and this should get better in the next 1-3 months, as notebooks get improved)
OK, thanks Ozzie on your recommendation I’ll try to make this work. I’ll see how it works, see if I can do it myself, and reach out to you if it seems hard.
1. By measureables you mean questions, right? Using the “New question” button? Is there a way for me to have a single question of the form “X is true” and then have four columns, one for each year (2025, 2030, 2035, 2040) where people can put in four credences for whether X will be true at each of those years?
2. I created a notebook/table with what I think are correctly formatted columns. Before I can add a “data” section to it, I need IDs, and for those I need to have made questions, right?
Yes, sorry. Yep, you need to use the “New question” button. If you want separate things for 4 different years, you need to make 4 different questions. Note that you can edit the names & descriptions in the notebook view, so you can make them initially with simple names, then later add the true names to be more organized.
You are correct. In the “details” sections of questions, you can see their IDs. These are the items to use.
You can of course edit notebooks after making them, so you may want to first make it without the IDs, then once you make the questions, add the IDs in, if you’d prefer.
Two months ago I said I’d be creating a list of predictions about the future in honor of my baby daughter Artemis. Well, I’ve done it, in spreadsheet form. The prediction questions all have a theme: “Cyberpunk.” I intend to make it a fun new year’s activity to go through and make my guesses, and then every five years on her birthdays I’ll dig up the spreadsheet and compare prediction to reality.
I hereby invite anybody who is interested to go in and add their own predictions to the spreadsheet. Also feel free to leave comments asking for clarifications and proposing new questions or resolution conditions.
I’m thinking about making a version in Foretold.io, since that’s where people who are excited about making predictions live. But the spreadsheet I have is fine as far as I’m concerned. Let me know if you have an opinion one way or another.
(Thanks to Kavana Ramaswamy and Ramana Kumar for helping out!)
Hi Daniel!
We (Foretold) have been recently experimenting with “notebooks”, which help structure tables for things like this.
I think a notebook/table setup for your spreadsheet could be a decent fit. These take a bit of time to set up now (because we need to generate each cell using a separate tool), but we could help with that if this looks interesting to you.
Here are some examples: https://www.foretold.io/c/0104d8e8-07e4-464b-8b32-74ef22b49f21/n/6532621b-c16b-46f2-993f-f72009d16c6b https://www.foretold.io/c/47ff5c49-9c20-4f3d-bd57-1897c35cd42d/n/2216ee6e-ea42-4c74-9b11-1bde30c7dd02 https://www.foretold.io/c/1bea107b-6a7f-4f39-a599-0a2d285ae101/n/5ceba5ae-60fc-4bd3-93aa-eeb333a15464
You can click on cells to add predictions to them.
Foretold is more experimental than Metaculus and doesn’t have as large a community. But it could be a decent fit for this (and this should get better in the next 1-3 months, as notebooks get improved)
OK, thanks Ozzie on your recommendation I’ll try to make this work. I’ll see how it works, see if I can do it myself, and reach out to you if it seems hard.
Sure thing. We don’t have documentation for how to do this yet, but you can get an idea from seeing the “Markdown” of some of those examples.
The steps to do this:
Make a bunch of measurables.
Get the IDs of all of those measurables (you can see these in the Details tabs on the bottom)
Create the right notebook/table, and add all the correct IDs to the right places within them.
OK, some questions:
1. By measureables you mean questions, right? Using the “New question” button? Is there a way for me to have a single question of the form “X is true” and then have four columns, one for each year (2025, 2030, 2035, 2040) where people can put in four credences for whether X will be true at each of those years?
2. I created a notebook/table with what I think are correctly formatted columns. Before I can add a “data” section to it, I need IDs, and for those I need to have made questions, right?
Yes, sorry. Yep, you need to use the “New question” button. If you want separate things for 4 different years, you need to make 4 different questions. Note that you can edit the names & descriptions in the notebook view, so you can make them initially with simple names, then later add the true names to be more organized.
You are correct. In the “details” sections of questions, you can see their IDs. These are the items to use.
You can of course edit notebooks after making them, so you may want to first make it without the IDs, then once you make the questions, add the IDs in, if you’d prefer.
Well, many of them live on Metaculus.
Right, no offense intended, haha! (I already made a post about this on Metaculus, don’t worry I didn’t forget them except in this post here!)