With the rise of AI, disinformation in mass media will only continue to grow and evolve. Turning our attention to crowd forecasting is one way that we can better understand, monitor, and respond to global uncertainty – together.
Read moreNew whitepaper explores how to use AI across different aspects of crowdsourced forecasting, including question development, reporting, engagement, and forecasting.
Read moreWe released a new feature on our forecasting platform: AI-powered forecast rationale summaries using Anthropic’s Claude2. Read about how forecasters and analysts are already using this capability.
Read moreAs a company, we hold small group forecasting sessions regularly. We’ve learned a few tactics to help other teams surface diverse viewpoints and avoid groupthink. Here are some recommendations for any teams forecasting together.
Read moreEarlier this month, one of our client programs INFER – the crowd forecasting program supporting the U.S. Government – hosted a special forecasting event about the future of AI. The event was attended by select INFER forecasters and nearly two dozen forecasting enthusiasts who work at Google, joining in a personal capacity.
Read moreWe are launching a new service offering "issue decomposition" workshops - new way of methodically understanding how the future will impact your most important decisions and policies.
Read moreCultivate has released a new “request for response” capability that allows you to send any audience a simple survey, in which they can submit forecasts that will automatically get aggregated with your crowd’s on your Forecasts platform.
Read moreOne of the first steps in a crowdsourced forecasting effort involves establishing a process for developing forecast questions that will deliver meaningful signals to decision-makers. We wanted to shed some light on our process, so we talked to a few of our team members that focus on developing questions for our client platforms.
Read moreWe recently launched an update to our binary question interface – it will now show both “yes” and “no” answer options, rather than a single “yes” option. When you change the probability for one answer, the other will automatically update to ensure the probabilities always add to 100%.
Read moreOur forecasters have been asking for a mobile app – and we are excited to share that it is now available for INFER, a crowd forecasting program in partnership with the University of Maryland’s ARLIS to support U.S. Government policymakers. You will now be able to submit forecasts on critical questions to support INFER’s government stakeholders directly from our native app on a phone or tablet.
Read moretl;dr - Yes, of course it matters. But improving it in lieu of the other benefits crowdsourced forecasting can provide continues to receive an outsized portion of attention when thinking about how to use crowdsourced forecasting to improve decision-making.
Read moreManual and time consuming sound like a perfect use case for some automated technology which is why we were so interested in what ChatGPT could do. Ultimately our goal would be to do the same thing a human was doing: summarize the rationales representing different probabilistic judgments.
Read moreTake a look at our past newsletters sent to the Cultivate community
Read moreIn a recent meeting in Washington, DC with a group responsible for continuously thinking about the needs of the U.S. Intelligence Community to improve their mission, I was asked how crowdsourced forecasting can help mitigate "gray rhinos." Gray rhinos are impactful, highly probable events, that everyone knows are coming, but are not acted upon.
Read moreWe were thrilled to see a couple different projects we have the opportunity to work on come together in a formal collaboration last week Cosmic Bazaar and INFER, the UK and US Government's forecasting efforts respectively, have agreed to a partnership of asking similar questions and sharing data between the two platforms - a first ever such collaboration.
Read moreCrowd forecasting allows you to get signals about events before they happen. We're making it even easier to be alerted to important signals by introducing crowd forecast change alerts – which notify you of sudden shifts in the consensus forecast.
Read moreI wanted to do a brief year-end retrospective on what we’ve been focused on both for your sake and for ours. Sometimes we take for granted how much we’ve accomplished in a 12-month window. Taking a moment to pause and look back helps us appreciate that better.
Read moreMany effective altruist (EA) core values illustrate why they are enthusiastic to use crowd forecasting methods. EAs seek to tackle problems of global significance, placing an emphasis on not only doing good, but doing good effectively. "When decision-makers in government have to make high-stakes judgment calls, using rigorous forecasting techniques can improve our ability to predict the future and make better decisions."
Read moreA key practice of a good forecaster is doing post-mortems on your forecasts. Whether the result was good or bad, a quality post-mortem can help you identify what you did well or poorly and can improve on next time. See what Zach learned about his blindspots on a recent forecast about now-former UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
Read moreCultivate Labs is excited to announce a partnership with The Bertelsmann Stiftung, an independent foundation headquartered in Germany, and the Washington, DC-based Bertelsmann Foundation, part of the Stiftung’s international network.
Read moreCultivate Labs and Pytho.io announced today the creation of a forecaster training curriculum for INFER (INtegrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk), a crowdsourced forecasting program run by the Advanced Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland.
Read moreFor many years, Cultivate Forecasts supported two different forecasting interface modes: prediction markets and opinion pools (aka opinion surveys or probability surveys). In a prediction market, forecasters buy and sell shares of answer options using real or virtual/fantasy currency (ie. I spend $10 to buy shares of “Yes” in the market “Will candidate X win the election?”). In an opinion pool, forecasters assign a probability to each potential answer (ie. I for
Read moreAs consumers learn to use these forecasts as part of their own analysis and decision-making, we've been thinking through how we can make sure they see a complete picture - not just the one represented by the graph visualization that tracks the consensus, but why that consensus may be wrong. We want the consumer to always question their assumptions and question the consensus.
Read moreQuestioning the assumptions and probabilities of the consensus is a simple best practice of forecasting. Do I currently agree with the prevailing winds, or do I predict something different will occur? We've recently introduced the "contrarian sort..."
Read moreWith increased attention to crowdsourced generated forecasts as guidance to critical decisions comes the need to be as transparent as possible about the credibility of a current forecast.
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