Thanks for writing this! I got lots of food for thought.
With regards to r/calledit, I looked through the top 30+ posts, but I wasn’t as impressed.
The Betty in 2021 thing is obviously great in multiple ways, and unfortunately so was this Onion satire.
But most of the Mark My Words statements seem like obvious cases of survivorship bias, i.e. if enough people make enough predictions, eventually some will turn out true. And I’m averse to even giving those credit, since they lack both confidence intervals and the context of these redditors’ other predictions.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg prediction looks very specific, but old people have a non-negligible chance to die each year, and the followup was inevitable in an increasingly partisan congress.
The 2nd-most upvoted post on the subreddit is this, supposedly predicting the Among Us game craze of 2020, but it’s actually a photoshopped fake of this post.
I thought that the How I Met Your Mother prediction was impressive.
I think that survivorship bias, or more generally the accuracy rate could be quantified, i.e., just get 100 random posts and check whether they were true. It’d be a nice mini-project.
Thanks for writing this! I got lots of food for thought.
With regards to r/calledit, I looked through the top 30+ posts, but I wasn’t as impressed.
The Betty in 2021 thing is obviously great in multiple ways, and unfortunately so was this Onion satire.
But most of the Mark My Words statements seem like obvious cases of survivorship bias, i.e. if enough people make enough predictions, eventually some will turn out true. And I’m averse to even giving those credit, since they lack both confidence intervals and the context of these redditors’ other predictions.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg prediction looks very specific, but old people have a non-negligible chance to die each year, and the followup was inevitable in an increasingly partisan congress.
The 2nd-most upvoted post on the subreddit is this, supposedly predicting the Among Us game craze of 2020, but it’s actually a photoshopped fake of this post.
I thought that the How I Met Your Mother prediction was impressive.
I think that survivorship bias, or more generally the accuracy rate could be quantified, i.e., just get 100 random posts and check whether they were true. It’d be a nice mini-project.