We have recently introduced two new features on INFER to help you evaluate and use crowd forecasts and comments with greater ease and precision. Within each question page, you can now find 1) an Analysis tab and 2) comment filters.

Analysis tab: A new way to evaluate crowd forecasts

Over the last few days you may have noticed a new “Analysis” tab on question pages. The Analysis tab enables forecasters and analysts to dig deeper into a question’s consensus forecast through two new charts: the Forecast Distribution and Forecast Updates.

Forecast distribution

On some questions, forecasters are united very closely behind the consensus forecast, but on others, there may be wide disagreement, which can be hidden behind a single consensus number. Now you can take a look behind the headline consensus probability to see how the crowd is positioned with the new Forecast Distribution chart.

The chart shows how many users have forecasted in each probability bucket (e.g. if a user makes a forecast of 42%, that is counted in the 40-49% bucket). It also allows you to click a bucket to pull up all the forecasts and rationales from the users forecasting in that bucket.

Note that only each user’s most recent forecast is included in the chart.

Forecast updates

When the consensus forecast is based on a large number of underlying forecasts, it can adjust slowly to even large forecast changes from a few individual users. The new Forecast Updates chart gives you greater insight into the direction and magnitude of change in recent forecast updates.

In this chart, each line represents one of the 25 most recent forecast updates (ie. forecasts where the user had a prior forecast, which they’ve come back to update). The dot on the left of the line is the user’s original forecast and the dot on the right is their updated forecast. Like in the Forecast Distribution chart, you can click on any point on the chart to view the underlying forecast and rationale of the original forecast, and its update.

Filter and sort through the most helpful comments

Comments received a major upgrade on INFER. Users can now choose to only view comments with certain attributes, as shown in the screenshot below. This is useful for when a user wants to just get a glimpse of the comments with external linked sources, view the comments from other users that they follow, etc.

In addition to the new filter feature, users can also sort comments according to three attributes, as shown in the screenshot: recency, number of upvotes, and quality. The “quality” sorting prioritizes comments that are longer and include references to external sources. Using this sorting, users can see the most helpful comments for learning more about other users’ rationales and developing a deeper understanding of the forecast topics.

To see all of the new features added to INFER, check out our new release notes page, which will be updated to include any future updates as well.

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By Zach Siewert and Henry Tolchard
Forecaster Engagement
INFER Team | Cultivate Labs