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Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by diab0lic on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:15PM (#33675382)
I am a little disappointed to see that the results of “super forecasters” in the economist and on the underlying Good Judgement open website does not present a 95% credible interval, or even a good old fashioned confidence interval.

Would love to see results presented with the uncertainty quantified. Especially given that the yes/no questions are aggregated binarized predictions from what is almost certainly a collection of continuous models. A lot of information is lost between the people performing the analysis and either of these pages.

Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by fddr on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:32PM (#33675520)
They are giving probabilities for discrete events, which already captures their level of uncertainty. Probabilities of probabilities (i.e., a probability distribution of a probability) are not very useful concepts.
Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by alexilliamson on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:00PM (#33675826)
This would imply that the confidence interval around the coefficient in a logistic regression is not a very useful concept, which I don't think is true.
Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by fddr on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:11PM (#33675944)
That it is a little different. There you are estimating a continuous parameter (which happens to be interpretable as a probability) and it makes sense to have a probability distribution over that.

But if you are talking about whether a single discrete events will happen or not, a single number (the probability) already fully captures the uncertainty about it.

Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by diab0lic on Sunday November 20, 2022 @10:14AM (#33681497)
There is a lot of missing information in their probability of binary events presented. Presumably they polled N forecasters and are presenting an x/N prediction. The fact that each forecaster is estimating in a continuous space and then binarizing their result means that a lot of information has been lost.

To look at an extreme example… were all the “yes” votes 95%+ certain and the “no” votes just under the line 49%? Or was it more like a bunch of no votes at 49% and a bunch of yes votes at 51%?

Binarizing forecasts necessarily discards information. Aggregating a bunch of binary predictions into a percentage does no recapture said information, unfortunately.

Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by subroutine on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:47PM (#33676306)
It looks like they are simply providing the summary data to their multiple choice survey questions. Still, CI or SEM would not apply (there is no SEM for 80% of forecasters said 'yes'). These graphs are literally just telling you the percent of responders who picked a given answer to the corresponding question.

edit- the longer I browse their website for the exact methodology, the less impressed I am with this group. The "Introducing the Superforecasters" section is so cringe.

https://goodjudgment.com/about/

Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by operator-name on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:49PM (#33675714)
It's definitely an odd emission since the original research project used such a calculation. Metaculus, which uses a similar technique provides such a confidence interval, along with a nice history graph.

As some wild speculation, I suspect that since the GJP only employs a handful of Superforcasters, the initial confidence intervals for these broad questions may be quite large. That's to be expected when predicting a year in advance, but publically admitting to have such a broad confidence interval is probably not very good for marketing.

Re:What the “superforecasters” predict for major events in 2023 by tedsanders on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:33PM (#33676166)
These events are binary. They will happen or not. A percentage prediction already incorporates the uncertainty. In what way would a 45-55% prediction be any different than a 50% prediction? The domain of outcomes is a set of size 2: (0, 1). There are no intermediate outcomes. Both predictions are functionally identical: {0: 50%, 1: 50%}.

(Where confidence intervals over percentages makes more sense is estimating a parameter rather than an event. E.g., if we flip this coin a bunch of times in series, I predict that the percentage of flips will be between 45% and 55%.)

((One sense in which a 45%-55% prediction might have some semantic meaning is that it could signal a higher willingness to adjust if new evidence or information is brought to light. But that's quite different than a confidence interval.))