The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, one person wrote a message of thanks on a forum: “I just want to say that I moved from kyiv to Lviv on February 13 thanks to this prediction thread and your estimates.[.] I leave Ukraine today. Thank you all”.
The message left by user availablegreen on Metaculus, a community that is dedicated to predicting the future by answering questions like the one that pushed him to leave his city: Will Russia invade Ukraine before 2023? In December, the community prediction said there was a 40% chance, and on February 13, when availablegreen left kyiv, which had 60%. At that time, US intelligence was already saying that it was going to happen, and although many people did not believe it, in Metaculus they did.
Metaculus
Prediction communities are experiencing a boom. On Metaculus, polymarket, Good Judgment or Insight questions about everything. On politics: Will Macron win the French elections? Very likely (94%). On the pandemic: Will the WHO add a new variant of covid to the list of “worrying” in 2022? Likely (74%). Or about catastrophes: What risk is there in London of dying next month from a nuclear explosion? Some 24 microdeaths, 24 options out of a million, according to a group of forecasters renowned, of which Nuño Sempere from Madrid is a part.
Sempere, who writes a newsletter On these topics, he explained to me how the platforms work: “Metaculus is a group of people who think that these questions are important, and that having models of the world that are capable of making predictions is important. Imagine a collaborative community of the type Wikipedia or Reddit, that instead of writing articles or selecting interesting content, generates investigations and a probability that summarizes them”.
These predictions were popularized by three Pennsylvania professors—Philip Tetlock, Barbara Mellers, and Don Moore—who in 2013 won a competition funded by US intelligence. They showed that some people are better at doing this, whom they would later call super-forecasters, and that by adding their forecasts, a team of generalists could match or beat the CIA experts.
But the community that has emerged goes further.
How do they do that?
Forecasters use open sources. They exploit the information that is on the internet, from scientific studies, to press news or public data. What Sam Freedman said: “Anyone on Twitter can, if they filter the information well, be better informed about the real-time course of the war than Lyndon Johnson is about Vietnam.”
In addition, we know how to predict better. First, a certain look (quantitative, probabilistic, parsimonious, willing to change your mind) helps. Second, it helps to use aggregation methods better than a median (for example, it is convenient to extreme: if two people with different information tell you that the probability of rain is 50%, you should bet that it will rain with plus 50% chance). And third, something logical, but often forgotten: it helps to have a real will to hit.
How much are they right?
In the community they are not very satisfied with their success in this war, although it seems to me to be commendable to have said in January that the invasion was probable.
I have also followed another prediction of yours that started out unsuccessful, but moved quickly. I found it useful to organize my coverage: Would kyiv fall under Russian control before April 1? On the second day of the invasion, Metaculus saw the fall as likely (80%), as did most observers who expected a rapid advance by the Russians. But they soon corrected.
On the fifth day the probability had dropped to 67%, on March 6 to 37% and on the 15th, two weeks before the deadline, it was only 10%. Even more interesting: now they believe that the probability that the capital will hold out for another two months, until June 1, is 80-85%. Will they succeed?
Metaculus
A success of Metaculus has been his predictions during the covid pandemic, as he explained to me John Cambeiro from New York, who I met when he was leading the ranking of the best tipster, and who now works for the platform. “For him December 2, the Metaculus forecasters successfully predicted that Omicron would rapidly overtake Delta.” Also that it had “inherently higher transmissibility, which would erode the protection conferred by vaccines and even be less lethal than Delta.”
Of course, the people of Metaculus are far from infallible oracles. They almost never offer strong predictions. But they have been proven correct in one key sense: they are well calibrated. Events to which they assign a probability of 60% occur 60% of the time (more or less), and those with probability 90% occur 90% (more or less).
Why do they do it?
There are platforms where you can predict to earn money or cryptocurrency, but the main reasons, at the moment, seem to be hobby and commitment. If the internet has taught us anything, it is that people can spend a lot of time on their interests.
For Sempere it is not a game: “Sports betting seems absurd to me and I don’t see the point in it. They are structured to generate addiction.” He also predicts in contests and paid markets, but finds advantages and disadvantages: “It allows you to invest more effort. But collaborating is more difficult.”
The key is that both Sempere and Cambeiro find their work useful, and potentially very useful. We all have to make quick decisions and under uncertainty. This is obvious for a mayor or a manager, but it is the same for the man who closed his bar in the pandemic, or for the young woman who decides not to buy a house for fear of the recession. These platforms, as Sempere says, can produce probabilities about “how long a quarantine is going to last, or about who is going to be the next president.” They won’t decide for you, but they can shed light and inform your decisions. Cambeiro emphasizes that it is already happening: “Many people have made decisions with our forecasts with covid: I and many other users were taking precautions before anyone else.”
Can this be the case availablegreen? I can’t say for sure that it’s true, although I’ve talked to him and it sure seems like it. A young Belarusian who lived in kyiv, and who in February, already worried, remembered having read about these platforms (“I went to see what the prediction markets said”), and trusting them, and what he saw on New York Times and on Twitter, he made a decision: to leave the city for Lviv and then to Warsaw.
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