EA - Announcing the Confido app: bringing forecasting to everyone by Blanka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the Confido app: bringing forecasting to everyone, published by Blanka on May 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryHi, we are the Confido Institute and we believe in a world where decision makers (even outside the EA-rationalist bubble) can make important decisions with less overconfidence and more awareness of the uncertainties involved. We believe that almost all strategic decision-makers (or their advisors) can understand and use forecasting, quantified uncertainty and public forecasting platforms as valuable resources for making better and more informed decisions.We design tools, workshops and materials to support this mission. This is the first in a series of multiple EA Forum posts. We will tell you more about our mission and our other projects in future articles.In this post, we are pleased to announce that we have just released the Confido app, a web-based tool for tracking and sharing probabilistic predictions and estimates. You can use it in strategic decision making when you want a probabilistic estimate on a topic from different stakeholders, in meetings to avoid anchoring, to organize forecasting tournaments, or in calibration workshops and lectures. We offer very high data privacy, so it is used also in government setting. See our demo or request your Confido workspace for free.The current version of Confido is already used by several organizations, including the Dutch government, several policy think tanks and EA organizations.Confido is under active development and there is a lot more to come. We’d love to hear your feedback and feature requests. To see news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn or collaborate with us on Discord. We are also looking for funding.Why are we building Confido?We think there is a lot of attention in the EA space toward making better forecasts – investing in big public forecasting platforms, researching better scoring and aggregation methods, skilling up superforecasters and other quantitatively and technically minded people in the EA community, building advanced tools for more complex probabilistic models, etc.This is clearly important and well done and we do not expect to add much to this effort.However, we believe some other aspects of forecasting / quantified uncertainty are also valuable and currently neglected.For example, little effort has gone into making these concepts and tools accessible to people without a math or technical background. This includes, for example, many people from:organizations working on animal welfareorganizations working on non-technical AI safety, strategy and governanceorganizations working on biological risks and pandemic preparednessorganizations working on improving policymaking and governance in general, think tanks, even government bodiesWe think all of these would benefit from clearer ways of communicating uncertain beliefs and estimates, yet existing tools may have a high barrier of entry.What makes Confido unique?Confido is a tool for working collaboratively with probabilistic forecasts, estimates, beliefs and quantified uncertainty together with your team. Several features distinguish Confido from existing tools in this space:a strong emphasis on being easy to understand and convenient to usethe ability to use it internally and privately, including self-hostingthe ability to use it for more than just forecasting questions (more below)Confido is free and open sourceEase of use & user experienceConfido’s two main goals thus are to be maximally:easy to understand (easy to get started with, requiring minimal background knowledge, guiding the user where needed)convenient to use (requiring minimum hassle and extra steps to use it and perform tasks, pleasant to work with)The second part is also very important because when a tool is cum...