Categories Forecasting, Statistics

More Is Probably More – Forecasting Accuracy and Number of Forecasters on Metaculus

TLDR

  • Metaculus is a prediction platform that collects and aggregates predictions from users on a wide range of questions
  • An increase in the number of forecasters seems to lead to an improvement of the Metaculus community prediction. I believe this effect is real, but due to confounding effects, the analysis presented here might overestimate the improvement gained. 
  • That improvement of the Metaculus community prediction seems to be approximately logarithmic, meaning that doubling the number of forecasters seems to lead to
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Categories Effective Altruism

Reflections on Wytham Abbey

This post was also posted to the EA Forum.

In April 2022, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) (now EVF) bought Wytham Abbey (a 1480 manor near Oxford) as a conference venue. The purchase was mostly funded by Open Philanthropy. To many, Wytham Abbey looked somewhat more luxurious and expensive than strictly necessary for an event location, which sparked some discussions. 

Bild

At least on Twitter, public perception isn’t quite what one might have hoped for:

Even among … more

Categories Forecasting

Announcing the UK Covid-19 Crowd Forecasting Challenge

Next Monday (May 24th 2021) is the official begin of the UK Covid-19 Crowd Forecasting Challenge. Over the course of 12 weeks, human forecasters will be asked for their prediction of Covid-19 case and death numbers. The (aggregated) forecasts will then be submitted to the European Forecast Hub and compared to models submitted by other research institutions. 

How to sign up

In order to sign up, checkout this post that explains everything in detail. You can also go directly to … more

Categories Recommendations

April 2021 Assorted Links

assorted-title of books piled in the shelves

A list with interesting links I came across in the past weeks. Enjoy!

  1. Diamonds Are Bullshit – Priceonomics (link)
    The economics of buying diamond rings. Turns out, diamonds are a terrible investment and really marketing campaigns have tricked us into buying diamond engagement rings.

  2. Club-goers take first bites of lab-made chicken – Nature (link)
    Slaughter-free meat grown in bioreactors reaches select diners in Singapore in the form of chicken nuggets. Singapore regulators in December approved in
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Categories Environment

Why Nuclear Power Flopped Commercially

four brown concrete towers

I came across a very interesting review of the book Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop. I haven’t read the book itself, but the summary is well worth a read.

The main point is this: nuclear power is expensive, but it should be cheap. The reason it is expensive is that regulators have held nuclear power to far higher standards than any other power source. Risk from nuclear must be ALARA – as low as reasonably achievable. … more

Categories Programming

How to Create a Twitter Bot That Posts a Random Daily Article

Automating things is fun, so I decided to spend a day to build a Twitter bot (@daily_axc) that posts a random article. The sources for the daily article will be astralcodexten.substack.com (ACX) and slatestarcodex.com (SSC). These two blogs by Scott Alexander are by far my favorite source of insight on the internet I highly recommend them.

This article explains step by step how you can create such a bot on your own. It is more geared towards beginners. … more

Categories Science

Imagine Scientific Author Lists as Film Credits

In Academia author lists are source of endless contention. The current system is undeniably unfair.

Source

Almost all of the credit go to the first and last author, while the middle authors often get forgotten. Who gets placed where on a paper is therefore subject to politics and fierce debates. Especially for early career researchers this can be a problem. There are some papers that let you list the individual authors’ contributions, but even that is somewhat opaque. That is … more

Categories Forecasting

Crowd forecasting Covid-19 Cases and Deaths in Europe

For the past few months of my PhD in epidemiology I have worked on forecasting and forecast evaluation. In many places, forecast models have had a huge influence on policy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Imperial model (code here) for example played an important role in the UK government’s decision to go into a lock-down in March. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also rely heavily on predictions made by research teams around the world.

Forecasting is hard. … more

Categories Rationality

Making Your Own Covid-19 Vaccine at Home

If you want, you can create your own Covid-19 vaccine at home and it is actually not that hard to do.

In December 2020, johnswentworth posted the following question on LessWrong: How Hard Would It Be To Make A COVID Vaccine For Oneself? . These are some of the answers they got from user eillasti:

I am not even sure that you need bio/bioinformatics know-how beyond the stuff that you can read up in the wikipedia.

The only

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