Reaffirming my forecast.

The question is stated as delivery of a "S-300 or S-400 missile system." A "system" requires all the major operational components to be delivered (search radar, targeting radar, missile launcher, command post, etc.). Regarding hiding the system, while I agree that generally you don't want to give away the exact location of your military assets, it is important to credibly signal your enemies if you expect to deter them. Most of the Iranian comments to this point are probably inward directed, to create a sense of strength in the aftermath of the nuclear deal with the West. Outward directed statements (to Israel) will come when the system is actually functioning.

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Inactive-102
made a comment:

I found an interview with one of the GJP judges talking about how this question was resolved. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0

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Inactive-43
made a comment:

I'm just trying to figure out what the objective of this game might be. A quick scan of the people I've identified as the top 20 superforecasters overall shows that most of them now have Brier scores close to or exceeding 0.5, for example mike97mike, jeremylichtman, Clairvoyance, just to mention those active in this thread. I'm now up to 0.449 but only escaped worse by having been scored on 18 questions so far, dilution effect.

"The only way to win is not to play the game."

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Inactive-102
made a comment:

Well you've kept your mojo anyway, you're showing up in the top 12 in many of my dream team picks: https://larswericson.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/a-super-long-picky-post/

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jeremylichtman
made a comment:

000: "Is" is a dirty word, in some quarters!

cmeinel: There's no prize. I don't know about anyone else, but I "compete" because it's an interesting puzzle. That said, it looks like they're moving away from "pure" Brier scores to relative scoring, so a 0.5 may not mean the same thing. We're also on "classic" Brier scoring, where the worst possible score is 2 (not 1, in the modified score). Also, I really messed up on a couple of questions!

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Inactive-43
made a comment:

@000 But have you updated it since this afternoon's scores updates? Now our various superpick techniques will biased by this weird scoring decision.

That system outage today must have been an upgrade of the software. Now the @username technique sends a notification to username.

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Inactive-102
made a comment:

@cmeinel, my run last night assumed that this question was closed as advertised. I reran it with todays additional forecasts and the numbers across all questions only change a % or 2 here and there, not worth updating right at the moment.

My cumulative score has hit the 1.0 zone with this question. I'm going to step back from thinking about the world and just run my superpicker algorithm for a little while to see if that restrains me back into a more reasonable score. Or I could eat ice cream and watch TV, we'll see what takes precedence.

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mike97mike
made a comment:

Scores. Smores. If you haven't lived on the street of an American city, or a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert, or waking up on the wind swept frozen taiga with no warm coffee, then this is good opportunity to experience the feeling. If you think forecasting is all reading The Diplomat or Die Welt, or Googling the right source engines, or even the correct algorithm, like a good, mythical, field agent - James Bond - you survive your 0.4-0.5 Brier and more even more numbing score. You learn that now is different from then. That 2015 is not 2005. The spirals moves forward.

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jeremylichtman
made a comment:

@mike97mike Yes, John le Carre.

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Inactive-102
made a comment:

@mike97mike, @jeremylichtman, I rely for my global inspiration strictly on the wisdom of this guy [1][2], although I'm told this guy [3] is also not too far off the mark.

[1] http://www.grenierdesbd.com/romans/sa_67.jpg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Dard
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/gerard-de-villiers-the-spy-novelist-who-knows-too-much.html

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Inactive-43
made a comment:

@mike97mike: The issue I'm trying to figure out is why Dr. Tetlock, who is a part owner via Good Judgment.com, would wish to demonstrate to the world that he has lost his mojo. That is the effect of running a game where known habitual superforecasters [his TM] are being demonstrated to be not so super after all. Consider that this is his selling point to UBS and his statements to the press, Edge Master Classes to IARPA etc. In the case of the S-300 question, his team, people who worked on his IARPA contract, made a classic cognitive science error: question substitution. Instead of the hard question, which during GJP would only have been resolved by approval by IARPA, GJOpen has documented the fact that it substituted the easy question, which was when will news sources that the scorers like, regardless of how frequently they have been known to be outlets for governmental disinformation, report that shipments "have begun." Even if true, these news stories did not mean a "system" has arrived. As pointed out be others, this could mean, for example, movement from one Russian warehouse to another, and of components such as just a screwdriver or just manual. This even could mean that preparation of shipping documentations has begun. Heck, you don't need to be an industrial engineer with expertise in arms shipments to know that these sorts of things don't get shipped overnight via Federal Express, especially in Russia.

However, lost mojo is not, IMHO, a credible explanation for what is going on here. Coming up soon are a raft of trivial questions that promise to raise most people's scores above the level we would have had by forecasting 50% all the time everywhere. Companies to whom Dr. Tetlock's team are pitching proposals might just look at the surface conduct of this site.

Another possibility is that I have reason to believe that the codebase for UBS, and presumably future customers, is totally different from this game. This comparison could be used to make the pitch that Dr. Tetlock has a secret sauce that only he will deliver, via the correct user intrerface.

A third possibility, and none of these possibilities are exclusive, is that this game is designed to further winnow the superforecasters [TM] in order to make job offers for the banksters, er, customers. You can read about Dr. Tetlock's first commercial customer that I know of in the book The Fall of the UBS: The Reasons Behind the Decline of the Union Bank of Switzerland. So could this game be a Hail Mary to sort out the ultras among the supers to save UBS's rear end? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuVJov3BXM0

Could this be why IARPA is about to release a Broad Agency Announcement for its CREATE program? I have reason to believe that the Good Judgment Lab has ruled out going it alone, and still is looking for a prime contractor to take them on. http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/create

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Tip: Mention someone by typing @username