Effective Altruism Student Summit
Forecasting Tournament
Saturday October 24, 2020 – Monday October 26, 2020
The tournament is closed.
Welcome to the EA Student Summit forecasting tournament! We've chosen a set of questions based on data collected by our event app, Swapcard.
The Centre for Effective Altruism will donate $500 USD on behalf of the most accurate forecaster across all seven questions. The winner can direct the donation to any of the funds or organizations listed on EA Funds. They will also be offered a 30-minute call with Jonas Vollmer, Head of EA Funds, to provide advice on their donation decision.
The tournament closed on Monday October 26 at 11:59pm UTC. See this in your local timezone here.
Results
This table shows the average score for the top 10 participants across the seven questions. You can see the resolution values for each question next to the question links below.
If you're not on this table and want to know your score or if you want to see your scores for each individual prediction, you can email amanda@ought.org.
| Rank | Username | Average score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tomas L | 0.75 |
| 2 | Ethan P | 0.71 |
| 3 | Toby M | 0.65 |
| 4 | Lijiayangsg | 0.62 |
| 5 | Arvo M | 0.58 |
| 6 | Maxime C | 0.56 |
| 7 | Paul O | 0.56 |
| 8 | Linh Chi N | 0.52 |
| 9 | Ronak Mehta | 0.48 |
| 10 | Abigail T | 0.46 |
How to participate
Click on the question titles to make a forecast. The more questions you forecast on, the better your chances of winning.
Create your distribution. Check out the video below if you get stuck.
Take a snapshot. Each time you take a snapshot, it submits a forecast. We'll use your latest snapshot as your final submission. You can see all the submissions you've made in your Snapshot History.
Click 'Log in'. You must create an account and log in to be eligible for the prize.
Compare. View the average of all predictions by clicking 'Import forecast' and selecting 'Elicit Aggregation'. You can also send your snapshot URL to friends!
Questions
Click on the question title to make a forecast. Click the + button to see more context for each question.
- For each question, a person is counted as an attendee if they have logged into Swapcard for the EA Student Summit. As of Friday Oct 23, there were ~750 attendees who had logged into Swapcard for this event.
- Questions refer to data collected on Swapcard and Elicit between 12:00am UTC on Friday October 9 (when Swapcard for EA Student Summit was launched) and 11:59pm UTC on Monday October 26 (the day after the conference closes).
- All questions will resolve according to Swapcard and Elicit data at 11:59pm UTC on Monday 26 October.
- To determine the winner, we'll calculate the log score for each participant on each question they forecasted on. We'll then calculate the average score for each participant across all seven questions. If you don't forecast on a question, your score for that question will be 0. The person with the highest average score will be the winner.
- This question asks: What percentage of attendees indicated in their application that this was their first EA conference?
- EA conferences refer to EA Global conferences or local EAGx conferences. Local meetups don't count.
- This question asks: Across all attendees, what will be the average number of contacts made between 12am UTC Friday 9 October and 11:59pm UTC Monday 26 October?
- On the ‘Contact’ tab of Swapcard, you can see how many contacts you have.
- If Person X sends a connection or meeting request to Person Y and Person Y accepts, both Person X and Person Y have made one additional contact each.
- This question asks: What is the total number of messages that will be exchanged on Swapcard between 12am UTC Friday 9 October and 11:59pm UTC Monday 26 October?
- You can find the number of messages you’ve received and sent by clicking the ‘message’ tab in Swapcard.
- Every time one attendee sends a message to another attendee, this counts as one message being exchanged.
- At the previous EAGxVirtual event, there were 1,495 attendees. 32,696 messages were exchanged in total.
- This question asks: How many meetings will be scheduled on Swapcard between 12am UTC Friday 9 October and 11:59pm UTC Monday 26 October?
- An attendee must opt-in to being available for meetings. Meetings are scheduled by going to an attendee’s profile page and selecting a time slot to meet.
- If Person X sends a meeting request to Person Y and Person Y accepts, this counts as one meeting being scheduled.
- The number of meetings scheduled may be greater than the number of meetings that actually occurred.
- The previous EAGxVirtual event had 1,495 attendees and 2,495 scheduled meetings.
- We will identify the person who has the most meetings scheduled. This question asks: How many meetings will that person have scheduled between 12am UTC Friday 9 October and 11:59pm UTC Monday 26 October?
- An attendee must opt-in to being available for meetings. Meetings are scheduled by going to an attendee’s profile page and selecting a time slot to meet.
- The number of meetings scheduled may be greater than the number of meetings that person actually attended.
- The highest number of meetings that one person had scheduled at the previous EAGxVirtual event was 35.
- This question asks: How many attendees at this conference indicated that they had taken the GWWC pledge in their application to this conference (i.e. before the conference started)?
- The Giving What We Can Pledge is a voluntary pledge to donate 10% of your income to effective charities. In total, 5,803 people have taken "The Pledge", as shown on the Giving What We Can website.
- This question asks: How many people will submit forecasts for at least one question in this forecasting tournament?
- A person submits a forecast if they take at least one snapshot on a question while they are logged in.
- This question will resolve according to Elicit data.
How to use Elicit
Any questions?
Join the #forecasting channel on the EA Student Summit slack if you have any questions about the tournament or question details.
Want to share feedback on Elicit or the tournament? Let us know your thoughts here.
You can use Elicit beyond this forecasting tournament to make forecasts on questions in your own life – head to the Elicit homepage and type in your question!