Last Updated: August 20, 2023 12:13 PM (PDT)

Summary

Funding to start & support 3-5 university forecasting clubs for one semester. Mainline request is $8.4k (~$1.6k per club + $500 for instructional content), used for club activities (events, food, books, posters, etc.) and instructional content (a syllabus and workshop styled after an EA introductory fellowship).

This is a subproject of OPTIC, which runs intercollegiate forecasting competitions. OPTIC is providing the lead organizers, materials, support, mentorship, etc for this project.

I’d be happy to chat more about this over a call with any regrantors who’re interested. Book a 25 or 50 minute call here: savvycal.com/saulmunn/optic :)

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

High-Level Goals

OPTIC aims to make forecasting a commonplace collegiate academic activity, like debate clubs, math teams, or hackathons. Our theory of change for university level forecasting:

1. Create a larger, more diverse pool of emerging forecasters and superforecasters, which increases the quality of individual & aggregated forecasts.
2. Normalize the field of forecasting to the general public, strengthening public support, knowledge, and awareness of the practice of rigorous forecasting.
3. Improve future institutional decision making to reduce and the scale and likelihood of future catastrophes.

Our goal is to add an intellectually energetic field of college students to the existing forecasting community through participation in engaging and enjoyable club activities. Workshops & sessions will refine their forecasting skills & improve their ability to contribute to the forecasting community and to the future decision-making of key institutions. Currently, students say they compete for their school’s debate team or MUN team: we want them to say they compete for their school’s forecasting team.

So far, OPTIC has been focused on organizing intercollegiate forecasting competitions, but we began to realize how effective university forecasting clubs would be after running our pilot competition. Many competitors indicated some level of interest in starting a club, and we expect a more decentralized version of forecasting outreach at universities — i.e. clubs — could build the collegiate forecasting community in parallel with intercollegiate competitions.

Linch’s post also includes a lot of great details about potentially great ways that forecasting (generally) can improve the longterm future; we contribute to some (but not all).

Detailed Goals

All are for EOY 2023. All goals are in order of importance.

Ideal (>75th percentile outcomes; above expectations)

• Have created ≥6 effective and promising forecasting clubs
  • effective:
    • generally, we want the goal of forecasting clubs to be “promote and practice forecasting and prediction markets among undergrads.” Effectiveness is evaluated based on achievement of that (nebulous) goal; more specifically, we’d want clubs to have gathered an average of >10 students/club to improve their engagement and interest in the forecasting community. Some examples:
      • took students from “what is forecasting” to “I’d attend an OPTIC competition and feel comfortable competing”
      • took students from “I read Superforecasting and every once in a while go on Manifold/metaculus/polymarket/etc” to “I meet with my forecasting club weekly and we spend an hour or two chatting about forecasting and going through Metaculus/Manifold/Polymarket/etc”
  • promising:

    • 80% likelihood that they’ll have grown in effectiveness from jan1 2024 to jan1 2025

    • note that “have grown in effectiveness” includes “has continued to exist”