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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why short-range forecasting can be useful for longtermism, published by Linch on March 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary See companion post here. 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). To do this, I propose the hypothetical example of a futuristic EA Early Warning Forecasting Center. The main intent is that, in the lead up to or early stages of potential major crises (particularly in bio and AI), EAs can potentially (a) have several weeks of lead time to divert our efforts to respond rapidly to such crises and (b) target those efforts effectively. A hedge fund is a useful analogy here, in terms of the hypothetical set-up. In the same way that hedge funds are private entities that (among other activities) convert large amounts of both structured data and unstructured data into accurate-ish prices, we can have a “forecasting center” that converts various forms of data into accurate predictions on EA-relevant questions. The forecasts are directly fed to key EA decision-makers. This is the basic idea. There are several variants of this general idea that also seem promising (though also potentially net-negative). Of these, my top 3 are: a) combining the forecasting with a civilian intelligence (OSINT) arm to generate data about issues of unusually high EA importance, b) combination with a crisis response unit to respond to pivotal moments directly and c) housing this forecasting center within a nation-state actor (perhaps the US government), to increase the chance that the forecasting center informs governmental rather than (just) EA rapid response decisions. This post paints a specific vision for an organization that could be set up, and argues that we should aim towards it. Further work, from myself and others, would consider and prioritize a number of ways to aim towards this vision (including further research, starter projects or organizations to initiate, grants that are worth making, etc). Further work should also include a red-teaming of this vision, and other refinements. Most of the points in this post will not seem original to people extremely acquainted with the EA forecasting space. Nonetheless, I thought it may be helpful to bring much of it in one place, as well as include my current opinionated best guesses and judgements. Early Warning Forecasting Center: What it is, and why it’d be cool The “hedge fund” metaphor can convey a lot of related concepts, but the definition/cluster of ideas I most want to invoke is “a large private entity that (relatively) accurately converts much of the information in the world into clear, precise prices on the financial market.” Similarly, I want us to consider having an Early Warning Forecasting Center as analogous to a hedge fund: a large entity that converts all sorts of data into accurate, calibrated, by-default-private, predictions on short-range questions of EA interest. What outputs would an Early Warning Forecasting Center provide? I think the most obvious outputs are accurate, calibrated, constantly updated, forecasts for ...