“Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

About this episode

Marcus Abramovitch argues that forecasting is overrated and should stop receiving funding from the EA community.

Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off. My Experience with Forecasting For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, despite quitting, I’m still #8 on the platform. Additionally, I have done well on real-money prediction markets (Polymarket), earning mid-5 figures and winning a few AI bets. I say this to suggest that I would gain status from forecasting being seen as useful, but I think, to the contrary, that the EA community should stop funding it. I’ve written a few comments throughout the years that I didn’t think forecasting was worth funding. You can see some of these here and here. Finally, I have gotten around to making this full post. Solution Seeking a Problem When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems. You solve problems by starting with [...] --- First published…

People in this episode

Host: EA Forum Team

Guest: Marcus Abramovitch

Topics covered

• forecasting
• effective altruism
• prediction markets
• decision making
• funding

Keywords

• forecasting
• effective altruism
• prediction markets
• decision making
• funding

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EA Forum, Manifold, Polymarket

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