adam

Every forecast question we ask has a verifiable outcome. We then score it based on what actually happens in reality and create a track record for all of it. In typical analysis, nothing is scored, and no one goes back and checks if it was right or wrong, but we do - whether we're scoring humans in human forecasting exercises, or seeing how AI does.

Not exactly - all the forecast questions get scored so we know how accurate the AI is and how calibrated it is. It's no different than asking a large crowd of humans on Good Judgment Open or Metaculus these same types of questions. Everything we ask eventually happens or it doesn't, and we can score it all.

In this model the probabilities were measured by an ensemble of LLM's. We give them context and ask them to follow a specific methodology for making a forecast, and then aggregate their forecasts into a "crowd" forecast. We can get input from humans as well to compare/combine them further, but in this particular instance I just used our AI Forecaster.

You're right that a human analyst - especially a very experienced one - is going to be able to still do a better job of analysis most of the time, but the AI is useful for having loops to re-examine the question, consume and curate new information, etc. We've built the system with that assumption: let humans do what they're best at, let AI do what it's best at...

Congratulations on the launch. We sell B2B crowd forecasting software, a fairly niche market, so something like this could be very interesting for us. We sell mostly into governments, think tanks, and other types of research institutions, with the occasional commercial application. A couple thoughts:

Perhaps I didn't do something correctly, but I ended up with a list of companies. That saves me a little time, but I want to be able to then get to something role-based. Is this behind the upgrade or do I never see this information?

Related, I want role to be one of my primary filtering mechanisms. Find me all Chief Risk Officers in x,y,z industry for companies larger than 500 people, for example. Then let me review their backgrounds, get their contact info, and contact them.

I think this is how many sales people / founders operate to try and start to sell. What am I missing?

We run a public crowdsourced forecasting site for the government here: https://inferpub.com. For our various stakeholders, we're using ChatGPT to summarize forecaster's rationales for their probabilistic forecast. We ask it to both summarize the arguments for the event happening, and against. We still need a human in the loop given who the information it's going to, but it's been an excellent starting point.

Somewhat similar conversation going on in the /r/chicago subreddit. Top comment from that thread[1]:

Anthony Bourdain is a far superior wordsmith than myself, so I will leave this here:

Here are Bourdain’s most memorable quotes about Chicago.

“I’ve done shows in LA, but LA’s a fantastic sprawl. San Francisco? A great town. New Orleans? A state of mind. Chicago? Chicago is a city.” — No Reservations, 2009

“Chicago is big — not just any kind of big — I’m talking major metropolis big. I love this city. In my opinion, it’s the only other real metropolis in America.” — No Reservations, 2009.

“You wake up in Chicago, pull back the curtain, and you KNOW where you are. You could be nowhere else. You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad shouldered motherfuckin’ city. A metropolis, completely non-neurotic, ever-moving, big hearted but cold blooded machine with millions of moving parts — a beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse.” — Medium essay for Parts Unknown, 2016.

“It is, also, as I like to point out frequently, one of America’s last great NO BULLSHIT zones. Pomposity, pretentiousness, putting on airs of any kind, douchery and lack of a sense of humor will not get you far in Chicago. It is a trait shared with Glasgow — another city I love with a similar working class ethos and history.” — Medium essay, 2016

“Chicago is a town, a city that doesn’t ever have to measure itself against any other city. Other places have to measure themselves against it. It’s big, it’s outgoing, it’s tough, it’s opinionated, and everybody’s got a story.” — Parts Unknown, 2016

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/vlxv9m/comment/idx...

2021 Tesla Y owner here. Midwest location. Took a 150 mile trip yesterday. Temps were 38F. Left my house fully charged at 330mi range, battery topped off. Arrived with 100mi estimated range left.

On the way home later that evening, temps were 28F. Left again almost fully topped off with estimated range of 310mi after visiting a supercharger. Arrived home with estimated 70mi of range left.

Many lament the downfall of traditional media then crucify them when they creatively explore new opportunities for themselves.

Should the "Gray Lady" have just stubbornly continued to print its papers until it was bought up by the same PE vipers who have destroyed countless other newspaper companies?

I applaud them for establishing other opportunities for themselves to survive and thrive. IMHO, the NY Times is not the enemy here.

We run the Cosmic Bazaar forecasting service (Economist article: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/...) on their PaaS and their services and people have been excellent to work with all around. Friendly, professional shop.

Also relevant: replacing 4-way's with roundabouts in Carmel, IN: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/climate/roundabouts-clima...

Having worked in a consulting firm for years, I spent very little time in the office anyway. Instead I was constantly deployed to client sites. I wonder how this will impact those who are working for clients who have different policies. Will the consultants still be remote, or will they have to adhere to their client's policies, some of whom inevitably will require being in the office. In that case, this isn't as sweet a deal as it may seem.

I hope people don't read your comment and choose not to read the article. I was very moved by how Bobby's death impacted his family and fiancee in different ways. It's an extremely well written piece and doesn't deserve (IMHO) the flippant "tl/dr" treatment given its subject matter and quality.

I would encourage anyone with a little extra time to read about the PLATO system. Truly ahead of its time, invented by an engineer at University of Illinois named Don Bitzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bitzer

I was fortunate to have a parent who worked for Dr. Bitzer and we had a PLATO terminal at home, hardwired in to the university mainframe at 1200 Bd. Played most of the games mentioned in the article along with Empire, a Star Trek-inspired multiplayer team game. Great memories.

I'm curious if you allow the project to enter actuals after the fact, then you can compare them to individuals/aggregate estimates so you know how biased your model/individuals/the organization is on these types of estimation efforts. You could give that as feedback as an additional service: "You're constantly overconfident on X type tasks..."

I immediately thought of business travel as well. Project us all in to a virtual conference room and give us a suite of collaboration tools to use while we're all there.

The only thing missing is the after meeting drinks and dinner, but there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...

Reminded of this Twitter thread from a couple months ago about how this will all go down: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

There's a forecast question on Foretell (a crowd forecasting site run by a think tank at Georgetown) about the likelihood of a successful acquisition if anyone is interested. Current crowd consensus is 41% likelihood, down 2% in the last day: https://www.cset-foretell.com/questions/102-will-nvidia-acqu...

I'm reminded of this article from 2011 about Silicon Valley executives who send their kids to their local Waldorf School...Where tech is forbidden. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-sch...

We do a version of this with our clients, where we use our forecasting software and host a "live" forecasting session. We make people forecast "cold" on something: likelihood of hitting milestones, competitive intelligence, industry trend, whatever, and then have someone come in and give a talk on what we've asked people to forecast. We follow that up with more forecasting and get to see if people were influenced by the expert or not.

Perhaps the most valuable part is the discussion after making that second forecast. We identify a lot of bias and assumptions people were making that they then learn from the next time they have to make a forecast like that.

You might also take a look at your logo when you're thinking about your brand. It looks very similar to Aether Apparel: https://www.aetherapparel.com

Awesome start to what could be a useful resource. In v1.1, would love to see some more granularity in your accommodation category, i.e. on-trail huts, primitive camping, nearby town inns, etc.

You're thinking in the right direction in terms of having infrastructure support during your first multi-day hike. My first was the Laugavegur trail in Iceland a few years ago, and it helped tremendously that I was staying in huts each night and not camping, both because of the weight, and also because the screwups my first-time self made in what I packed were lessened by the fact I had a roof over my head each night, a place to cook my food, and other strangers in my "cohort" I got to know over the course of the 4 nights who had started at the same time to share advice.

So, hut supported, you could try the Iceland trail, the Kungsleden in Sweden is moderate difficulty and the huts are wonderful, the huts in the U.S. on segments of the Appalachian trail are quite nice (and they even cook you dinner at some!) and there are a few others you can search for. Then once you've picked a specific hike, quite a few people write about their experiences on that particular trail and you can hone in on the specific equipment you'll need to bring.

My biggest piece of advice: be absolutely ruthless about the stuff you decide to bring so you can keep your pack as light as possible for that first multi-day hike. A bunch of extra clothes? No. The very low probability emergency situation that your hut won't have working gas so you have to bring your own stove? No. etc. etc.

If anyone ends up building lamps for themselves or buys something for self-treatment, you should look up protocols for use to treat psoriasis. Psoriasis is often treated with full-body UVB lamps like these units: https://www.natbiocorp.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0K...

Protocols typically start out with just 30-45 seconds, and increase from there to a max of 5-7 minutes in front of the lamps. A lot depends however on the type of skin you have, which you should figure out before starting any of this. Even though it's UVB and not UVA like at tanning salons, you can still burn yourself very badly.

I'm not disputing your practices, but I was in the same boat as you, then recently saw this article and have since relaxed a bit on some of the cleaning protocol we've been following: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...

This sounds great. We already use https://percentpledge.org though. How is this different?

I think the larger point the author was trying to make was don't give lip service to specifically going out of your way to try and help Black founders if you're still going to use the exact same credentialing signals you always do: track record where someone has worked, name brand of their school, etc.

One might argue that without the special consideration these VC's rushed to say they would give, how would someone like the author ever have an established track record of starting/selling their businesses in the first place?

I'm frankly still expecting VC's to make decisions on what they think is going to be most profitable for them, full-stop. But plenty of other firms like large consulting firms, do set aside people and resources to work with non-profits for example. Why couldn't VC's do the same to try and level the playing field and eliminate some of these inherent advantages the well connected/well credentialed have? A "no" is potentially fine, but how you deliver that "no" can make all the difference.

A very well sourced article on SeriousEats begs to differ: https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavi...

I'd be interested in the counter sources for your claims as we've been ordering in pretty regularly!

They got a slight budget increase in the 2020 budget to $3.56B.

We were in that first California batch for our old company Inkling Markets. I remember going through our interview and being asked very few questions about our actual idea, and instead Paul asking a bunch of questions about a political blog I was writing at the time. Being consultants at the time working for big companies we walked out thinking what the hell was that and questioning if we even wanted to make this leap if we were offered. But that night at 9pm as we were aimlessly wandering around Cambridge waiting for a call back (or not) we decided we'd do it if they called. "We want to invest in you. You have 5 minutes to decide if you want to come. If we don't hear back from you by then, we'll assume you're not interested." We called back, flew home, quit our consulting jobs and two months later drove out from Chicago to live in a rented house in Cupertino.

We did YC again in 2011 and it was kind of a shit show, but I'll never forget my time out there Jan - Apr in 2006. Probably still one of the most productive, eye opening experiences I've ever had in my entire life.

Cultivate Labs (Formerly Inkling Markets YC W06) | Rails Engineer | Chicago, IL

Cultivate Labs builds collective intelligence solutions like prediction markets and opinion polls for governments, large private organizations, and think tanks. Our mission is to quantify and amplify the voice of employees to better define ground truth and drive reality-based decision making.

This role will touch all aspects of our development and delivery process, from new feature development on our products, to working with clients on specific requested customizations, to data analysis, to bug fixes. On a day to day basis, you will:

- Write code

- Work with clients and our team to define application requirements

- Perform data analysis

- Contribute thinking/perspective on product and company strategy

We are self-funded and pride ourselves on NOT having a "work hard, play hard" culture, just work hard on interesting problems, then go home and enjoy your life.

You can read more about the job, and if interested, apply here: https://cultivatelabs.com/jobs