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Animal Futures Forecasting Tournament
1 min readJun 20
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I've just launched the Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus, in partnership with The Unjournal and @Sentient Futures. The tournament is built on a simple idea: the animal movement regularly makes strategic decisions over which organisations to fund, which campaigns to push, and which emerging issues to prioritise. These decisions are more informed when there's a well-calibrated, public forecast to draw in the absence of substantial research and evidence.Â
Questions were crowdsourced from people in strategic positions across the advocacy community, with one filter: could a forecast on this actually change a key decision? The 16 questions (more coming) cover corporate welfare commitments, alternative protein regulation, and emerging frontiers like octopus farming and how animal welfare might (or might not) show up in frontier AI systems.Â
You don't need to be an animal advocate to forecast on the questions - the more diverse the forecaster base, the better.
A $3,400 prize pool is on offer.
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November 13 update: the short report and dashboard have been refreshed.
The original questions now average 59 forecasting accounts each; the September additions average 31. These are accounts per question, including some bots. There is still only one officially resolved outcome; the Mexico resolution request remains pending and unverified. The main forecast picture is steady.
Which forecast, at what threshold, would change a grant, campaign, or policy decision? We’d particularly like funders, advocates, and policymakers to name one. Add a response here or annotate the report with Hypothes.is.
AI prepared this preliminary report and update at David Reinstein’s direction. The forecasts are from the Metaculus community.