Leveraging the Virtual World to Improve your Real World
Bestworld: The World's First Collaborative Social Media/News/Forecasting Platform
Problems
Retail workers quitting in droves because of abusive customers. Road rage incidents increasing. News stories we can’t trust – indeed, a majority of Trump voters now say the news media is America’s greatest threat. Neighborhoods, churches, even families torn apart by polarization and conspiracy beliefs. Increasing numbers of U.S. citizens want their states to secede from the nation -- civil war?
The result? An inability to solve even "normal" problems like fixing that crumbling bridge the school bus drives over every day, let alone big problems like climate change.
Causes
The current soup of media + social media + propaganda + "performance art" conspiracy theorists + foreign bad actors + mis/disinformation campaigns.
Also, an alarming increase in loneliness among in the U.S. Loneliness in turn leads to increased vulnerability to hate/fear conspiracy communities. Once someone is lured into a hate/fear community, “… you can’t fact-check, plead, or argue a person out of a conspiracy, because you’re trying to fact-check, plead, and argue them out of their community.”
Our approach
Research led by Wharton Professors Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock revealed that within one year or less, by forecasting on noncontroversial topics, people automatically tended to moderate their unrelated social and political beliefs. More recent research including Mellers and Tetlock, and led by Christopher Karvetski and Carolyn Meinel, revealed how to determine accuracy of a crowdsourced forecast by using AI to evaluate their explanations of their forecasts. This is a quantum leap in forecasting of geopolitical events.
Their research activities in Good Judgment Open, Good Judgment 2.0 and FOCUS have revealed that forecasting participants also build new friendships and communities as a side effect of working together on forecasting problems..
Research also shows that the people most able to rescue victims of the hate/fear complex are their real world (not online!) friends and family. BestWorld will be designed to enable our participants to cultivate real world friendships and work together to build better lives for themselves along with developing ways to encourage friends and family to escape these hate/fear communities.
.We believe that this must be done in a transparent manner. Participants must be advised that participation may cause them to see other people in a more understanding and kind manner, and almost certainly improve their abilities to foresee the future. We also will advise them that by signing up, they are agreeing to us using whatever they post to our site for scientific research. We will obtain Institutional Review Board approval for our research activities.
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. As an example, see our most recent research results, featuring BestWorld founders Carolyn Meinel and Maxwell, "What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns..." has been published in the International Journal of Forecasting
Our experience is that our collaborative Natural Language/AI/human forecasting system typically results in successful predictions about 80% of the time. Our human forecasters typically will tell us what news sources they use to discover what the future holds. Our news aggregation system will comprise these news sources and what each news source implies about our future. We believe that associating news sources with successful forecasts will build trust in our news aggregation system. This gets around the problem of fact checking services, which ask the reader to simply trust them.
We also will encourage politeness and remove toxic influences via our AI + natural language processing system (see also this), a team of human moderators, and our journalism team. We look to the Good Judgment Open platform as a model for how to gently and compassionately moderate our system. Thank you to our friends there! We also are looking to David Brin's briefing to Facebook -- which Facebook requested, but 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 could further counter the toxic tendencies of today’s news and social media platforms.
Latest news: Our second set of example forecasting questions is up.
USA power outages, sponsored by M/B Research -->
Space debris questions, sponsored by Palmer Labs -->
These questions include background information, sponsors and prizes. Because we are still under construction, to sign up for the competition, please email cmeinel [at] cmeinel.com More to come, and soon. We will alert you via email as we build out the site and get more sponsors and prizes.
More to come, and soon. We will alert you via email as we build out the site and get more sponsors and prizes.
August 2021: ISIT's Dawna Coutant and BestWorld's Carolyn Meinel had been combating COVID-19 as participants in IARPA's FOCUS program. We did better than the big modeling teams for the first six months of the pandemic. Then we were about even with the models until Delta arrived. Wow, what a surprise this was to most of our fellow forecasters. See what we had forecasted for 2021 as of August 8, 2020 at Covid_forecasts_2021.html
GJP2.0 COVID-19 Forecasting Tournament Top 10 Best Final Forecasts
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