Summary

A Forecasting 101 Workshop helps ensure that everyone who wants to be involved has some basic understanding of forecasting. Often, a Forecasting 101 Workshop will go over fundamental topics like reasoning with uncertainty & probabilities, tracking accuracy, calibration, and a walkthrough of forecasting on a question or two.

Purpose

Often, there are some basic parts of forecasting that require explanation — people need to have the fundamentals down before they can meaningfully contribute.

This session is one of the most important sessions you’ll run. Screwtape on Lesswrong talks about the importance of the 101 space that you will always have with you:

Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven’t heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn’t another way out of that. You don’t get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for ten years straight, you will still sometimes run across people who have only fuzzy and incorrect ideas about the subject unless you are making an active effort to make Something Which Is Not That happen.

You might consider putting an unusual amount of effort into it. Some additional reasons this event is particularly important:

• it will likely be the first time that a number of people encounter your club; for those who don’t end up actually joining your club, this will be their only impression of your club
• it will likely be the first time that a number of people encounter forecasting; for those who don’t end up participating in forecasting, this will be their only impression of forecasting
• having an understanding of the basic ensures everyone who does end up continuing to participate can do so at a higher level

Content

Basics

You want everyone who attended to come away with the ability to comfortable answer some of the following questions:

• What’s forecasting? For example, answers to questions like:
• How do you forecast well? For example, answers to questions like:
• Why is forecasting useful? For example, answers to questions like:

Examples

We’ve collated a few example workshops that others have run below. Importantly, you shouldn’t simply copy, paste and call it a day. Instead, you should build your own workshop using the examples as a default, as a base off of which you can experiment.

• Why?

All that out of the way, here are the examples: