(1) where do you think forecasting has its best use-cases? where do you think forecasting doesn't help, or could hurt?

interested in your answer both as the co-CEO of an organization making important decisions, and an avid forecaster yourself.

(2) what are RP's plans with the Special Projects Program?

sorry about that, i didn’t mean to come off as hostile!

i’m legitimately wondering about both questions (conditional on your answer to the first). i’ll try again, hopefully with less hostile language:

1. are you proposing this? is this something you’re considering creating?

2a) if so, cool! what’s your take? why do you think it’d be good?

2b) if not, i’m don’t quite understand what your goal was in posting this — i’m sure that you have a valid and valuable one, i just don’t want to assume.

did my rephrasing help? again, i’m so sorry to have come off as hostile in my previous comment. apologies!

Is this a proposal? If so, what value do you think there'd be in a news style EA podcast? If not, what's the purpose of this post?

The "Retrospective grant evaluations of longtermist projects" idea seems like something that would work really well in conjunction with an impact market, like Manifund. That — retroactive evaluations — must be done extremely well for impact markets to function.

Since this could potentially be a really difficult/expensive process, randomized conditional prediction markets could also help (full explanation here). Here's an example scheme I cooked up:

Subsidize prediction markets on all of the following:

• Conditional on Project A being retroactively evaluated by the Retroactive Evaluation Team (RET), how much impact will it have^[1]?
• Conditional on Project B being retroactively evaluated by the RET, how much impact will it have?
• etc.

Then, randomly pick one project (say, Project G) to retroactively evaluate, and fund the retroactive evaluation of Project G.

For all the other projects' markets, refund all of the investors and, to quote DYNOMIGHT, "use the SWEET PREDICTIVE KNOWLEDGE ... for STAGGERING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS and MAXIMAL STATUS ENHANCEMENT."

1. ^{^}

   Obviously, the amount of impact would need to be metricized in some way. Again obviously, this is an incredibly difficult problem that I'm handwaving away.

   The one idea that comes to mind is evaluating n projects and ranking their relative impact, where n is a proper subset of the number of total projects greater than 1. Then, change the questions to "Conditional on Project A/B/C/etc being retroactively evaluated, will it be ranked highest?" That avoids actually putting a number on it, but it comes with its own host of problems

This is a great (and very recent!) post from DYNOMIGHT on the last point.

(written on my phone, apologies for the poor formatting and lack of hyperlinks!)

this is AWESOME! so glad i’m seeing this become a reality :D

i think one of the central things you might work on is developing out rationales. a number only gets ppl so far — understanding WHY the market is at a certain percentage is also super helpful. this seems like one of the central aspects of what makes forecasting useful. it also seems like a great way to monetize forecasting as a skill, which you mentioned is one of your goals.

[edit: to clarify, i’m proposing that you could hire forecasters to write reports/rationales on specific topics. forecasters get paid for their skills, you get longer-form content, consumers get actionable, context-laden info > a single number. in terms of figuring out where the money’s coming from…]

some ideas for funding:

• seems like you’re giving the prediction market companies free advertising??? maybe ask them to pay or smth…
• LTFF
• ads (i don’t recommend)
• paid subscription option, maybe/especially to get the rationales or something
• sponsorships — might function similar to ads, except partnering with specific companies who’re interested in capturing the attention of ppl who read BRT. for example, quant finance. dm me if you want more help/info on this one.
• ask for donations from readers
• uhh idk i ran out of ideas ngl

again, i think this is really really cool and i’m in full support! :)

thanks for the kind words — and thanks for helping OPTIC become a reality! :)

yeah, i agree — i think we'll probably rely more heavily on questions in that style for the next iteration of OPTIC. i don't think we relied enough on existing questions/tournaments (see here).