{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Does Forecasting Have Room At The Top?","description":"Superforecasting is the art\/science\/sport of predicting the future - for example, who will win elections, which countries will fight wars, when key technologies will be discovered. Over the past few years, it went from an obscure academic subfield to a multibillion dollar industry in the form of prediction markets. More recently, AI superforecasters have come close to the accuracy of top humans, and their performance is rising rapidly. In a year or two, we\u2019ll see one of the following patterns: Either humans have already come close to some fundamental limit on the predictability of world events - in which case AIs will plateau at or slightly above the human level - or the trend line will continue until AIs are far beyond top humans. By analogy to superintelligence, the natural term for the second situation would be \u201csuperforecasting\u201d; since that\u2019s already in use, we can cringely call it \u201cultraforecasting\u201d. Daniel Reeves1 makes the case for scenario A here. He describes a study he coauthored in 2010, which found that, on a variety of questions related to sports games and movie box office receipts2, prediction markets only outperformed simple boring statistical models by 3-6%. Maybe those statistical models are close to the best that it\u2019s possible to do; the rest is what the mathematicians call aleatoric uncertainty - irreducible complexity downstream of chaotic systems that entirely resist modeling. He could be right. This post isn\u2019t meant to be a decisive refutation, but rather a description of why I\u2019m still about 70-30 expecting Scenario B. https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/does-forecasting-have-room-at-the ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"