From participating on Metaculus I certainly don’t get the sense that there are people who make uncannily good predictions. If you compare the community prediction to the Metaculus prediction, it looks like there’s a 0.14 difference in average log score, which I guess means a combination of the best predictors tends to put e^(0.14) or 1.15 times as much probability on the correct answer as the time-weighted community median. (The postdiction is better, but I guess subject to overfitting?) That’s substantial, but presumably the combination of the best predictors is better than every individual predictor. The Metaculus prediction also seems to be doing a lot worse than the community prediction on recent questions, so I don’t know what to make of that. I suspect that, while some people are obviously better at forecasting than others, the word “superforecasters” has no content outside of “the best forecasters” and is just there to make the field of research sound more exciting.
From participating on Metaculus I certainly don’t get the sense that there are people who make uncannily good predictions. If you compare the community prediction to the Metaculus prediction, it looks like there’s a 0.14 difference in average log score, which I guess means a combination of the best predictors tends to put e^(0.14) or 1.15 times as much probability on the correct answer as the time-weighted community median. (The postdiction is better, but I guess subject to overfitting?) That’s substantial, but presumably the combination of the best predictors is better than every individual predictor. The Metaculus prediction also seems to be doing a lot worse than the community prediction on recent questions, so I don’t know what to make of that. I suspect that, while some people are obviously better at forecasting than others, the word “superforecasters” has no content outside of “the best forecasters” and is just there to make the field of research sound more exciting.