It is a pretty big ask of individuals (who perhaps are making a blog post with a list of yearly predictions, in the style of Slate Star Codex, theZvi, Matt Yglesias, or others) to do all this math in order to generate and evaluate Normal Predictions of continuous variables. I think your post almost makes more sense as a software feature request—more prediction markets and other platforms should offer Metaculus-style tools for tweaking a distribution as a way of helping people generate a prediction:
It would be awesome if a prediction market let me bet on the 2024 election by first giving me a little interactive tool where I could see how my ideas about the popular vote probability distribution might translate into a Democratic or Republican victory. Then I could bet on the binary-outcome market after exploring my beliefs in continuous-variable land.
Perhaps blogging platforms like LessWrong or Substack could have official support for predictions—maybe you start by inputting your percentage chance for a binary outcome, and then the service nudges you about whether you’d like to turn that prediction into a continuous variable, to disambiguate cases like your example of “N(50.67, 0.5), N(54, 3), N(58, 6)” all giving 91% odds of a win. This seems like a good way of introducing people to the unfamiliar new format of Normal Predictions.
It is a pretty big ask of individuals (who perhaps are making a blog post with a list of yearly predictions, in the style of Slate Star Codex, theZvi, Matt Yglesias, or others) to do all this math in order to generate and evaluate Normal Predictions of continuous variables. I think your post almost makes more sense as a software feature request—more prediction markets and other platforms should offer Metaculus-style tools for tweaking a distribution as a way of helping people generate a prediction:
It would be awesome if a prediction market let me bet on the 2024 election by first giving me a little interactive tool where I could see how my ideas about the popular vote probability distribution might translate into a Democratic or Republican victory. Then I could bet on the binary-outcome market after exploring my beliefs in continuous-variable land.
Perhaps blogging platforms like LessWrong or Substack could have official support for predictions—maybe you start by inputting your percentage chance for a binary outcome, and then the service nudges you about whether you’d like to turn that prediction into a continuous variable, to disambiguate cases like your example of “N(50.67, 0.5), N(54, 3), N(58, 6)” all giving 91% odds of a win. This seems like a good way of introducing people to the unfamiliar new format of Normal Predictions.
The big ask is making normal predictions, calibrating them can be done automatically here is a quick example using google sheets: here is an example
I totally agree with both your points, This comment From a Metaculus user have some good objections to “us” :)