What happens when you analyze college football like the CIA?
What happens when you apply CIA-style analysis normally used to understand China or Russia to your favorite sports team?
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From the team shipping AI forecasting and sensemaking systems used by government, defense, finance, and research teams.
Q&A with Cultivate: A look into our forecast question development process
One 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.
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Our new forecast question interface for yes/no binary questions
We 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%.
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Introducing the INFER mobile app
Our 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.
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Does forecasting accuracy really matter?
tl;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.
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Playing with ChatGPT: Summarization of Forecast Rationales
Manual 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.
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Cultivate Beaker Newsletter Archive
Take a look at our past newsletters sent to the Cultivate community.
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Prompting Action to Address "Gray Rhinos" Using Crowdsourced Forecasting
In 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.
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UK's Cosmic Bazaar and U.S.' INFER Forecasting Collaboration is Launched
We 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.
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Learning and improving our forecasts together: crowd forecast change alerts
Crowd 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.
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2022 in the Rearview
I 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.
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Crowd Forecasting and Effective Altruism
Many 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."
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Well, that was embarrassing: lessons from forecasting on UK’s prime minister
A 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.
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Bertelsmann Stiftung and its Foundation launch RANGE to examine Transatlantic Relations
Cultivate 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.
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Cultivate Labs and Pytho.io Team Up to Create a Forecaster Training Curriculum for INFER
Cultivate 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.
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Why We Stopped Supporting Prediction Markets
For 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
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Tell us how you may be wrong
As 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.
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A Contrarian Sort
Questioning 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..."
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Assessing the credibility of a crowd forecast
With 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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New Series: Everything is Forecasting
Many of our clients find that going through the process of making forecasts and "practicing" improves their "off-platform" decisions. That's why we're starting a new blog series about applying forecasting principles to other areas of life and work.
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Base Rates for Forecasting and Decision-Making
To see the future, one must first see the past. Base rates are a hallmark of good forecasting and decision-making - start using them in your work today.
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Tracking the Outcome of Strategic Questions with Crowd Forecasting
To understand a big, fuzzy strategic question, you need to break it down into digestible signals you can forecast. Here's how we do it.
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New Type of Forecasting Interface Creates a Lot of Options
We’re excited to announce the launch of a beta version of a new forecasting capability on the Cultivate platform we’re calling “multi-time period questions.” This new type of forecasting input now gives us the ability to collect several points of input from the forecaster all at once.
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Don't Let Your Forecasts Get Too Stale
For a long time we've had a rudimentary reminder system a user can set after they make a forecast. But now, we've introduced a more intelligent "nudging" system to ensure a larger percentage of forecasters are updating their forecasts on a regular basis.
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Small Company Life
Thinking of working for a small company? Here are some of my experiences from joining Cultivate Labs!
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Cultivate Forecasts Latest Updates: Leaderboard filters, source link section, cleansed emails & more
The latest Cultivate Forecasts platform updates as of December 7, 2020.
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