Metaculus's 'Minitaculus' Experiments — Collaborate With Us

By christian @ 2024-08-26T20:44 (+10)

This is a linkpost to https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/27612/experimenting-with-minitaculuses--collaborate-with-us/

Metaculus is experimenting with hosting more specialized forecasting communities called "minitaculuses" managed by volunteer curators. A minitaculus might be dedicated to a particular area of inquiry — like the workings of a particular industry, or questions taking a deep dive on a topic. A minitaculus can be the venue for a series of niche economic forecasts, or a collection of questions focused on a single city or region. And importantly, minitaculus curators can make questions public in a matter of minutes and can resolve them at will.

Metaculus is transitioning to open source development soon, and we're interested in experimenting with more ways to decentralize and diversify forecasting. Giving more forecasters the opportunity to manage their own spaces and create questions for others to forecast can lead to a richer variety of forecasting questions on offer.

We've invited a few forecasters to create their own spaces, and you can find these below. Right now these are very much an experiment, but we're investigating what tools we can give curators, and how to best present these spaces to give them their own look and feel.

• Abstraction — curated by Jonathan Mann, a member of Samotsvety, an INFER All-Star, and a Good Judgment Superforecaster.
• Zvi Mowshowitz's Minitaculus — Zvi writes on AI, rationality, public policy, and more at Don’t Worry About the Vase.
• David Mathers' Minitaculus, is a seasoned forecaster and researcher at Arb Research.
• The Sudan Minitaculus — Sudan-focused questions by M.M. Elrashid, who led the Forecasting Society at KU Leuven.
• More to come

Are you interested in setting up your own space? What do you want to collaborate on? Reach out.

Note that minitaculuses operate largely independently from the usual Metaculus moderation process. You might find different styles of question operationalization; curators will vary in how detailed their resolution criteria are and how they approach question resolution. To that, your scores on minitaculus questions do not contribute to your track record or standing on the Metaculus leaderboards. We're still considering what scoring regime is most sensible for minitaculuses. Let us know what you'd like to see.