Don't Let Your Forecasts Get Too Stale
By Adam Siegel on April 26, 2021
We've known for awhile that one of the factors for higher accuracy for individual or collective forecasting is people updating their forecasts on a regular basis. This makes intuitive sense: as new information about a forecast question is revealed, the probability changes for an outcome to occur. Those who can rationally track and reflect these changes do better.
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.
If you have forecasts that are older than a certain number of days (set by
the administrator of your site,) you’ll receive notifications on the site as
well as a summary email to remind you to either confirm that your forecast has
not changed, or update it. You’re able to do both directly from the
notification window.
So far on the sites we've deployed this to, the number of forecasts made have been tracking higher than their usual activity and we've received a lot of feedback from forecasters that they like being able to either quickly re-iterate their current judgments, or make updates.