Forecasting Atrocities

By Ben Golden on September 21, 2015

Holly Ramer has a piece up at the Washington Post about our work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to identify risks of mass violence in different countries:

There have been few efforts to create a public system, and those that have tried mostly involved small groups of people making judgments about the world. He said the Early Warning Project is different because it is public and more systematic, combining both statistical risk assessment based on data sets that go back more than 50 years and an “opinion pool” that includes more than 100 experts in particular regions or subjects who will regularly weigh in.

While our Forecasts solution usually uses prediction markets, we're also able to implement prediction pools, which is what the Early Warning Project needed.  We're glad to see our software being used for such an incredibly meaningful purpose.  Hopefully this tool will be helpful in identifying and reducing global risks, such that some day Myanmar (14.0% risk) will be as safe as Mongolia (0.1%).

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