Type of business | Benefit corporation |
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Available in | English |
Founded | 2015 |
Headquarters | Santa Cruz, California, United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) |
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CEO | Deger Turan |
Employees |
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URL | metaculus |
Registration | Optional |
Current status | Active |
Metaculus is an American reputation-based, massive online prediction solicitation and aggregation engine. [1] One of the focuses of Metaculus is predicting the timing, nature and impact of scientific and technological advances and breakthroughs. [2] [3]
Three types of predictions can be made: probability predictions to binary questions that resolve as either 'yes' or 'no', numerical-range predictions, and date-range predictions. [2] Users can contribute to the community prediction for any given question, leave comments and discuss prediction strategies with other users. [4] Users can suggest new questions which, after moderation, will be opened to the community. [4]
Users can earn points for successful predictions (or lose points for unsuccessful predictions), and track their own predictive progress. [4] The scoring awards points both for being right and for being more right than the community. [5]
In January 2020, Metaculus introduced the Bentham Prize, which awards bi-weekly monetary prizes of $300, $200 and $100 to the first, second and third most valuable user contributions. [6] The following month, Metaculus introduced the Li Wenliang prize, which awards a number of different monetary prizes to questions, forecasts and analyses related to the COVID-19 outbreak. [7]
Data scientist Max Wainwright and physicists Greg Laughlin and Anthony Aguirre launched the site in 2015. [2] [4] In June 2017, the Metaculus Prediction was launched, which is a system for aggregating user predictions. [8] The Metaculus Prediction, on average, outperforms the median of the community's predictions when evaluated using the Brier or Log scoring rules. [9]
In 2021, Metaculus received an Effective altruism infrastructure fund grant worth $300k. [10] In 2022, Metaculus received a $5.5m grant from Open Philanthropy. [11] In October 2022, Metaculus received $20k funding from the FTX future fund, 3 weeks before the bankruptcy of FTX. [12]
In 2022 the organization announced it reached 1,000,000 individual predictions, and that it was restructured as a public-benefit corporation, it is committed to the following goals, its new charter compels it to report annually on its progress in achieving these goals: [13]
In 2024, Metaculus rewrote their website code and released it under the BSD-2-Clause License. [14] [15] [16]
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected timeline that is anticipated to occur. In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.
Max Erik Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher and author. He is best known for his book Life 3.0 about what the world might look like as artificial intelligence continues to improve. Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute.
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Futures studies, futures research, futurism research, futurism, or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social/technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement has achieved significant popularity outside of academia, spurring the creation of university-based institutes, research centers, advisory organizations and charities, which, collectively, have donated several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He was a Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better (2015) and What We Owe the Future (2022), and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty (2020).
Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. Augur is developed by Forecast Foundation, which was founded in 2014 by Jack Peterson, Joey Krug, and Jeremy Gardner. Forecast Foundation is advised by Ron Bernstein, founder of now-defunct company Intrade, and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
Unanimous AI is an American technology company provides artificial swarm intelligence (ASI) technology. Unanimous AI provides a "human swarming" platform "swarm.ai" that allows distributed groups of users to collectively predict answers to questions. This process has resulted in successful predictions of major events such as the Kentucky Derby, the Oscars, the Stanley Cup, Presidential Elections, and the World Series.
A superforecaster is a person who makes forecasts that can be shown by statistical means to have been consistently more accurate than the general public or experts. Superforecasters sometimes use modern analytical and statistical methodologies to augment estimates of base rates of events; research finds that such forecasters are typically more accurate than experts in the field who do not use analytical and statistical techniques, though this has been overstated in some sources. The term "superforecaster" is a trademark of Good Judgment Inc.
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... the Metaculus Prediction uses a sophisticated model to calibrate and weight each user