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
It would be lovely if you could also support a form of formatted export feature so that people can use this tool with the knowledge that they can export the data and switch to another tool (if this one gets Googled) anytime.
But yes, I am really excited for a super-fast and easy-to-use and good-looking prediction book successor. Manifold markets was just intimidating for me, and the only reason I got into it was social motivation. This tool serves a more personal niche for prediction logging, I think, and that is good.
I’ve added a feature to export all your forecasts to CSV, thanks for the suggestion!
I agree—I think data export is especially important for a prediction platform so you’re confident making long-run predictions.
I’m planning to add import/export to spreadsheet, and maybe also to JSON, probably this week. If anyone has thoughts about the format of this data lmk!
I’ve also added the ability to import your forecasts from a spreadsheet/CSV file, which I think is also useful for switching tools: fatebook.io/import-from-spreadsheet
This looks amazing. Thank you so much for making this. I’ve already integrated this in my team shard’s MATS 4.0 slack, and look forward to quantifying our results over time. See also: Predictions for shard theory mechanistic interpretability results, but PredictionBook results are clunky and have lots of friction and were harder to coordinate on. That’s why the MATS 3.0 prediction retrospective post isn’t out yet.
I especially like the “hide other forecasters to avoid anchoring” feature.
Any chance we can get an Android app version?
Thanks for asking—I’m interested in doing iOS and Android apps! It’d be helpful to hear if other people are keen for this to help prioritise.
For now, one option is to add a homescreen shortcut to the website in Chrome.
An Android app would definitely be valuable to me. I have my phone with me constantly, and my computer is often in another room, or entirely unavailable, so an app is much more available and lower friction.
Cool thanks! For now you can use https://fatebook.io on your phone, do you think a native app would be much better?
I’ve added the website as a shortcut to my home screen for the last 3 days and that seems to work pretty well! Would be useful to be able to use it when I don’t have internet/data though.
Admittedly a very niche case, but I don’t have a browser on my Android phone (to reduce distractions).
I really like this, and am glad there’s active development on something similar to predictionbook!
Glad to hear it!
For PredictionBook users: you can import all your historical predictions to Fatebook here: https://fatebook.io/import-from-prediction-book
Oh HELL yeah. I tried Metaculus’s private predictions for this, but they needed just as much detail as the public ones did, at least in terms of “this field is required”. They seem to be aiming more for the superforecaster/people who actually give their predictions some thought camp, which is perfectly fine, but not suited for me, who just wants something quick and simple.
Signup was easy, I love how it watches for dates in the question and automatically sets them in the resolve field. Posting a comment containing a link by itself (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/24/bitcoin-btc-price-could-hit-100000-by-end-2024-standard-chartered.html) on one of my private predictions seems to have posted a blank comment, though. (p.s. my odds on 1 BTC = $100,000 are about 15%)
Absolutely love this one. I’ve already migrated my (admittedly few) existing predictions over. Thanks for this!
EDIT: “Each day I’ll write down whether I want to leave or stay in my job. After 2 months, will I have chosen ‘leave’ on >30 days?” is such a good suggested question, both to demonstrate details about the site and also to get people to think about what prediction can do for them, personally! And I love how you can just click the suggestion and have it auto-populate into the title field.
Thanks! And thanks for mentioning this bug where the contents of comments were lost—I’ve now fixed this, comments made from now on should be recorded properly.
Cool, thank you!
Thanks! I’ve personally been using this to force myself out of procrastination! I just give high probability Y to “finishing work X by the end of the day” and then, to preserve my precious brier score, I end up… doing it, most of the time. “The best way to predict the future is to shape it” actually applies very well to to-do lists.
Is this available for discord?
I’ve made a basic version of Fatebook for Discord—you can install it here!
Thanks so much🙏
Currently it’s not—just Slack and web. What would do you think you’d use it for in Discord?
Same I would do in Slack! I simply have some work groups in Discord, that’s why
A thing I’d quite like is to have tags for predictions (which, ideally, I can then see separate calibration scores for).
I hired someone to build this for predictionBook, and he came up with the UI option of just inserting hashtags into your prediction description (i.e. type something like “Donald Trump will win the 2024 election #politics” and it automatically gets the politics tag)
This is now added (see below)
Can anyone who uses this or similar websites (eg. Predictionbook) explain what practical purpose websites like that have? Do you just want to check how correct your predictions are, or do you actually do something with that? Do you find the most value in the calibration graph and other statistics?
I really like the idea! Thanks for this!
Fatebook has worked nicely for me so far, and I think it’d be cool to use it more throughout the day. Some features I’d like to see:
Currently tags seem to only be useful for filtering your track record. I’d like to be able to filter the forecast list by tag.
Allow clicking and dragging the bar to modify probabilities.
An option to input probabilities in formats besides percentages, such as odds ratios or bits.
An option to resolve by a specific time, not just a date, plus an option for push notification reminders instead of emails. This would open the door to super short-term forecasts like “Will I solve this problem in the next hour?”. I’ve made a substitute for this feature by making reminders in Google Keep with a link to the prediction.
Thank you!
I agree this would be nice. But try clicking on a tag to see all of your forecasts under it!
This is terrific. One feature that will be great to have, is a way to sort and categorize your predictions under various labels.
I’ve now added this! You can also see your track record for questions with specific tags, e.g.:
the link to fatebook.io at the top does not work.
Thanks, fixed!
Seems like a great tool, I’ve made several personal predictions to test it out and it was actually fun. The only thing that confused me is how the date widget works—it seemed to switch between date formats or something? idk. But I sometimes had trouble picking the date I want.
This should be fixed now (it was a timezone-related bug!)
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Just a thought: I experience discomfort with only being able to sign up via a Google account. I can get over it personally, but we should observe I’m probably not the only one, so there are people out there for whom this is an insurmountable hump that stops them from getting started. I dunno how many in actuality, but there are definitely bubbles where it’s normal not to have used a Google service for years.
Alas, I dunno what alternative sign-up would be quickest and easiest to implement.