Project summary
This project aims to run the first animal-focused forecasting tournament on the Metaculus platform. The goal is to generate forecasts on decision-relevant questions that will help both funders and animal-aligned organisations make more informed decisions about their funding allocation and strategy. Questions will be crowdsourced from the collective animal advocacy community and vetted appropriately to ensure the questions’ relevancy to decision-making in the community. The tournament contains a prize pool, which will be split amongst the best forecasters.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
Every day, billions of animals suffer in ways we can prevent, but only if we direct our resources wisely. This project exists to ensure that our time, money and effort are directed and utilised in the best ways possible.
The primary goals of this project are threefold:
To enable funders in the animal welfare/rights space to prioritise animal-aligned interventions more effectively.
To raise awareness amongst animal-aligned organisations about forecasting, to enable them to make better-informed decisions about their strategies and future direction.
We also want forecasters outside the animal advocacy community to weigh in on the forecasts, diversifying the set of forecasters for the questions in the tournament.
#1 and #2 will primarily be achieved by advertising the tournament in various animal advocacy communities (e.g. Hive, Sentient Futures) and partnering with a media body like Sentient Media.
I’m hoping to achieve #3 by the presence of a prize pool in the tournament, so if forecasters weren’t intrinsically motivated to forecast these questions, at least the money to be won would be a good motivator.
How will this funding be used?
The funding will be used to create a prize pool for the Metaculus tournament. If funding exceeds $10,000, a small portion of the amount above the $10,000 will also be used to cover my efforts in filtering questions, operationalising them to a Metaculus-friendly format, advertising the tournament, and following up with decision makers in the animal advocacy community to gauge whether they have found the forecasts useful.
The minimum funding is set such that the prize pool will hopefully be viable to incentivise a sufficient number of forecasters to predict. More money raised will produce a larger prize pool, greater participation incentive, and more attention on the tournament, and will also enable more outreach to spread awareness.
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
It’s primarily me on the team.
Jeffrey Maxim, a forecasting enthusiast and blogger from the Hive community, and Ryan Beck, the Forecasting Programs Coordinator at Metaculus are playing supporting roles. The team at The Unjournal will also be collaborating with me on selecting and refining the final set of questions.
I have not personally worked on something similar, but Ryan Beck is experienced in shaping and operationalising Metaculus tournaments, including many of Metaculus’ active and past tournaments.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
Questions evolve to become non-decision-relevant over time.
Funders and animal organisations are unsure how to translate forecasts into concrete actions/decisions
Aggregate forecasts on the tournament questions are completely unreflective of the actual outcome, leading decision makers to potentially make the wrong decisions
How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?
None.