I just saw the blog post about the Fatebook integration. What an intriguing site! And it sounds like at least a few of y’all use it to make predictions. Do you mind sharing what kinds of things you’re using it to predict? Have you noticed benefits to using it?
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I’ve been playing with it a bit. I would say thus far the results have been meh, but I can still work toward investing energy in achieving more, and hopefully will.
Example topics of predictions include: will I finish task X by Y date, how other people will behave (e.g., will X person get back to me about Y without me following up by Z date, or will an interviewer ask me X question), what will happen in ongoing fiction series, will a program I just finished writing run without any errors…
I think in my head there are supposed to be three possible kinds of benefits:
- At least one might notice a tendency to systematically get a certain type of thing wrong, and adjust accordingly. (along the lines of the classic realizing your own estimates of when you’ll finish things are always optimistic.)
- Practice making better estimates.
- Actually forming a habit of using estimates to make decisions instead of doing it blindly.
I don’t think I’ve really done enough yet to notice improvements of the type (1,2)—I probably need to either increase the volume of predictions or well, work a bit harder on each one.
(3) hasn’t happened at all—I don’t think any of the predictions I’ve made have actually changed my behaviour (a la Murphyjitsu, say). I probably need to intentionally think of cases where it might, and direct my efforts toward that.
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My predictions tend to fall into three categories (sometimes overlapping):
- I’m predicting an event or the outcome of interaction because I’m curious how it’s going to turn out, and I want the reminder to reflect on it;
- For some categories of predictions, I want to try to make my predictions lie closer to the trend in reality by predicting better – mostly because I have anxiety and a tendency to catastrophise;
- I know that predicting an outcome at high certainty will push me to make the thing happen – not a big push, but an extra nudge can sometimes be enough.
So I’ve found it useful as regards #1 and #3 already, since that’s a fairly immediate benefit. As for #2, I don’t know. I’d say I haven’t used it nearly enough to have any thoughts about that yet; realigning my anxious expectations with reality would take a lot more time, in my experience.
I also like to tag everything descriptively so I can compare my predictions: those about my own reading habits are very accurate, while my predictions about real-world events are shakier. That said, I have a lot of data about predicting my own reading habits, and haven’t predicted many real-world events either way yet, right or wrong. So, time needed.
I did refrain from predictions about some life events because it felt weird and unpleasant to be assigning probabilities to horrible outcomes. In light of laying out what I’m aiming for here, that seems maybe a bit silly of me, but it felt a bit ghoulish at the time.
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I also just found this single post on the Fatebook “blog,” which articulates some opinions about what to predict!
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I now have a goal for making predictions and I’ve made a couple dozen so far! Lots of them are centered around the end of the year. Some of them begin to pull back towards the more near term, and occasionally I’ll have one or two that end within the week.
Some examples of things I’ve been predicting:
- Will I derail on a Beeminder goal before the end of the month?
- Will I still be rucking at the end of the month?
- Will I weigh less than X pounds at the end of the year?
- Will <some economic situation> happen in the US in 2025?
- Will I still be employed at the same company at the end of the year?
- Will I finished my end-of-week update by end-of-day Friday?
It’s certainly interesting. I can’t tell right now if I feel like it’s worth doing or not. And I wonder if there are better predictions I could be making.
How is it going, did you see something improving?
…I have to say I am not sure my fatebook goal has really done much good. I am making predictions. But it feels like the feedback ok my behaviour has been minimal.
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How many predictions did you make? Do you mind sharing your brier score?
I think I would like to see when I was too optimistic and when I underestimated my power. I see no feedback loop in my decisions, also many commitments that make little sense. Expectation is that I will make better bets, less bets - taking into account new variables.
The rate on my goal is 1 per day, and I usually make a few at a time every few days. My brier score is like 0.4—I’ve just made a lot of predictions close to 50%, so it’s hard to do much better, my calibration doesn’t look that bad.
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So I created forecaster.interestingprojects.net. It has similar features to Fatebook, but I own it, was fun to build.
Cool things is ability to challenge your friends:
And then you can see how they do. We did it with pen and paper with one of my friends, now we’ve got digital way.
This is very nice tool to help me keep friends accountable. I’ll soon add email reminders to make sure you resolve the thing.
You get Exposure and Policy fields extra, as a reminder - to make it a tool for commitments.
There’s some charts I copied from fatebook.
I have public profiles, but I don’t have public challenges yet.
It’s installable as an app (PWA), so it can work as a standalone app on your computer or phone. Obviously it features beeminder integration. I really wanted to create an app like that and I’m very curious to see where it takes me.
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