That’s Fatebook with a T. [1] Made by the impressive folks at Sage.
What is Fatebook for? It’s for predicting things. Specifically, it’s for publicly or privately logging your estimates of the likelihood of certain future events. Which events? It’s totally up to you. You can predict the course of history, or predict things about your own life. Or register disagreements you have with friends or colleagues to see who turns out to be right. It’s kind of like Manifold, but for less betting-minded people.
The real value to doing this is to improve your calibration. Being calibrated means that, for example, of all the times you claim there’s a 90% chance of a thing happening, nine times out of ten it does. Here’s one of our own calibration graphs (specifically, Oliver Mayor’s) from Fatebook:
If all the blue dots were on the green line, you’d be perfectly calibrated. It’s common for untrained humans to be overconfident. That shows up on a calibration graph as the blue dots being below the green line. Like, as the above graph reveals, when you say something is 90% likely to happen and only 55% of the time does it actually happen.
If you’re curious, here’s what it looks like to be underconfident, as Scott Alexander was for his predictions for 2019:
(He’s is still uncannily well-calibrated there.)
So that’s what Fatebook’s good for: training yourself to make better predictions. To quantify your uncertainty.
And how can I use Fatebook with Beeminder?
Well, when you set up a Beeminder goal to track your Fatebook predictions, we’ll encourage you to keep making more forecasts.
To create a goal, head to beeminder.com/new, pick the Fatebook icon from the list of integrations, and answer the questions about how much you want to commit to predicting. Or, here, have a button:
Footnote
[1] Relatedly, when we talk about our Meta integration we’re obviously using the Greek word (meta as in beeminding your beeminding), not the confusing new name for Facebook-with-a-C. (We’re waiting for some company to name itself “The” next.)