Fatebook is a website that makes it extremely low friction to make and track predictions.
It's designed to be very fast - just open a new tab, go to fatebook.io, type your prediction, and hit enter. Later, you'll get an email reminding you to resolve your question as YES, NO, or AMBIGUOUS.
It's private by default, so you can track personal questions and give forecasts that you don't want to share publicly. You can also share questions with specific people, or publicly.
Fatebook syncs with Fatebook for Slack - if you log in with the email you use for Slack, you’ll see all of your questions on the website.
As you resolve your forecasts, you'll build a track record - Brier score, Relative Brier score, and see your calibration chart. You can use this to track the development of your forecasting skills.
Some stories of outcomes I hope Fatebook will enable
- During conversations at meetups, in coworking spaces, or amongst friends, it’s common to pull out your phone and jot down predictions on Fatebook about cruxes of disagreement
- Before you start projects, you and your team make your underlying assumptions explicit and put probabilities on them - then, as your plans make contact with reality, you update your estimates
- As part of your monthly review process, you might make forecasts about your goals and wellbeing
- If you’re exploring career options and doing cheap tests like reading or interning, you first make predictions about what you’ll learn. Then you return to these periodically to reflect on how valuable more exploration might be
- Intro programs to rationality (e.g. ESPR, Atlas, Leaf) and to EA (e.g. university reading groups, AGISF) use Fatebook to make both on- and off-topic predictions. Participants get a chance to try forecasting on questions that are relevant to their interests and lives
As a result, I hope that we’ll reap some of the benefits of tracking predictions, e.g.:
- Truth-seeking incentives that reduce motivated reasoning => better decisions
- Probabilities and concrete questions reduce talking past each other => clearer communication
- Track records help people improve their forecasting skills, and help identify people with excellent abilities (not just restricted to the domains that are typically covered on public platforms like Metaculus and Manifold like tech and geopolitics) => forecasting skill development and talent-spotting
Ultimately, the platform is pretty flexible - I’m interested to see what unexpected usecases people find for it, and what (if anything) actually seems useful about it in practice.
Your feedback or thoughts would be very useful - we can chat in the comments here, in our Discord, or by email.
You can try Fatebook at fatebook.io
Oh HELL yeah. I tried Metaculus's private predictions for this, but they needed just as much detail as the public ones did, at least in terms of "this field is required". They seem to be aiming more for the superforecaster/people who actually give their predictions some thought camp, which is perfectly fine, but not suited for me, who just wants something quick and simple.
Signup was easy, I love how it watches for dates in the question and automatically sets them in the resolve field. Posting a comment containing a link by itself (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/24/bitcoin-btc-price-could-hit-100000-by-end-2024-standard-chartered.html) on one of my private predictions seems to have posted a blank comment, though. (p.s. my odds on 1 BTC = $100,000 are about 15%)
Absolutely love this one. I've already migrated my (admittedly few) existing predictions over. Thanks for this!
EDIT: "Each day I’ll write down whether I want to leave or stay in my job. After 2 months, will I have chosen ‘leave’ on >30 days?" is such a good suggested question, both to demonstrate details about the site and also to get people to think about what prediction can do for them, personally! And I love how you can just click the suggestion and have it auto-populate into the title field.
Cool, thank you!