Fatebook is a website that makes it extremely low friction to make and track predictions.
It’s designed to be very fast—just open a new tab, go to fatebook.io, type your prediction, and hit enter. Later, you’ll get an email reminding you to resolve your question as YES, NO, or AMBIGUOUS.
It’s private by default, so you can track personal questions and give forecasts that you don’t want to share publicly. You can also share questions with specific people, or publicly.
Fatebook syncs with Fatebook for Slack—if you log in with the email you use for Slack, you’ll see all of your questions on the website.
As you resolve your forecasts, you’ll build a track record—Brier score, Relative Brier score, and see your calibration chart. You can use this to track the development of your forecasting skills.
Some stories of outcomes I hope Fatebook will enable
During conversations at meetups, in coworking spaces, or amongst friends, it’s common to pull out your phone and jot down predictions on Fatebook about cruxes of disagreement
Before you start projects, you and your team make your underlying assumptions explicit and put probabilities on them—then, as your plans make contact with reality, you update your estimates
As part of your monthly review process, you might make forecasts about your goals and wellbeing
If you’re exploring career options and doing cheap tests like reading or interning, you first make predictions about what you’ll learn. Then you return to these periodically to reflect on how valuable more exploration might be
Intro programs to rationality (e.g. ESPR, Atlas, Leaf) and to EA (e.g. university reading groups, AGISF) use Fatebook to make both on- and off-topic predictions. Participants get a chance to try forecasting on questions that are relevant to their interests and lives
As a result, I hope that we’ll reap some of the benefits of tracking predictions, e.g.:
Truth-seeking incentives that reduce motivated reasoning ⇒ better decisions
Probabilities and concrete questions reduce talking past each other ⇒ clearer communication
Track records help people improve their forecasting skills, and help identify people with excellent abilities (not just restricted to the domains that are typically covered on public platforms like Metaculus and Manifold like tech and geopolitics) ⇒ forecasting skill development and talent-spotting
Ultimately, the platform is pretty flexible—I’m interested to see what unexpected usecases people find for it, and what (if anything) actually seems useful about it in practice.
Your feedback or thoughts would be very useful—we can chat in the comments here, in our Discord, or by email.
You can try Fatebook at fatebook.io
+9. Fatebook has been a game changer for me, in terms of how practical it is to weave predictions into my decisionmaking. I donated $1000 to Sage to support it.
It’s not listed here, but one of the most crucial things is the Fatebook Chrome Extension, which makes it possible to frictionless integrate it into my normal orienting process (which I do in google docs. You can also do it in the web version of Roam).
I’ve started work on “Enriched Fatebook” poweruser view that shows your calibration at a more granular level. I have several ideas for how to build additional poweruser UI for it but not sure if I’ll get around to it. https://raemon.github.io/fatebook-enriched
One weakness is that the Slack Integration produces pretty bulky predictions, which makes it feel awkward to make a ton of predictions in a channel (and usually, when we’re having a discussion where it’d be appropriate to make a prediction, it’s useful to make like 3 predictions that tackle the question from different angles). Trimming off a few lines from the Slack UI would be good, i.e. see here:
I don’t know what the limitations of the Slack integration are but you should be able to shave at least one line off that.
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I currently thinking a thing that Quick Forecasting is missing is “qualia-based predictions.” I.e. before I know “what probability do I assign here?” I often know things like “I don’t believe in this, in my gut” or “I believe in this but in a loopy way where I’m the one driving the actions and I’m inhabiting a confident mode which is hard to be objective about.” Right now Fatebook has tags for Questions, but not tags for “predictions.”
Longterm, I think the Philosophically/Practically Correct Typing for an individual prediction should let you either put a number (if you have one), or a “prediction tag” which is some kind of metadata other than the raw probability. (But, admittedly I don’t expect anyone other than me to use that for the near future so it’s not obviously a priority)
Thanks Raemon – I’m a fan of ~all these ideas! I’m not spending much time on Fatebook specifically these days (busy with various other projects), but your feedback is and has been super useful.
I love Fatebook as a user, and also this feels like an odd fit for the Best Of LessWrong collection.
I usually think of the Best Of LessWrong collection as being the best posts from a given year. The collection used to be physical books, printed on paper, which I could physically hand to someone. By that standard, this isn’t very good. What exactly would someone do with this post if they read it in a book? It’s kind of just a (well written) advertisement. The magic happens if they go to the website.
But man, the last few years have been a giant leap forward in prediction tools, haven’t they? Polymarket and Kalshi showing up in news broadcasts and respectable journalism, Manifold Markets having honest to goodness conferences, and here, quietly announced in a LessWrong post, is a tool that’s starting to feel as much a reflex and habit to me as Google Search and my pomodoro timer. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, a clean, fast, simple prediction tool, and the thought of going back to the google form I used to use makes me sad.
Take your +4 vote. It’s a very well written advertisement for a product more people should use. If the LW team does print more Best Of LessWrong books, may I suggest having one page that literally just says “THESE PEOPLE USE FATEBOOK AND YOU SHOULD TOO” with a bunch of signatures underneath? (Half joking- but only half.)