Thanks for doing this, great idea! I think Metaculus could provide some valuable insight into how society's/EA's/philosophy's values might drift or converge over the coming decades.

For instance, I'm curious about where population ethics will be in 10-25 years. Something like, 'In 2030 will the consensus within effective altruism be that "Total utilitarianism is closer to describing our best moral theories than average utilitarianism and person affecting views"?'

Having your insight on how to operationalize this would be useful, since I'm not very happy with my ideas: 1. Polling FHI and GW 2. A future PhilPapers Survey if there is one 3. Some sort of citation count/ number of papers on total/average/person utilitarianism. It would probably also be useful to get the opinion of a population ethicist.

Stepping back from that specific question, I think Metaculus could play a sort of sanity-checking, outside-view role for EA. Questions like 'Will EA see AI risk (climate change/bio-risk/etc.) as less pressing in 2030 than they do now?', or 'Will EA in 2030 believe that EA should've invested more and donated less over the 2020s?'

A while ago, Leah Edgerton, of Animal Charity Evaluators, gave an AMA, and one of the questions I asked was What are some questions regarding EAA (effective animal advocacy) which are amenable to being forecasted?.

Her answer is in this video here. In short:

• Will corporations stick to their animal welfare commitments?
• When will specific animal free food technologies become cost-competitive with their traditional animal counterparts?
• Timelines for cultured meat coming to market?
• When will technology exist which allows the identification of the sex of a chicken before it hatches? When, if ever, will such a technology be adopted
• When, if ever, will the global production and consumption of farmed animals stop growing? When will stop completely?
• When will specific countries or states adopt legal protection for animals / farmed animals?
• When will EAA organizations have a budget of more than $500 million? $1 billion?
• Questions related to the pandemic.
• Questions related to the budget of EAA organizations in the immediate future.

Operationalizing these questions, and finding out what the most useful things to forecast are may involve contacting ACE directly. For example, "corporations" is pretty general, so I imagine ACE has some particular ones in mind.

I post my own questions sometimes, but I have some ideas for questions that I'm not sure how to operationalize:

• Will there ever be a broadly accepted answer on how to compare possible worlds that have a nonzero probability of containing infinite utility?
• Are donations to GiveDirectly net positive?
• How much will the EA movement grow over the next few decades?
• What is the long-term rate of value drift among EAs?
• If the Founders Pledge makes a long-term investment fund, how long will it last before shutting down? And why does it shut down? (Or the same question for some other long-term investment fund.)
• Will a well-diversified long term investor eventually go bankrupt due to a market crash?
• What will the funding distribution look like across causes 5/10/20 years from now?
• What will be the cost per human life saved equivalent according to Animal Charity Evaluators in 2031? (I asked a similar question on GiveWell, but it's not obvious how to determine a cost per life human saved equivalent from ACE's recommendations.)

Some fun, useful questions with shorter time horizons could be stuff like:

• Will GiveWell add a new Top Charity to its list in 2020 (i.e. a Top Charity they haven't previously recommended)?
• How much money will the EA Funds grant in 2020? (total or broken down by Fund)
• How many new charities will Charity Entrepreneurship launch in 2020?
• How many members will Giving What We Can have at the end of 2020?
• How many articles in [The Economist/The New York Times/...?] will include the phrase "effective altruism" in 2020?

Stuff on global development and global poverty could also be useful. I don't know if we have data to resolve them, but questions like:

• What will the global poverty rate be in 2021, as reported by the World Bank?
• How many malaria deaths will there be in 2021?
• How many countries will grow their GDP by more than 5% in 2021?

I'm interested in operationalizing two questions raised in this thread. The first seems substantially easier to operationalize than the second, but less interesting.

1. Will the next new constitution for a national government be closer to a presidential or parliamentary system?

2. To what extent would academics think that the work of Gerring, Thacker and Moreno were causally relevant to this choice?

These questions are not directly decision-relevant to me, but I'm generally excited about the idea of adding more quantification/forecasting to EA conversations.

I'm also interested in questions around approval voting in general, and the Center for Election Science in particular.

Some stuff:

• Conditional on less than 5 cities with >=50,000 people having implemented approval voting by Dec 31, 2022, what will the funding for the Center for Election Science be during 2023? Context: According to the CES's strategic plan converting 5 cities with >= 50,000 inhabitants is one of their main targets by 2022 (see p. 7). Conditional on them not achieving it, how will their funding look like? This can probably be operationalized with reference to IRS tax reports.
• How many US cities with more than 50,000 people will have implemented approval voting by [date]?
• What will CES funding look like in 2021, 2022, etc.

For EAs who are investing to give, more questions about the market would be great, e.g. my comment here.

In The Precipice Toby Ord gives estimated chances of various existential risks happening within the next 100 years. It'd be cool if we could get estimates from Metaculus as well, although it may be impossible to implement, as Tachyons would only be awarded when the world doesn't blow up.