[pyentropy]

You can gain reputation by simply forecasting the same outcome as the (publicly available) average probability of everybody - so a user that forgets to forecast on questions is gonna be worse off than a bot who just follows the crowd.

However it gets more interesting when you try to beat the crowd - because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one. You can learn more about scoring functions and how to measure the accuracy of everyone's forecasts: https://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/

Personally I have opened one question, and it involves predicting the net sales of Apple Vision Pro until 2025: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17407/apple-vision-pro-n...

[ruuda]

> because you have to take risk and disagree with the masses. You will either end up with negative reputation or a very large one.

A prediction market is a zero-sum game, and you should only participate if you expect you can beat the market, which you shouldn't expect to be able to on average. But this is not true for Metaculus, which is a prediction aggregator and can create more virtual internet points when there are more participants. So even if you don't expect to do better than the community on average, you can still earn positive points on average. You have to be really confidently wrong to get a bad negative score on Metaculus.

[pram]

Median seems based on the information we have? I’d say around $500m too. Apple already said it has to limit the units that are manufactured, news reports the manufacturers say they’re only making ~150k units. Doesn’t seem like much of an interesting prediction.

In order to go against consensus you’d have to predict it’s an enormous flop or somehow more units magically get made.

[tersh]

Forecasting in tournaments — head-to-head on the same set of questions — is the true test of forecasting ability.