[Question] When has forecasting been useful for you?

[sanyer]

I’m currently thinking of how impactful forecasting is. I’m interested to hear about situations where crowd-sourced forecasting (like Manifold and Metaculus) has influenced your decisions, or cases where you’ve seen it change someone else’s behavior. Has there been a situation in which, if you had not had access to Manifold or Metaculus, you would’ve made a worse decision?

[exmateriae]

I know a ukrainian metaculus user moved days before the attack because of the community’s forecast

[SimonM]

https://​​www.metaculus.com/​​questions/​​8898/​​russian-invasion-of-ukraine-before-2023/​​#comment-82655

Just want to say that I moved from Kyiv to Lviv on Feb 13 /​entirely/​ thanks to this prediction thread and the Metaculus estimates. (Still in Lviv but leaving Ukraine later today.)

It’s hard to estimate the impact, but at the very least I have saved myself an enormous hassle trying to move all my possessions, finding an apartment in Lviv, etc on very short notice — which would have happened otherwise. Of course, worse outcomes were possible too if things had played out a bit differently.

Thank you, everyone.

[casens]

forecasting is so intractible-in-practice that metaculus doesn’t even use it for internal decisions, despite attempting to do so multiple times (source: i was there)

[shirtless]

what happened? what was intractable?