Announcing a subforum for forecasting & estimation

By Sharang Phadke, Lizka @ 2022-12-26T20:51 (+72)

TL;DR: We’ve launched a dedicated space for discussing forecasting and estimation. Go explore it or join it if you’re interested! 

As mentioned before, the Forum team is piloting subforums that allow people interested in specific topics in effective altruism to keep up with them, have more casual conversations with a smaller group of people interested in the same topic, and engage more deeply with the topic. We’ve just kicked off our fourth subforum: forecasting & estimation!

What goes in a “forecasting & estimation” subforum?

Some discussions that we think people might have in this subforum: 

• Predictions for 2023
• How to forecast, how to get better at forecasting, bottlenecks in forecasting
• Fermi estimation
• Specific forecasts and estimates
• And more!

How subforums currently work — give us feedback!

It’s early days for subforums, and we expect the features and structure to evolve significantly in the near future, so feedback is particularly useful right now. You can comment here or email us at forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

Here’s the current setup:

• All posts that are relevant to the subforum’s topic will appear in the subforum, even if they’re by someone who’s not part of the subforum.
• You can post directly to the subforum, so only people who have joined the space or are exploring it will see them. There are two approaches possible:
  • Full posts in the subforum are like normal Forum posts
  • Discussion threads in the subforum are a bit like shortform comments
• The default ordering of content in the subforum is by a combination of recency and upvotes (“magic”). If someone adds a comment to a post or thread in the subforum, the post will resurface at the top of the discussion. 
• Every subforum has an “organizer.” You can see an outline of what they’ll be doing here.
• Notifications: if you join the subforum, you’ll have the choice to opt in to notifications of new posts and discussions. You can change this by clicking on the bell icon on the subforum page and setting your preferences accordingly (e.g. by removing “upweight on frontpage”).