The jist is that most professional forecasters are shitty, surprise surprise. I thought it may be fun to have a little contest go on where we make analysis of upcoming events, then make rationales for them, assign probabilities, and determine afterwards what was driving our predictions, what we misunderstood, both in how we predicted and in terms of available information, and what we could do to better approach decision making in the future. Any interest or suggestions for what we could cover? Or in other words, what do you guys think are some fun, fairly specific, unique/constrained historical events or scenarios, which have multiple reasonable outcomes, which can be predicted on? Also, how would you go about researching, constructing your thesis, and assessing the results? Or would anyone be up to start a team on this tournament?
I considered joining the good judgment project. But considering my job requires making predictions each day, I decided a better course of action would be to monitor/test my accuracy on those instead of random ones. That way I hopefully get the benefit of practice without much added hours required.
There’s so much material here, what is it that of all of it that made you focus of all things on edging? What is it that makes you associate so heavily with edging?
Do people still get paid to ‘make predictions’? I thought that ended but maybe not. Such a fraud industry/job. Selling a prediction is nothing more than selling the buyer the ability to blame someone else when things don’t go well. That’s the only value of a third party prediction/forecast.
Indeed it is. But hey, these practitioners have “high conviction,” isn’t that what they say? I always have a good laugh when I meet with teams of stockpickers and the PM tells me that he has high conviction in these names as if that’s some kind of selling point…like, what buddy, you’re going to focus on names you don’t have conviction in? Charlatans.
I think that this is less of a unique historical event and more of an investment idea. For this I’d prefer to stick with things outside of investing. Unless you and/or others would prefer to do some collaborative analysis:
it’s not so much predicting the future as positioning yourself to benefit from what might happen that’s good at the same time not getting hurt by what could happen that’s bad, the whole asymmetric probabilities thing (which I have zero technical understanding of, but know it when i see it). basically getting exposure to potential sources of upside without paying for it.