Notice of related project: Fatebook

[adam-binks]

Hi - just a quick note to the maintainers of PredictionBook to say:

1. I've made a site for rapidly tracking your predictions: fatebook.io. It's open source and aims to help people make better decisions and improve their calibration by tracking more of their predictions.
2. Thank you for creating and maintaining PredictionBook - it was a source of inspiration for Fatebook, and it's impressive that it has been active for so many years.

If you'd like to use or contribute to Fatebook you'd be more than welcome.

I've added the ability for users to import their PredictionBook predictions using the API, so it should be painless to move from one platform to the other, or try using both for a bit.

[michaelwebb76]

I run the team that currently maintains PredictionBook.

The key word there is maintain. PredictionBook is not under active development and all of the features delivered over the last year or two have been contributed by the community. My team takes responsibility for keeping the application server, Ruby, Rails and all of the project dependencies up to date, and we've been happy to do so.

However, my team's ability to support this project is diminishing - not least because Bellroy is migrating away from Rails and we have very few developers left who can even keep the dependencies up to date. Migrating the project to our new technology stack is highly unlikely to happen. As a result, I had on my to-do list this year to look around and see if there were any groups or individuals who would be happy to take over as the primary maintainer, and then I saw Adam's message above.

In my playing around with Fatebook, I've found it to be a modern, well-thought-out and delightful successor to PredictionBook. I've chatted to Adam on Discord and found strong alignment between the reasons PredictionBook was originally developed and his organisation's intentions with Fatebook.

I strongly encourage PredictionBook users to take it for a spin and report back here if there are features missing that would prevent them from migrating across to Fatebook permanently. If there are, I'll do my best to co-ordinate with Adam and try to patch those gaps. I would ideally like to get our active users migrated across, put PredictionBook into a read-only mode and archive the project. I don't have a specific timeline for this - my main concern is that at some point in the near future (like in the next 12 months or so), we will no longer have the skills in our team to update dependencies and the site may become susceptible to security vulnerabilities.

Very open to the community's thoughts - this is not an ultimatum, just (I think) an opportunity.

[brunoparga]

I've migrated my predictions. One thing I am missing is that, for prediction groups, what was imported is just the unique part, and not the prefix shared by all predictions in the group. In some cases this makes the prediction pretty impossible to understand - imagine if the group was saying "[Event X will happen by]" and each of the predictions was just a date.

I wish we would centralize all of our predictions on Metaculus. But if that won't happen, let's have Fatebook and give it a warm welcome!

[michaelwebb76]

@brunoparga What importing options does Metaculus offer?

I could easily add an extra field to the PredictionBook API for the prediction group description, so even if the "group structure" was lost during the import process, a prediction could still be created that read: "[Event X will happen by] Y1: 20%", "[Event X will happen by] Y2: 40%" etc

[michaelwebb76]

Or I could just make predictions retrieved via the API include the prediction group description as a prefix to the prediction text

[michaelwebb76]

@adam-binks This appears to already be present in the API. If you use the description_with_group property, if the prediction belongs to a group it will contain [group description] prediction description and if it's not in a group it will return just prediction description.

To illustrate, if you've made three predictions in a group of the form

Group - Adam will read this within:
Prediction - 1 hour
Prediction - 1 day
Prediction - 1 week

Then description_with_group for those three predictions will look like:

[Adam will read this within] 1 hour
[Adam will read this within] 1 day
[Adam will read this within] 1 week

[adam-binks]

Great, I've added the description groups - if you reimport your predictions at https://fatebook.io/import-from-prediction-book they should now have the description_with_group name.

Thanks for reporting @brunoparga and thanks for the tip on how to set this up @michaelwebb76!

A sidenote - currently it looks like the PredictionBook API doesn't expose a "resolved_at" field, so Fatebook uses the "resolve by" deadline, or if there was an update after the deadline then we just add 24 hours to the last update time. It would be nice to have the actual date that the user resolved their question exposed instead, but not a big deal as this heuristic probably gives an accurate ballpark of the real resolution date. I made an issue for this: #252.

[michaelwebb76]

Added last_judgement_at to the API representation of predictions, as an optional representation of a timestamp.

[michaelwebb76]

Also just added the ability to export all predictions as a CSV, for anyone who would prefer to try a different platform or slice n dice their data themselves.

[brunoparga]

Thank you both!

@michaelwebb76 , any chance issue #244 could get some love? I failed to reproduce it locally. This is an example of prediction that is failing to be resolved. It is a member of a group, but this very colorful one is from way before prediction groups existed and it also errors.

If you have the time, Michael, we can take a look together, maybe? I'm on UTC+2.

Edit: maybe the error even applies to the prediction about Fatebook...

[michaelwebb76]

244 is resolved.