I like the idea of visualizing progress towards a future milestone. However, the presentation as a countdown seems problematic. A countdown implicitly promises that something interesting will happen when the countdown reaches 0, as seen with New Year’s countdowns, launch countdowns, countdowns to scheduled events, etc. But, here, because of the uncertainty, it’s vanishingly unlikely that anything interesting will happen at the moment the countdown completes. (Not only might it not have happened yet, but it might have happened already!)
I can’t think a way to fix this issue. Representing the current uncertainty represented by Metaculus’s probability distribution is already hard enough, and the harder thing is to respond to changes in the Metaculus prediction over time. It might be that countdowns inherently only work with numbers known to high levels of precision.
I like the idea of visualizing progress towards a future milestone. However, the presentation as a countdown seems problematic. A countdown implicitly promises that something interesting will happen when the countdown reaches 0, as seen with New Year’s countdowns, launch countdowns, countdowns to scheduled events, etc. But, here, because of the uncertainty, it’s vanishingly unlikely that anything interesting will happen at the moment the countdown completes. (Not only might it not have happened yet, but it might have happened already!)
I can’t think a way to fix this issue. Representing the current uncertainty represented by Metaculus’s probability distribution is already hard enough, and the harder thing is to respond to changes in the Metaculus prediction over time. It might be that countdowns inherently only work with numbers known to high levels of precision.