 Metaculus front page | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Santa Cruz, California, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) |
|
| CEO | Gaia Dempsey |
| Employees |
|
| URL | metaculus |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
Metaculus is an American reputation-based, massive online prediction solicitation and aggregation engine.[1] One of the focuses of Metaculus is predicting the timing, nature and impact of scientific and technological advances and breakthroughs.[2][3]
Three types of predictions can be made: probability predictions to binary questions that resolve as either 'yes' or 'no', numerical-range predictions, and date-range predictions.[2] Users can contribute to the community prediction for any given question, leave comments and discuss prediction strategies with other users.[4] Users can suggest new questions which, after moderation, will be opened to the community.[4]
Users can earn points for successful predictions (or lose points for unsuccessful predictions), and track their own predictive progress.[4] The scoring awards points both for being right and for being more right than the community.[5]
In January 2020, Metaculus introduced the Bentham Prize, which awards bi-weekly monetary prizes of $300, $200 and $100 to the first, second and third most valuable user contributions.[6] The following month, Metaculus introduced the Li Wenliang prize, which awards a number of different monetary prizes to questions, forecasts and analyses related to the COVID-19 outbreak.[7]
Data scientist Max Wainwright and physicists Greg Laughlin and Anthony Aguirre launched the site in 2015.[2][4]
In June 2017, the Metaculus Prediction was launched, which is a system for aggregating user predictions.[8] The Metaculus Prediction, on average, outperforms the median of the community's predictions when evaluated using the Brier or Log scoring rules.[9]
In 2021, Metaculus received an Effective altruism infrastructure fund grant worth $300k.[10] In 2022, Metaculus received a $5.5m grant from Open Philanthropy.[11] In October 2022, Metaculus received $20k funding from the FTX future fund, 3 weeks before the bankruptcy of FTX.[12]