It's important to consider adverse selection. People who get hounded out of everywhere else are inexplicably* invited to a forecasting conference, of course they come! they have nowhere else to go!
* inexplicably, in the sense that a forecasting conference is inviting people specialized in demographics and genetics-- it's a little related, but not that related.
3 year update: I consider this 2 year update to be a truncated version of the post, but it's actually too punchy and even superficial.
My opinion lately / these days is too confused and nuanced to write about.
thanks for the writeup! I had a ton of similar feelings for a while, mixing between finding people who say "it's not worth defending it's just a meme" and "actually I'll defend using something like this".
At one point I was discussing this issue with Rob Miles at manifest, who told me something like "the default is a bool (some two valued variable)", the idea being that if people are arguing over an interval then we could've done way worse.
You, my friend, are not sorry :)