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Sage-Future / fatebook

The fastest way to make and track predictions
https://fatebook.io
MIT License
28 stars 8 forks source link

Feature request: Normal predictions #10

Open joy-void-joy opened 10 months ago

joy-void-joy commented 10 months ago

Inspired by https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions

Most of my predictions these times are in the form of normal predictions (with different standard deviation for each side) and I would be interested if there was something like this in fatebook. Is there interest for this? If yes, I can make a PR.

adam-binks commented 10 months ago

Hey, thanks for the suggestion!

I think normal predictions make a lot of sense for quantities (like "How many people will come to my party?" or "When will GPT-5 come out?") but I'm not sure they're as useful for binary predictions ("Will I host a party this year?") On a binary question, you already express your uncertainty by being further from 0% or 100% - I guess the normal distribution would be second-order uncertainty?

Are you thinking that it'd be good to add quantity questions, and that they should take a normal distribution as a prediction? Or that you'd like normal predictions for binary questions?

joy-void-joy commented 10 months ago

Sorry, I explained this poorly. I meant the former, to allow quantity questions. I have found it useful to broaden my questions, allow them to have more bandwidth and go closer to the original source of it. For instance

Will I host a party this year?

Could be

How many parties will I host?

Or

How many people will attend my next party?

For me at least, it allows for way quicker calibration.

(I think asymetrical normal is the best way to start, though ultimately multi-modal ala metaculus might be the way to go)

adam-binks commented 10 months ago

Ah cool! Yes I think having quantity questions would be excellent, it's probably the feature I'm most excited about adding!

I think it would be a fairly major addition, some required stuff:

This is quite a lot to take on! And I think the UI stuff I'd like to help design to make sure it matches the ease of use of the current system. So this might be a tough first PR for you as a contributor.

Maybe you could take a stab at part of this to begin with, if you're interested, e.g. the scoring rule is fairly self contained?

joy-void-joy commented 10 months ago

Maybe you could take a stab at part of this to begin with, if you're interested, e.g. the scoring rule is fairly self contained?

Sure I can do that! I must admit I was mainly motivated to have it quickly integrated in what I use. Maybe I could also fork it into something that works for me, and we can see from there? Though I wouldn't want it to be useless to you