EA - OPTIC [Forecasting Comp] — Pilot Postmortem by OPTIC

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: OPTIC [Forecasting Comp] — Pilot Postmortem, published by OPTIC on May 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.OPTIC is an in-person, intercollegiate forecasting competition where undergraduate forecasters compete to make accurate predictions about the future. Think olympiad/debate tournament/hackathon, but for forecasting — teams compete for thousands of dollars in cash prizes on question topics ranging from geopolitics to celebrity twitter patterns to financial asset prices.We ran the pilot event on Saturday, April 22 in Boston and are scaling up to an academic league/olympiad. See our website at opticforecasting.com, and contact us at [email protected] (or by dropping a comment below)!What happened at the competition?Attendance114 competitors from 5 different countries and 13 different US states initially registered interest. A significant proportion indicated that they wouldn’t be able to compete in this iteration (logistical/scheduling concerns), but expressed interest to compete in the next one. 39 competitors RSVP’d “yes,” though a few didn’t end up attending and a couple unregistered competitors did show up. At the competition, the total attendance was 31 competitors in 8 teams of 3-4, with 2 spectators.Schedule1 hour check-in time/lunch/socialization10 min introduction speech1 hour speech by Seth Blumberg on the future of forecasting (Seth is a behavioral economist and head of Google’s internal prediction market, speaking in his individual capacity) — you can watch the speech hereQuestions released; 3 hours for forecasting (“forecasting period”)10 min conclusion speech, merch distribution20 min retrospective feedback formForecasting (teams, platform, scoring, prizes, etc)Competitors were split up into teams of 3-4. They submitted one forecast per team on each of 30 questions through a private tournament on Metaculus. Teams’ forecasts were not made visible to other teams until after the forecasting period closed. Questions were a mix of binary and continuous, all with a resolution timeframe of weeks-months; all will have resolved by August 15. At that point, we’ll score the forecasts using log scoring.We will have awarded $3000 in cash prizes, to be distributed after the scoring is completed:1st place — $15002nd place — $8003rd place — $400Other prizes — $300Note that prizes for 1st-3rd place are given to the team and split between the members of the team.FundingWe received $4000 USD from the ACX Forecasting Mini-Grants on Manifund, and $2000 USD from the Long Term Future Fund.OrganizersOur organizing team comprises:Jingyi Wang (Brandeis University EA organizer)Saul Munn (Brandeis University EA organizer)Tom Shlomi (Harvard University EA organizer)Also, Saul and Jingyi will be attending EAG London — please reach out if you want to be involved with OPTIC, have questions/comments/concerns, or just want to chat!The following is a postmortem we wrote based on the recording of a verbal postmortem our team held after the event.SummaryOverall, the pilot went really well. We did especially well with setting ourselves up for future iterations, with flexibility/adaptability, and resource use. We could have improved time management and communication, as well as some other minor issues. We’re excited about the future of OPTIC!What went wellStrong pilot/good setupAs a pilot, the April 22 event definitely has set us up for future iterations of OPTIC. We now have a network of previous team captains and competitors from schools all around the Boston area (and beyond) who have indicated that they’d be excited to compete again. We have people set up at a few schools around the country who are going to start forecasting clubs which will compete as teams in forecasting tournaments. We have undergraduate interest (and associated emails)...