Research shows that news combined with community building, and undergirded by forecasting games and other win-win games, can build trust and understanding.
In a Wharton School of Business research project, Professors Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock asked participating college students to forecast on non-controversial topics. The participants became less polarized in their worldviews. These results are backed up by many other research reports, For example: Researchers asked participants to rate the accuracy of a single neutral (nonpolitical, non-COVID-19) headline. Participants became better at identifying false news–even when that false news had nothing to do with the neutral topics they were asked to forecast. Both self-identified Republicans and Democrats improved.
Our Team’s Research Further Reinforces These Outcomes
Members of the BestWorld team have experienced these outcomes, as well. Our 2019 experiment with a hybrid human-machine forecasting system in IARPA’s Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge II typically resulted in successful predictions around 2/3s of the time. A crucial part of this was that our human forecasters told us the news sources and historical facts they used to discern what the future holds.
By analyzing approximately 24,000 of their rationales, we found the top two predictors of how well they could foresee geopolitical events were “integrative complexity” and citing similar historical events. More on our integrative complexity research here —>
A recent look at forecasting rationales, as well as ongoing research at RAND and here at BestWorld have suggested that there might be better ways to forecast by using an AI helper. At RAND, the helper is a specialized version of Anthropic. At BestWorld, led by Botmaster Jeremy Lichtman, we are testing and improving our GenAI bots.
BestWorld also builds on forecasting research underway at RAND. There we have found that despite running a competition with cash prizes, most forecasters worked selflessly to assist each other and forged friendships and while reducing polarization.of their political beliefs. A crucial factor appears to be primarily forecasting on topics that have not been targeted by disinformation or political campaigns. This avoids getting into arguments on topics that can spark high emotions.
Based upon the ten years so far of our team members’ research, we plan to constantly improve and scale up BestWorld’s social media/news/forecasting collaborative system. Informed by BestWorld chief scientist Dr. Dawna Coutant, we will ensure best research ethics.
BestWorld Founding Principles
We seek a more peaceful and prosperous world, one that leaves nobody behind. We believe that an integrated forecasting/social media/news aggregation system could contribute to this goal.
1) Conduct BestWorld so that it encourages unbiased and understanding attitudes toward each other.
That means resisting the temptation to gain members and donations through hate/fear clickbait
2) Conduct forecasting competitions with the goal of doing more than just passively seeing the future. If you and others helping us with forecasts foresee an impending disaster, we will amplify your voice by enabling you to share your insights with the public and with high level policy makers in the US government..
3) We also will amplify your insights and forecasts into a news system similar to Flipboard, which now offers users ways to join their “magazines” to the Fediverse., which links to tens of millions of users.
Pictured left, Carolyn Meinel, BestWorld’s founder and president. More on BestWorld’s team here —>
