Whatever happened to forecasting? April 2020

Prediction Markets & Forecasting platforms.

Forecasters may now choose to forecast any of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, Pestilence and War.

Augur: augur.net

Augur, the blockchain prediction market, will be undergoing its first major update.

Predict It: predictit.org

In PredictIt, the world politics section...

is overconfident on a Scottish independence referendum (though read the fine print).
gives 16% to Netanyahu leaving before the end of the year
gives 63% to Maduro remaining President of Venezuela before the end of the year.

The question on which Asian/Pacific leaders will leave office next? also looks like it has a lot of free energy overestimating low probability events.

Replication Markets: replicationmarkets.com

Replication markets add two market-maker bots and commence their 6th round. They also add a sleek new widget to visualize the price of shares better.

Coronavirus Information Markets: coronainformationmarkets.com

For those who want to put their money where their mouth is, there is now a prediction market for coronavirus related information. The number of questions is small, and the current trading volume is $8000.

Foretold: foretold.io

Foretold brings us:

Estimates of Active Infections throughout the world.
A new distribution builder.

Metaculus: metaculus.com

Metaculus brings us a series of tournaments and question series:

Good Judgement Project: gjopen.com

The GJP has their usual challenges, plus one on the Coronavirus Outbreak, financed by the Open Philantropy Project.

Of the questions which have been added recently, the crowd doesn't buy that Tesla will release an autopilot feature to navigate traffic lights, despite announcements to the contrary. Further, the aggregate...

is extremely confident that, before 1 January 2021, the Russian constitution will be amended to allow Vladimir Putin to remain president after his current term.
gives a lagging estimate of 50% on Benjamin Netanyahu ceasing to be the prime minister of Israel before 1 January 2021.
and 10% for Nicolás Maduro.
forecasts famine (70%).

In the News:

Forecasts in the time of coronavirus: The Financial times runs into difficulties trying to estimate whether some companies are overvalued, because the stock value/earnings ratio, which is otherwise an useful tool, is going to infinity as earnings go to 0 during the pandemic.
Predictions are hard, especially about the coronavirus: Vox has a short and sweet article on the difficulties of prediction forecasting; of note is that epidemiology experts are not great predictors.
Pandemic highlights problems with efficient-market hypothesis: a very rambly article by an Australian Newspaper. See also this LW comment by Wei Dai and this tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky. See here for a Financial Times take on the concept, from Jan 1st and thus untainted by coronavirus discussion.
538: Why Forecasting COVID-19 Is Harder Than Forecasting Elections
COVID-19: Forecasting with Slow and Fast Data. A short and crisp overview by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis on lagging economic measurement instruments, which have historically been quite accurate, and on the faster instruments which are available right now. Highlight: "As of March 31, the WEI [a faster, weekly economic index] indicated that GDP would decline by 3.04% at an annualized rate in the first quarter, a much more sensible forecast than that which is currently indicated by the ENI (a lagging measure which predicts 2.26% growth on an annualized basis in the first quarter)".
Decline in aircraft flights clips weather forecasters' wings: Coronavirus has led to reduction in number of aircraft sending data used in making forecasts.
The World in 2020, as forecast by The Economist. The Brookings institution looks back at forecasts for 2020 by The Economist.
A failure, but not of prediction; a SlateStarCodex Essay.
Mainstream mishmash: The market might be forecasting a faster recovery than we expect. IMF says the world will ‘very likely’ experience worst recession since the 1930s. Forbes brings us this terrible, terrible opinion piece which mentions Tetlock, goes on about how humans are terrible forecasters, and then predicts that there will be no social changes because of covid with extreme confidence.
The Challenges of Forecasting the Spread and Mortality of COVID-19. The Heritage foundation brings us a report with takeaways of particular interest to policymakers. It has great illustrations of how the overall mortality changes with different assumptions. Note that criticisms of and suggestions for the current US administration are worded kindly, as the Heritage Foundation is a conservative organization.
Why most COVID-19 forecasts were wrong. Financial review article suffers from hindsight bias.
Banks are forecasting on gut instinct — just like the rest of us. Financial Times article starts with "We all cling to the belief that somebody out there, somewhere, knows what the heck is going on. Someone — well-connected insider, evil mastermind — must hold the details on the coming market crash, the election in November, or when the messiah will return. In moments of crisis, this delusion tightens its grip," and it only gets better.
'A fool's game': 4 economists break down what it's like forecasting the worst downturn since the Great Recession. "'My outlook right now is that I don't even have an outlook,' Martha Gimbel, an economist at Schmidt Futures, told Business Insider. 'This is so bad and so unprecedented that any attempt to forecast what's going to happen here is just a fool's game.'"
IMF predicts -3% global depression. "Worst Economic Downturn Since the Great Depression".

Miscellanea

Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox; an interview with Tyler Cowen. Some highly valuable excerpts on counterfactual reasoning. Mentions this program and this study, on the forefront of knowledge.
COVID-19 Projections: A really sleek US government coronavirus model. See here for criticism. See also: Epidemic Forecasting.
Atari, early. "Deepmind announced that their Agent57 beats the ‘human baseline’ at all 57 Atari games usually used as a benchmark."
Assessing Kurzweil's 1999 predictions for 2019. Kurzweil made on the order of 100 predictions for 2019 in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. How did they fare? We'll find out, next month.
Zvi on Evaluating Predictions in Hindsight. A fun read. Of course, the dissing of Scott Alexander's prediction is fun to read, but I really want to see how a list of Zvi's predictions fares.
The M5 competition is ongoing.
Some MMA forecasting. The analysis surprised me; it could well have been a comment in a GJOpen challenge.
An oldie related to the upcoming US elections: Which Economic Indicators Best Predict Presidential Elections?, from 2011's Nate Silver.
Self-reported COVID-19 Symptoms Show Promise for Disease Forecasts. "Thus far, CMU is receiving about one million responses per week from Facebook users. Last week, almost 600,000 users of the Google Opinion Rewards and AdMob apps were answering another CMU survey each day."
Lockdown Policy and Disease Eradication. Researchers in India hypothesize on what the optimal lockdown policy may be.
Using a delay-adjusted case fatality ratio to estimate under-reporting.
The first modern pandemic. In which Bill Gates names covid-SARS "Pandemic I" and offers an informed overview of what is yet to come.
36,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis.
A cool comment exchange at GJOpen in which cool superforecaster @Anneinak shares some pointers.

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