We believe that news combined with forecasts of what’s next can build trust and understanding.
It starts with building something better than clickbait news. Yes, clickbaits get page views. But we believe that ethical journalists should avoid this tactic. Here’s why. 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 results were conclusive: the participants became less polarized in their worldviews.
These results are backed up by many research reports, which document similar effects of forecasting on non-controversial topics. For example:
Researchers asked participants to rate the accuracy of a single neutral (nonpolitical, non-COVID-19) headline. Afterwards, 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 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 are using to discern what the future holds.
By analyzing approximately 80,000 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.
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 BestWord’s social media/news/forecasting collaborative system. Led by BestWorld chief scientist Dr. Dawna Coutant, we will ensure best research ethics.
The research is clear. The effects of combining forecasting with non-controversial topics can fundamentally change how we approach news, social media, and scientific research–driving profound social, political, and interpersonal change.
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 can do this in part through those on our team who have long advised the US government on global and emerging risks: Dawna Coutant (AKA DKC) was ranked as RAND’s top forecaster in 2023. Our Botmaster Jeremy Lichtman currently is #13 and Michał Dubrawski #7 out of over one thousand competitors for upvotes at RAND. In addition to these RAND activities, our president, Meinel has been advising US policymakers about threats to world peace since 1983, when she first became a Science and Engineering Technical Advisor to DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, later also its Tactical Technology Office and its Information Awareness Office. Our chairman of the board, Dr. Miles Palmer, also has advised US government at its highest levels (he and Meinel jokingly call it the “burn before reading” level) Indeed, through these shared activities they became lifelong friends — and then launched BestWorld. Our treasurer, Brian LaBatte, played key roles in IARPA‘s Good Judgment Project and FOCUS, a research effort on “counterfactuals, meaning how to forecast “what if?” questions.
4) We plan to integrate an Activitypub-compliant social media platform with our forecasting system, and join the Fediverse’s over 100 million people through their memberships in Threads, Mastodon, and a fast growing number of other social media platforms.
5) We also will amplify your insights and forecasts into a news system similar to Flipboard, which now offers users way way to join their “magazines” to the Fediverse.
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The Challeng of the Implosion of the Traditional News Media
One of the biggest problems today is the implosion of the traditional news media. If you have ever dreamed of doing a better job of reporting the news than what you read online, we can give you better tools than those used in traditional newsrooms. When big news breaks, we’ll help you find people on the scene ready to share their stories with you, and translate if you don’t share the same language. Soon we intend to field an AI bot that can help you with this.
Check out the foundational research we are doing right now, led by Botmaster Jeremy!
Our community of seasoned forecasters also can assist you in reporting not just today’s news, but also how your breaking story may unfold over the next days, weeks, and sometimes, even years. Our team already is experimenting with this concept on a small and partial scale at RAND. Please join us at RAND and enjoy a chance to win their occasional competitions for prize money. Bestworld’s Dawna Coutant and Michał Dubrawski are paid RAND Pro Forecasters, tasked in part with helping you to succeed at forecasting.
The Future of BestWorld
Our next step will be to combine forecasts and our participants’ rationales to produce a news aggregation system. Currently Botmaster Jeremy is evaluating AskNews.app for use in this plan. Translations in over fifty languages already are being provided by AskNews.app. AskNews.app optionally may include forecasts created by its voir GenAI. We believe that associating news stories with successful predictions will help the reader evaluate their credibility. This gets around the problem of fact checking services, which ask the reader to simply trust them.
However, as of today, neither voir or any of Jeremy’s bots are very good at automated forecasting. That’s why we are working so hard at solving this problem. Yes, we can have skilled human forecasters adding their predictions to news tories. Unfortunately, this takes lots of people spending lots of time on eachnews story. Even the world’s most brilliant foreasters, for example BestWorld’s Brian LaBatte, needed at thirty minutes per question to create a reliable forecast. See “ForecastBench: A Dynamic Benchmark of AI Forecasting Capabilities,” a recent project in which Brian participated.
Our plans include combining our research with two automated news aggregation and summarization projects now underway at IARPA. REASON is developing novel technologies to assist intelligence analysts sorting mountains of conflicting information. BENGAL seeks to prevent GenAI systems from spewing hallucinations, biases, and other harmful actions. Success on this front would be a game changer for the intelligence sector, as well as for the news media. Both REASON and BENGAL feed into our own research using leading-edge summarization research and translations of news stories in dozens of languages.
Gentle and Compassionate Moderation
We also are looking to David Brin’s briefing to Facebook — which Facebook requested, and then ignored! — for ways to gently moderate our participants’ posts.
Ultimately we envision something similar to the IEEE, the world’s largest professional society, which in addition to its massive online presence, hosts thousands of local dinner gatherings, and hundreds of conferences. By building in-person relationships, we will further counter the toxic tendencies of today’s news and social media platforms.
