Prediction Tracking Websites

There are many prediction markets, where participants bet real or notional money on future outcomes of political, social, sporting and other events. The best known of these are Intrade and the Iowa Electronic Markets.

CXO Advisory Group runs an excellent project called Guru Grades, which tracks stock picks by various financial entertainers, as well as evaluating certain chartist strategies. The site has a great deal of empirical data about prediction effectiveness as well as certain cognitive biases in financial markets

Hubdub is a user-participatory predictions market, where you can create an account and bet notional money on other people's predictions. The site briefly ran an experiment called punditwatch, which tracked predictions by a small number of prominent pundits over four months.

The Long Now Foundation runs LongBets, with participants staking substantial sums (payable to charity) on their predictions. This site is geared to longer-term predictions (up to hundreds of years) made specifically for the site.

Books and Articles

Nassim Taleb treats the fallacies of prediction at length in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the major inspiration for this site. His earlier book Fooled by Randomness also deals with material relevant to prediction tracking. Taleb keeps a set of irregularly-updated notes online.

Philip Tetlock has written a groundbreaking book called Expert Political Judgment, synthesizing years of experimental data on the effectiveness of expert prediction and its psychological aspects.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Gruber, Andy Baio, Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky and dozens of others who spread the word about this site.

Thanks to Philip Tetlock, Tim Baker, Joshua Schachter, Peter Gadjokov and Britta Gustafson for helpful feedback.

Discussion

There are interesting discussion threads on this site at Metafilter, news.ycombinator.com, peakoildebunked and Overcoming Bias.