Project description

We're organizing OPTIC, the Open Prediction Tournament for Intercollegiate Competition — an in-person, intercollegiate forecasting tournament in Boston this spring.

*NOTE: This page is no longer updated (as of mid-April). We successfully conducted the April 22 tournament and in the process of scaling up. See our website (opticforecasting.com) for more updated public information, and contact the organizers (opticforecasting@gmail.com, opticforecasting.com/contact) for more updated investor information.

Goals

Our main goal is to build the forecasting community by encouraging college students in relevant fields (international relations, statistics, politics, computer science, etc), which would:

1. Create a larger and more diverse pool of future and present forecasters and superforecasters, which increases the quality of aggregated & individual forecasts, and

2. Normalize the field of forecasting to the general public, strengthening public support, knowledge, and awareness of the practice of rigorous forecasting.

We expect this spring’s tournament to serve as a pilot program for a future, long-term, recurring academic league similar to existing intercollegiate academic competitions like debate, mock trial, or model UN. Currently, students say that they’re on the debate team, or the MUN team; we want students to say that they’re on their college’s forecasting team.

Our primary goal is to add an intellectually energetic field of college students to the existing forecasting community through an engaging, fun, enjoyable event. Competitors will refine their forecasting skills, improving their ability to contribute to the forecasting community and to the future decision-making of key institutions. We’ll be shooting for a collaborative, competitive, and fun environment over forecasting accuracy. Over the long run, we want this tournament to increase interest in forecasting among college students, identify more superforecasters, and encourage the development of diverse forecasting communities within and between colleges.

Logistics

Venue

We’ll be renting out a large venue in Boston, but our backup plan is to use a university venue (likely at Harvard).

Attending universities

Boston-area college students — including those from regionally-adjacent colleges, like Brown or Yale — will form university teams. Depending on the size of these university teams, team captains may choose to split into sub-teams.

Question info

During the event, teams will make probabilistic predictions on topics ranging from Russia/Ukraine and China/US, to AI development, to global economics and indices, to COVID rates and the avian flu, as well as predicting more fun questions on sports games, popular news, public-figure tweets, etc. The timeframe of these questions is on the scale of weeks to months.

Prizes & other fun stuff

Prize money will be granted to the top three teams based on forecasting accuracy, as well as some prizes being granted to high-quality forecasting rationales. Since a primary objective of the event is to be fun and enjoyable for the competitors, we're inviting a few speakers (speakers TBD), as well as providing snacks, merch, and covering transportation costs, as funding allows.

Expected results

Achieving high competitor turnout for this first event would be around 120 competitors; from aggregating about ten independent estimates from the organizers of OPTIC and Harvard EA leadership, we project a turnout of between thirty and 120 competitors, with a median of around 40-60. We expect future events to grow significantly, conditional on the success of this spring’s tournament.

Relevant information about the outcome of the project — including the shape of our plans to continue/discontinue future tournaments — will be available to investors and funders by September 1st (the oracular funding deadline) and probably well before. 

What is your track record on similar projects?

Our core team is Tom Shlomi (Harvard), Saul Munn (Brandeis), and Jingyi Wang (Brandeis). We’ve also been in close contact with a number of people in the forecasting and EA communities who’ve run similar projects in the past and who’ve been incredibly helpful, including: Juan Gil (a prominent community builder for Boston EA), Ozzie Gooen (president of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, founder of Guesstimate), Henry Tolchard (co-organized an online, intercollegiate forecasting tournament in 2022), and others.

Additionally, all core team members are Boston-area university EA organizers — and we’re well-connected with the regional EA scene, which will help expedite and maximize outreach efforts, advising processes, etc.

Tom Shlomi

Tom organizes for Harvard EA, and is currently running a workshop series at Harvard focused on teaching practical forecasting skills.  He is also a former summer research fellow at the Center on Long-term Risk and long-time forecaster on Metaculus and Manifold, and currently holds 2nd place on the Manifold AI timelines leaderboard.

Saul Munn

Saul organizes for Brandeis EA (BEA). He coordinates the BEA Reading Group and helps to facilitate the BEA Introductory Fellowship.

He co-organized a 250-person festival for Purim (major Jewish holiday), as well as numerous smaller (15-50+ person) events at his synagogue. As co-president of his high school Jewish Student Union, he co-organized monthly 50-200+ person events for two years.

Additionally, he’s helped out at a few high school debate tournaments of similar size and scope.

Jingyi Wang

Jingyi is the treasurer for Brandeis EA. She liaises with EA Group Funds and the university treasury board to acquire funding, and ensures the Brandeis EA budget is used appropriately. 

How will you spend your funding?

We’re requesting 1,265 USD in order to launch a minimum viable product, but we strongly hope to raise additional funding. This will cover food and smaller prizes.

Our mainline request is 6,000 USD (total) for a strongly valuable & impactful tournament. The additional funding will allow us to book a better venue, increase prizes, and enable us to fund transportation for speakers and participants and we expect further funding up to 13,125 USD (total) to result in substantially better outcomes.

For a more detailed breakdown of where the money will be spent, see our budget linked below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ftj4mGcKBGFl4MiWqlehzaka_-8qu6FuSsuZnhQY1a8/edit?usp=sharing