Login to SciCast to take the course Understanding SciCast.

Click the “Understanding SciCast” link once you are logged in to SciCast to see lessons in our new training course.  (More coming in 2015.)  If 2-minute videos are too long for you, here’s some key points:

• Don’t be overconfident. Forecasting is hard — consider ways your forecast could go wrong.
• You start in Safe Mode — use it to express your considered belief.
  • The system will make a small adjustment on your behalf.
  • Revisit periodically to update or re-assert your belief.
• Don’t use Power Mode until you understand points. Or at least use these rules of thumb:
  • Power Mode is about edits — it will change the market to whatever you say, but you don’t have enough points to move everything where you want it and keep it there. Be frugal.
  • Avoid the extremes: the logarithmic cost function is bowl-shaped; pushing the marble uphill becomes progressively harder (more expensive) for less reward.
    • Conversely, pushing it back is cheap for great reward — if the market is overconfident (or you are overcommitted), make a small correction towards the center.
    • Consequently, the market is usually slightly under confident.
  • The market usually knows something. Pick the questions and chances that are most wrong (edit out of outrage), but move the estimate at most halfway to your belief, and wait a day or so to see what happens.

 

Legacy Tutorials

Some older tutorials we will be moving into the new training course. The interface has changed some.

• Why did my forecast do that? — Markets vs Surveys; Power-mode vs. Safe-mode. @DJFlirt3000, this is for you!
• Related Scenarios — Make forecasts depend on the outcome of other questions.  Note that these now appear up front instead of afterwards.
• Scaled Continuous Question — Instead of estimating the chance of a particular outcome, you are asked to forecast the outcome in natural units.

Reaching further back, here are some general video tutorials from our old DAGGRE project. Different website, different topic, but the same fundamentals:

• Basic Strategies — Best 2 minute introduction to forecasting in a market like SciCast
• What is an estimate? — 5 minutes very general overview
• Scoring — 4 min introduction to the core LMSR scoring rule, with examples.

Knowledge Base

SciCast Knowledge Base. Searchable by keywords, this is a series of short articles on a variety of topics related to SciCast.