I have become frustrated with the financial style of prediction manifold encourages; while it produces better predictions, what I want is not good predictions from someone else, but consistent pressure to directly make good predictions myself. A prediction market doesn’t incentivize making the best prediction de novo, it incentivizes knowing when you’re more right than someone else, which most naturally implies modeling the someone else somewhat. I don’t want to deal with this when what I want is practice making predictions. So, I would prefer metaculus—except that metaculus makes it very hard to make new questions. What I’d really like is metaculus style prediction with manifold style anyone-can-make-a-question. I’d also want a slight change to the metaculus UI to hide most people’s predictions[1] and remind people that the community prediction is basically nonsense (it’s a median of predictions, lol.) But with those changes, it would become highly possible to recommend the service to friends who are allergic to their market-style prediction aggregation due to aversion to the power accumulation of unregulated markets.
[1] there’s already a setting to hide other’s predictions, but it’s not on by default. Since I think almost all the value in this sort of thing is in training people to do the thinking themselves rather than in informing them what others think, I think it should be hidden by default.
I have become frustrated with the financial style of prediction manifold encourages;
while it produces better predictions,what I want is not good predictions from someone else, but consistent pressure to directly make good predictions myself. A prediction market doesn’t incentivize making the best prediction de novo, it incentivizes knowing when you’re more right than someone else, which most naturally implies modeling the someone else somewhat. I don’t want to deal with this when what I want is practice making predictions. So, I would prefer metaculus—except that metaculus makes it very hard to make new questions. What I’d really like is metaculus style prediction with manifold style anyone-can-make-a-question. I’d also want a slight change to the metaculus UI to hide most people’s predictions[1]and remind people that the community prediction is basically nonsense (it’s a median of predictions, lol.)But with those changes, it would become highly possible to recommend the service to friends who are allergic to their market-style prediction aggregation due to aversion to the power accumulation of unregulated markets.[1] there’s already a setting to hide other’s predictions, but it’s not on by default. Since I think almost all the value in this sort of thing is in training people to do the thinking themselves rather than in informing them what others think, I think it should be hidden by default.
The so-called “nonsense” community prediction is still more accurate on average than Manifold for the same questions.
https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/15359/predictive-performance-on-metaculus-vs-manifold-markets/
wow, what! I really didn’t see that coming. it … is in fact the median of the community predictions, though, right?
This is where I got the idea it was a median. Looks a little more complex than I remembered. Very interesting. https://www.metaculus.com/help/faq/#community-prediction