Last updated: 4th October, 2023
1. Key Information
Length: 1-2 hours, or can be longer over multiple days/weeks
Cost: Minimal cost involved, mainly for materials (paper, pens, white board) and prizes (if any).
Target Audience: Participants interested in improving forecasting skills, decision-making, and having a fun and engaging activity.
2. Important considerations
Pros:
- Enhances forecasting abilities through practical experience.
- Promotes clear thinking and decision-making.
- Fosters community engagement and friendly competition.
- Provides a unique and enjoyable activity for retreats.
Things to consider:
- Requires careful question design to avoid manipulative strategies.
- May need manual scoring that you create yourself and can be done by participants without difficult computations.
3. Preparation
- Question Design: Prepare a list of prediction questions that are engaging, tangible, and cover a range of difficulty levels.
- Scoring System: Design a user-friendly scoring system that provides intuitive feedback and encourages calibrated predictions.
- Materials: Gather + create necessary materials, including making prediction sheets, printing them out (or just having blank paper sheets) and pens.
- Prizes: Consider offering a donation prize to the winner's chosen charity (optional).
- Instructions: Create clear instructions for participants on how to make predictions and calculate scores either written on white board or posted/printed somewhere for everyone.
Event Logistics
- Allocate time for both the prediction session and the evaluation session in the retreat schedule.
4. Event structure
- Introduction (Day 1): Explain the purpose and rules of the prediction tournament. Present the list of prediction questions.
- Prediction Session (Day 1): Allow participants to make their predictions and assign confidence scores to each question.
- Tournament Progress (Throughout Retreat): Keep track of participants' predictions and scores in a central location.
- Evaluation Session (Last Day): Revisit each prediction question, reveal the outcomes, and allow participants to calculate their scores.
- Winner Announcement (Last Day): Determine the participant with the highest score and award the donation prize.
5. Further resources
For a more in-depth case study of this event – check out this forum post: Report on Running a Forecasting Tournament at an EA Retreat
Prediction Questions: Prepare a list of yes/no questions with clear and unambiguous outcomes, that participants can’t meddle in, has a range of difficulty, and required no background knowledge. Example:
- On Saturday, will active COVID cases in New Zealand exceed 100?
- Will at least two people have gotten visibly sunburnt by the time we do scoring?
- Will at least three people attend morning yoga on Saturday?
- Will anyone end up kayaking to the island? (There was a specific island which some people had already planned to kayak to.)
- When we do scoring, I will pick two random people and ask if they have talked to each other. Will they both say “yes”?
Scoring System: Design a user-friendly scoring system that encourages accurate and well-calibrated predictions. Higher confidence yields more points for correct predictions but with a limit, preventing infinite points for absolute certainty. Incorrect predictions result in losses but are bounded to avoid extreme negative scores. Only correct predictions yield points, discouraging random guessing. Assigning 50% confidence gives zero points for either a win or a loss, promoting thoughtful decision-making. Example:
Key People to Reach Out:
Workshop Organizer: Collaborate with retreat organizers to integrate the prediction tournament into the event schedule.
Participants: Engage with potential participants who are attending the retreat or gathering and let them know that event is happening.