<story><title>A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at forecasting world events</title><url>https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RugnirViking</author><text>This is very interesting. A discussion of the process of estimating and predicting future events, specifically going into their focus on &amp;quot;base rates&amp;quot;. Apparently they are significantly better than other groups that enter most predicting competitions. (who knew there was such a thing?)&lt;p&gt;I particularly liked the idea of base rates and averaging them. [1] I can see here that the idea of them is not to be on their own accurate (some of the methodologies individually are dumb), but do get an idea for the scales of numbers to talk about (the difference between a 5% event and a 10% event is very hard to notice as a human)&lt;p&gt;[1] &amp;quot;One was the rate at which provinces claimed by China (like Hong Kong, Macau, and Tibet) have eventually been absorbed, peacefully or by force; another was how often control of Taiwan has changed over the last few hundred years (twice; once when Japan took over from the Qing Empire in 1895 and once when the Chinese Nationalists did in 1945); the third base rate used Laplace’s rule. Laplace’s rule states that the probability of something that hasn’t happened before happening is 1 divided by N+2, where N is the number of times it hasn’t happened in the past. So the odds of the People’s Republic of China invading Taiwan this year is 1 divided by 75 (the number of years since 1949 when this has not happened) plus 2, or 1&amp;#x2F;77, or 1.3 percent.&lt;p&gt;Sempere averaged his three base rates to get his initial prediction: 8 percent&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at forecasting world events</title><url>https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vlovich123</author><text>The base rate arguing seems like specious reasoning. For example, if you had a volcano that erupts roughly ever 100 years, base rate reasoning using the past 99 years of data would suggest that the probability is 0 and using 1000 years of data would suggest it&amp;#x27;s ~10% when in reality your base rate in the year following an eruption is 0 with every passing year your probability of an eruption would increase &amp;amp; increase past 10% for every year past 100 that goes without explosion. Same goes for something like war where pressures build up and war becomes more likely rather than less. So getting judged that you&amp;#x27;re better at predicting by giving low probabilities for rare events isn&amp;#x27;t that insightful because you&amp;#x27;d be outperformed by someone who predicts a black swan event because the magnitude of the event matters.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The prediction got some press attention and earned rejoinders from nuclear experts like Peter Scoblic, who argued it significantly understated the risk of a nuclear exchange. It was a big moment for the group — but also an example of a prediction that’s very, very difficult to get right. The further you’re straying from the ordinary course of history (and a nuclear bomb going off in London would be straying very far), the harder this is.&lt;p&gt;Yup, the group got it right but predicting a rare event doesn&amp;#x27;t happen isn&amp;#x27;t that difficult, it&amp;#x27;s just notable because everyone was overly freaked out, particularly in the media due to self-repeated sensationalism. Peter Scoblic is correct that the risk is significantly understated because it&amp;#x27;s not correctly adjusting for the impact of the black swan event happening (e.g. if a nuclear explosion were to occur, you&amp;#x27;d expect nuclear retaliations).</text></comment>