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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > it becomes incredibly unlikely you are just the worlds luckiest guesser

And yet that is still more likely than the idea that you can predict the future.

In any case, we are not talking about _you_ becoming the world's best guesser, we are talking about _somebody_ becoming the world's best guesser. That is going to be someone, so no need to be surprised when they emerge.

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you're right, but people predict the future all the time, if there's a pre-established model for that prediction. I just threw a ball in the air and predicted how long it'd stay there </akshually>

so I think this comes down to how the predictions were arrived. One way to do this is to ask individuals who both have similarly high predictive scores and bet on the same types of events to explain some of their past predictions, and if their methods are similar then you've learned a new predictive tool.

How is the difficulty of a certain prediction scored and weighted?

In these competitions it generally isn't. So, you can't compare, for example, my brier scores for predicting events a, b, c and yours for events x, y, z.

There aren't actually that many people sitting around predicting things and keeping track of it. The whole monkeys tossing coins argument sounds clever, except that there aren't many monkeys in the real world.

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