Use the wisdom of the MIT alumni crowd to forecast climate solutions by MIT Superforecasting
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Finalist Evaluation
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Judges'' comments
Judge 1:
Good job on improving the proposal. The authors have clarified the actual process for the "gamification" and have addressed judges concerns about the neutrality of the questions. Altogether interesting idea to take a social experiment (a forecasting tournament) combined with a known group of smart people (MIT alumni) and direct them toward solutions for a global challenge. Great idea well presented.
Judge 2:
This is far more about forecasting than about harnessing the power of MIT's alums. The author sidesteps the hardest part of this proposal, which is identifying the questions that would motivate alumni to participate and also hold the attention of a larger audience.
To hold the attention of the alumni, the outcomes that are being forecasted must be relatively near term and well defined. The Economist contest clearly demonstrates this. The big questions associated with climate change tend to be long term, and in the short term there is variability both with respect to baselines and to the measurement of change. For example, MIT's carbon footprint was much smaller this winter than the last largely because this winter was much milder. I don't see the alumni getting excited over predicting events like when the 1,000,000th electric car will be sold in the US.
Semi-Finalist Evaluation
Judges'' ratings
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Judges'' comments
Judge 1:
I completely agree that 130,000 of the smartest kids in the room would be an interesting group to use to forecast almost anything - especially technology-based future developments to solve global problems. And, yes, MIT faculty might produce interesting questions to address if you could wean them from including their own prejudices from the questions.
Challenges would be:
1) How do you get 130,000 people interested in anything? Do you have a communication plan? Who does it? Who is in charge?
2) How do you monitor the neutrality of the questions? Do you have a panel of reviewers? Where do they come from? How does it operate?
3) Who is going to implement the forecasts and turn them into policy? Do you already have legislators or bureaucrats lined up? If not, how will you get them?
In summary, I think this is a great idea but you need to put lots more meat on these bones.
Judge 2:
Can you describe in more detail The Economist model you mention? How will you encourage participation? The idea of using crowdsourcing is exciting and creative, but I’d love to see you walk through an actual example of how it might work.
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 Carsten Pedersen Mar 3, 2016 04:19  | Proposal creator The proposal has been revised and refined in consideration of all of the comments provided by the judges. Moreover, the proposal has been extensively elaborated upon. Consequently, it should now meet the comments of the judges. |
