2024 Prediction Contest

A prediction contest for 2024, featuring UK politics and economy, global politics and world events and science, the arts and miscellany.

A prediction contest for 2024, featuring UK politics and economy, global politics and world events and science, the arts and miscellany. Read on to find out more and enter.

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As I did last year, I’m holding a Prediction Contest to see how well I, and readers of this blog, can predict what’s going to happen in 2024. The contest encourages and rewards people for not just getting things right, but for quantifying how likely something is to happen, so that you can see how well-calibrated you are - and ideally get better at making predictions.

Enter the 2024 Prediction Contest here.

The contest consists of 45 questions, with 20 on UK politics and economy; 15 on world politics and global events; and 10 on science, entertainment and miscellany. For each event, you have to say the probability (represented as a percentage between 0 and 100) of it happening. The aim is to predict how likely each event is to happen. The goal is not to predict everything perfectly, but to be well calibrated; in other words, if you predict 10 events have an 80% chance of happening, and 8 do, that is a good result.

For each question, you simply have to enter a number between 0 and 100 - you can take as much or as little time as you want.

You do not have to answer every question.

To enter the contest, click on the link here.

I have also recorded my own answers and registered them with a friend to ensure I don't change them. I'll publish these on this site, as well as the average result for each score, once the contest has closed.

Further instructions are given on the contest form. It’s really important that you only enter a number between 0 and 100 for each question. Last year a few people wrote things such as ‘yes’ or ‘probably’ which meant these answers were not valid.

Scoring will be by Brier Scoring. You don’t need to understand this to take part - the key thing to know is that it is a scoring system that rewards you for guessing what you genuinely think: In other words, if you think something is 70% likely to happen, write 70 - it’s as simple as that.

A few tips:

• Don’t be overconfident. Brier scoring can punish you brutally for unwarranted overconfidence.

• Don’t be afraid to miss out questions. Last year the person who came third missed out ten questions, showing a high score is possible even if you don’t answer every question.

• Don’t guess what you want to happen, guess what you think will happen.

To get a sense of what happened last year, the results of the 2023 Prediction Contest can be found here.

This year’s results will be published in January 2025. The prize is honour and glory.

The contest is open until 11:59pm UK time on 21st January. Please do share this link with others and encourage them to enter, even though strictly speaking this is not in your interests and will decrease your chance of winning.

Enter the contest here.