Linchuan Zhang

Most work on forecasting, including most EA work on forecasting, is on short-range forecasting (defined loosely here as timescales of ~1 week – ~3 years). Yet most of the motivation for why forecasting is valuable appeals to long-range forecasting, defined loosely as forecasting on the timescale of greater than 10 years, or much longer. Here, I argue that advances in short-range forecasting (particularly in quality of predictions, number of hours invested, and the quality and decision-relevance of questions) can be robustly and significantly useful for existential risk reduction, even without directly improving our ability to forecast long-range outcomes, and without large step-change improvements to our current approaches to forecasting itself (as opposed to our pipelines for and ways of organizing forecasting efforts).

In addition to the EA Early Warning Forecasting Center I outlined in my other post, I think there are several ways forecasting may be very useful for longtermism, including: (1) Forecasting as a way to amplify EA research (2) Prediction-evaluation setups as a way to improve EA grantmaking (3) Large-scale broad forecasting as an EA outreach intervention (4) Large-scale forecasting tournaments as a talent training and vetting pipeline (5) The dream: high-quality, calibrated, long-range forecasting (ideally also at scale and on-demand).