I am a huge fan of forecasting tournaments, competitions in which people try to have the most accurate predictions on a variety of questions.
There is proven value in the wisdom of the crowds leading to more accurate average answers than any individual’s. They encourage people to question their own biases. They force us to think probabilistically about what might happen.
The one downside is that not enough people know about them.
I’ve spoke about them to people who nonetheless get nervous that they’re too complex or would be too much of a time commitment. Yet while they may be hesitant of joining a forecasting tournament, the internet has shown that people are extremely willing to take quizzes, even the below from the FT which resembles in broad strokes what a forecasting tournament is.
Non-SMART questions
I took the FT’s quiz and was surprised at how vague a couple of the questions were. One asked “Will the Great Resignation end?”
That is the worst type of question one could ask for a prediction.
“The Great Resignation” is ill-defined already. What its end means is completely undefined. There’s little way for this question to be adjudicated with any outcome that is not clear-cut one way or the other; that’s a real problem in politics when issues are almost never clear cut.
It’s too easy for people in politics to offer muddled answers when confronted with questions that aren’t SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-limited). See, for examples, most debates on cable news.
That’s one of the benefits of forecasting tournaments. Because prediction will eventually have to be scored to find out who won the tournament, every question has to be measurable with clear guidelines about how they will resolve.
Compare the vagueness of “Will the Great Resignation end?” with the precision with which the Good Judgement Open approaches the labor market.
Two Lanterns 2022 Forecasting Tournament
To bring forecasting tournaments to a wider audience - as well as to see what the political risk community thinks - we’ll be running a forecasting tournament throughout 2022. But rather than using a bespoke forecasting tournament app, we’re going to make it as easy to take as a quiz.
Every Monday morning, we’ll post a poll question on LinkedIn. It will be open for a week and all you have to do to enter is click to vote.
To start off, we’re asking what is the probability that Boris Johnson is still UK Prime Minister on March 31.
At the end of every quarter, we’ll tally up the answers, assign Brier scores for the questions that have closed in that period, and award a $50 Amazon Gift Card to the top forecaster. At the end of the year, we’ll give a $100 Amazon Gift Card to the year’s top forecaster. (There will be a minimum participation threshold to ensure the prize doesn’t go to someone who answered only one question and got it right).
If you want to know your score and where you sit on the overall ladderboard, let us know and we’ll email you your result.
The questions will be on a range of global political issues. Let me know of any questions you think we should include, as long as they resolve before December 31.
We hope that this makes forecasting tournaments easily accessible and encourages everyone to check out the more in-depth offering that Good Judgement and others provide.
Good luck predicting!
Want to learn more about political risk best practices? The Two Lanterns Political Risk Academy is 7.5 hours of videos and 4 hours of live sessions to get you up to the cutting edge of the field.