My hypothesis: They don’t anticipate any benefit.
Personally, I prefer to chat with friends and high-status strangers over internet randos. And I prefer to chat in person, where I can control and anticipate the conversation, rather than asynchronously via text with a bunch of internet randos who can enter and exit the conversation whenever they feel like it.
For me, this is why I rarely post on LessWrong.
Seeding and cultivating a community of high value conversations is difficult. I think the best way to attract high quality contributors is to already have high quality contributors (and perhaps having mechanisms to disincentivize the low quality contributors). It’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem. LessWrong is doing well, but no doubt it could do better.
That’s my initial reaction, at least. Hope it doesn’t offend or come off as too negative. Best wishes to you all.
I spent years trading in prediction markets so I can offer some perspective.
If you step back and think about it, the question ‘How well can the long-term future be forecasted?’ doesn’t really have an answer. The reason for this is that it completely depends on the domain of the forecasts. Like, consider all facts about the universe. Some facts are very, very predictable. In 10 years, I predict the Sun will exist with 99.99%+ probability. Some facts are very, very unpredictable. In 10 years, I have no clue whether the coin you flip will come up heads or tails. As a result, you cannot really say the future is predictable or not predictable. It depends on which aspect of the future you are predicting. And even if you say, ok sure it depends, but like what’s the average answer—even then, the only the way to arrive at some unbiased global sense of whether the future is predictable is to come up with some way of enumerating and weighing all possible facts about the future universe… which is an impossible problem. So we’re left with the unsatisfying truth that the future is neither predictable or unpredictable—it depends on which features of the future you are considering.
So when you show the plot above, you have to realize it doesn’t generalize very well to other domains. For example, if the questions were about certain things—e.g., will the sun exist in 10 years—it would look high and flat. If the questions were about fundamentally uncertain things—e.g., what will the coin flip be 10 years from now—it would look low and flat. The slope we observe in that plot is less a property of how well the future can be predicted and more a property of the limited set of questions that were asked. If the questions were about uncertain near-term geopolitical events, then that graph shows the rate that information came in to the market consensus. It doesn’t really tell us about the bigger picture of predicting the future.
Incidentally, this was my biggest gripe with Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforecasting book. They spent a lot of time talking about how Superforecasters could predict the future, but almost no time talking about how the questions were selected and how if you choose different sets of counterfactual questions you can get totally different results (e.g., experts cannot predict the future vs rando smart people can predict the future). I don’t really fault them for this, because it’s a slippery thorny issue to discuss. I hope I have given you some flavor of it here.