elifland's Quick takes

Thanks Max! Was great seeing you as well. I did take some time off and was a bit more chill for a little while blogging however much I felt like. I've been doing a lot better for the past 2 months.

Hi Lizka, thanks for your feedback and think it touched on some of the sections that I'm most unsure about / could most use some revision which is great!

1. [Bottlenecks] You suggest "Organizations and individuals (stakeholders) making important decisions are willing to use crowd forecasting to help inform decision making" as a crucial step in the "story" of crowd forecasting’s success (the "pathway to impact"?) --- this seems very true to me. But then you write "I doubt this is the main bottleneck right now but it may be in the future" (and don't really return to this).

I'll say up front it's possible I'm just wrong about the importance of the bottleneck here, and I think it also interacts with the other bottlenecks in a tricky way. E.g. if there were a clearer pipeline for creating important questions which get very high quality crowd forecasts which then affect decisions, more organizations would be interested. 

That being said, my intuition that this is not the bottleneck comes from some personal experiences I've had with forecasts solicited by orgs that already are interested in using crowd forecasts to inform decision making. Speaking from the perspective of a forecaster, I personally wouldn't have trusted the forecasts produced as an input into important decisions. 

Some examples: [Disclaimer: These are my personal impressions. Creating impactful questions and incentivizing forecaster effort is really hard and I respect OP//RP/Metaculus a lot for giving it a shot, and would love to be proven wrong about the impact of current initiatives like these]

1. The Open Philanthropy/Metaculus Forecasting AI Progress Tournament is the most well-funded initiative I know of [ETA: potentially besides those contracting Good Judgment superforecasters], but my best guess is that the forecasts resulting from it will not be impactful. An example is the "deep learning" longest time horizon round, where despite Metaculus' best efforts most questions have no-few comments and at least to me it felt like the bulk of the forecasting skill was forming a continuous distribution from trend extrapolation. See also this question where the community failed to fully update on record-breaking scores appropriately. Also note that each question attracted only 25-35 forecasters.
2. I feel less sure about this, but the RP's animal welfare questions authored by Neil Dullaghan seem to have the majority of comments on them by Neil himself. I feel intuitively skeptical that most of the 25-45 forecasters per question are doing more than skimming and making minor adjustments to the current community forecast, and this feels like an area where getting up to speed on domain knowledge is important to accurate forecasts.

So my argument is: given that AFAIK we haven't had consistent success using crowd forecasts to help institutions making important decisions, the main bottleneck seems to be helping the interested institutions rather than getting more institutions interested. 

If, say, the CDC (or important people there, etc.) were interested in using Metaculus to inform their decision-making, do you think they would be unable to do so due to a lack of interest (among forecasters) and/or a lack of relevant forecasting questions? (But then, could they not tell suggest questions they felt were relevant to their decisions?) Or do you think that the quality of answers they would get (or the amount of faith they would be able to put into those answers) wouldn't be sufficient?

[Caveat: I don't feel too qualified too opine on this point since I'm not a stakeholder nor have I interviewed ones, but I'll give my best guess.]

I think for the CDC example:

1. Creating impactful questions seems relatively easier here than in e.g. the AI safety domain, though it still may be non-trivial to identify and operationalize cruxes for which predictions would actually lead to different decisions.
2. I'd on average expect the forecasts to be a bit better than CDC models / domain experts. Perhaps substantially better on tail risks. Don't think we have a lot of evidence here, we have some from Metaculus tournaments with a small sample size.
   1. I think with better incentives to allocate more forecaster effort to this project, it's possible the forecasts could be much better.

Overall, I'd expect slightly decent forecasts on good but not great questions and I think that this isn't really enough to move the needle, so to speak. I also think there would need to be reasoning given behind the forecasts for stakeholder to understand and trust in crowd forecasts would need to be built up over time.

Part of the reason it seems tricky to have impactful forecasts is that often there are competing people/"camps" with different world models, and a person which the crowd forecast disagrees with may be reluctant to change their mind unless (a) the question is well targeted at cruxes of the disagreement and (b) they have built up trust of the forecasters and their reasoning process. To the extent this is true within the CDC, the harder it seems for forecasting questions to be impactful.

2. [Separate, minor confusion] You say: "Forecasts are impactful to the extent that they affect important decisions," and then you suggest examples a-d ("from an EA perspective") that range from career decisions or what seem like personal donation choices to widely applicable questions like "Should AI alignment researchers be preparing more for a world with shorter or longer timelines?" and "What actions should we recommend the US government take to minimize pandemic risk?" This makes me confused about the space (or range) of decisions and decision-makers that you are considering here. 

Yeah I think this is basically right, I will edit the draft.

1. [Side note] I loved the section "Idea for question creation process: double crux creation," and in general the number of possible solutions that you list, and really hope that people try these out or study them more. (I also think you identify  other really important bottlenecks).

I hope so too, appreciate it!

Appreciate the compliment. I am interested in making it a Forum post, but might want to do some more editing/cleanup or writing over next few weeks/months (it got more interest than I was expecting so seems more likely to be worth it now). Might also post as is, will think about it more soon.

Really appreciate hearing your perspective!

On causal evidence of RCTs vs. observational data: I'm intuitively skeptical of this but the sources you linked seem interesting and worthwhile to think about more before setting an org up for this. (Edited to add:) Hearing your view  already substantially updates mine, but I'd be really curious to hear more perspectives from others with lots of experience working on this type of stuff, to see if they'd agree, then I'd update more. If you have impressions of how much consensus there is on this question that would be valuable too.

On nudging scientific incentives to focus on important questions rather than working on them ourselves: this seems pretty reasonable to me. I think building an app to do this still seems plausibly very valuable and I'm not sure how much I trust others to do it, but maybe we combine the ideas and build an app then nudge other scientists to use this app to do important studies.

It wouldn't shock me if an average vegan diet decreased lifetime productivity by more than 20% by malnutrition -> mental health link.

I think the obvious answer is that doing controlled trials in these areas is a whole lot of work/expense for the benefit.

Some things like health effects can take a long time to play out; maybe 10-50 years. And I wouldn't expect the difference to be particularly amazing. (I'd be surprised if the average person could increase their productivity by more than ~20% with any of those)

I think our main disagreement is around the likely effect sizes; e.g. I think blocking out focused work could easily have an effect size of >50% (but am pretty uncertain which is why I want the trial!). I agree about long-term effects being a concern, particularly depending on one's TAI timelines.

On "challenge trials"; I imagine the big question is how difficult it would be to convince people to accept a very different lifestyle for a long time. I'm not sure if it's called "challenge trial" in this case. 

Yeah, I'm most excited about challenges that last more like a few months to a year, though this isn't ideal in all domains (e.g. veganism), so maybe this wasn't best as the top example. I have no strong views on terminology.