Get together with your friends and predict the future.
Fun activity
- Create a shared spreadsheet
- Enter predictions like those below
- Quantify predictions by type
- Share link with friends
- Privately make estimates for the likelihood of each statement in 1,5,10 years
- Copy predictions into shared sheet
- Discuss (this is fun)
- For particularly divergent predictions, people have already given their odds so it's easy to generate a bet from it
- In a year, get together and discuss the results
- Scoring: There are various ways of scoring. No clear winner
Prediction types
- "End of year" - the state on jan 1 of the judgement year
- cumulative - has the event/state ever happened
Observations
- People involved in personal projects (improve body fat percentage, learn a skill, get a new job etc) typically overestimate their probabilities
- People love to discuss global events
- It's actually somewhat hard to not enter provably wrong estimates (because of interaction between predictions)
- People have a hard time with cumulative predictions - if the prediction is "I will have gone to russia" over 1,5,10 years, cumulative, people sometimes enter like 1,4,3 which is impossible. Even 1,4,4 implies that there's zero percent change they'll do it from year 5 to 10, given that they haven't done it by year 5.
Benefits
- Find out your biases / lack of knowledge
- Shared ceremony with friends
Sample Global Predictions
- Alien life will be discovered
- X person will win the presidency
- 10% of cars on the road will be moving without a human driver
- US Life expectancy at 20 will be above X
- US obesity rate will be <30% (~39% at time of writing)
Sample personal predictions
- I will continue working at X company
- I will still live in this state
- I will have kids, be married, etc.
- I will be convicted of a crime
- I will complete project X (book, story, website, academic paper)
- We will get together in a year to discuss this
- I will be happy, given that I change jobs
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