Announcing the 2021 Narcissist Forecasting Contest

What do we want? Forecasts! When do we want them? This week.

In a tradition prompted by my long-ago perusal of Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting, I run an annual forecasting contest for my friends and blog readers.

The way the contest works is that I post a form with 25 crowdsourced propositions (binary and time-bound ones, along the lines of “Will Chesa Boudin still have his job on March 15?”). Each contest participant predicts the probability, from 0 to 100%, of each prop coming true. As the year goes on, props get resolved and the scoreboard is updated against a backdrop of analytical commentary by me, side bets and trash-talking by the participants, and infallible rulings by a secret panel of judges.

To give you a sense of the topics, the 25 props this year include:

• Will a major university announce a permanent closing or merger before the fall?
• Will Kim and Kanye still be living together on their 7th wedding?
• Will an anonymous June poll of contest participants show that more than half have been COVID-vaccinated?

This year’s winner will receive the traditional prizes: a bowl of pho and a book. The book this year is John McPhee’s The Control of Nature (1989), which I enjoy for many reasons but especially for its elegant and prescient description of how a major hurricane would affect New Orleans.

The contest is free to enter. You can do as much or as little research as you like. Unlike some other forecasting contests I could mention, the time commitment here is finite, since there are no competitors updating their forecasts after the deadline.

Last year’s winners, the marital team “Obsequious Fog,” made their predictions while one drove a minivan up I-95 and the other typed answers. Some entrants gather the family around and make it a team effort—while other families, perhaps in a minivan en route to group therapy, make a point of submitting separate entries from each family member. And then there are a few souls who pour a thermos of coffee and settle in for four hours of research into the base rates of Super Bowl upsets and celebrity lifespans.

Last year, I opened the contest to a wider audience and was pleased that my trawling net brought in a wise crowd—well, wise in the aggregate; people’s individual performances ranged, as always, from soup to nuts. Your entry this year will contribute to the advancement of predictive analytics, since that’s one of the things we do in this space. The other thing we do is mix food metaphors.

Entries are due this Sunday, January 17. Here’s an opportunity to work on your New Year’s resolutions to pick the low-hanging fruit and bring home the bacon. Click on this link to start forecasting now—or go to your calendar now and schedule a reminder for this weekend. Good luck!