Check out our blog, updated every weekday with forecasts of geopolitical events by our Botmasters: Jeremy Lichtman and Phillip Godzin; and our AI News Briefs, curated by David Isenberg.
With our Bot or Not project, we are continuing to discover new ways to detect the activities of AI bots, which is crucial given their rapidly evolving technology.
BestWorld’s continuing research on integrative complexity here.
We always reveal wherever we have used AI to author anything on this website.
Supporting our mission:
BestWorld’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Dawna Coutant, and occasional Principal Investigator Prof. David R. Mandel (who partners with our team as a professor at York University) ensure our research ethics and practices, and participate in our experiments. Our research is also supported by our Chief Technology Officer, Jeremy Lichtman, President, Carolyn Meinel, and Chairman of the Board, Dr. Miles R Palmer.
- Carolyn Meinel’s science and technology publications; market research books; research papers; technology transfer activities, and fiction; all linked here.
- Jeremy Lichtman’s science fiction anthologies:
- Infinite Regress: A Collection of Short Science Fiction Stories
- Visions II: Moons of Saturn
- Eponymous Plot Device: A Collection of Short Science Fiction Stories
- Alien Puzzle Boxes: Twenty short science fiction stories
- Visions III: Inside the Kuiper Belt
- More of his short stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Online.
- He was a round-of-ten finalist for the Amazing Stories inaugural Gernsback Contest.
- Dr. Dawna Coutant
- Dr. Miles Palmer, who has leveraged his research into unicorns:
We also continue building on research by other teams. They have found that news combined with community building, and undergirded by forecasting games and other win-win games, can build trust and understanding.
Example: 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 papers.
Example: In “Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online,” Gordon Pennycook and colleagues asked participants to rate the accuracy of a single neutral (nonpolitical, non-COVID-19) headline. They found that “subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share.” Participants also 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.
Prior to the founding of BestWorld, members of the BestWorld team participated in many other relevant research efforts. Meinel and Coutant, working with Christopher Karvetski in their 2019 experiment with a hybrid human-machine forecasting system in IARPA’s Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge II resulted in successful predictions. They followed up by analyzing approximately 70,000 of the rationales generated by IARPA’s team of some 500 Amazon “turkers.” The found the top two predictors of how well they could foresee geopolitical events were “integrative complexity” and citing similar historical events. Led by Christopher Karvetski with Meinel as the second author, in collaboration with Mellers and Tetlock, their results, “What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?” were published in a high-impact journal. Non-paywalled preprint here.
Meinel and Coutant have also served as experimental subjects in many research efforts by Tetlock and Mellers as they unraveled why their visions of the future (along with an elite cohort of their fellows) are consistently exceptional. Examples: the Good Judgment Project as conducted under IARPA’s ACE program; : bet team out of three; IARPA’s FOCUS program, best team out of three; the Existential Risks Persuasion Tournament; and the Good Judgment Project 2.0’s forecasting of the COVID epidemic through June of 2020. In that case, their top ten participants, including Coutant and Meinel, far outperformed all other forecasting efforts at that time.
