I detailed my 2022 focus here (read that first if you want more context) & did a quarter year update as well.. Here is how I’m progressing.

2022 Theme: Forecasting

I’m 2.5 books into this theme and really enjoying it. I’ve found forecasting and optimal decision making are very closely intertwined topics and so I might have to take up the latter topic soon in order to keep reading any of these I can’t finish this year.

1. “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” Philip Tetlock
2. “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke
3. IN PROGRESS – “The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver
4. Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki
5. “Noise” by Daniel Kahneman
6. “How to Measure Anything” by Douglas Hubbard
7. “Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayre
8. “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman
9. “Think Again” by Adam Grant
10. “Data Detective” by Tim Harford
11. “How not to be wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg

2022 Challenge: Become a Superforecaster

I’ve participated in 51 questions this year of which 20 have resolved. Based on those I’ve successfully lowered my average Brier score on GJOpen.com from 0.357 to 0.353. I’ve had a few questions I did really well on, a lot I was about average on and few I’ve done quite poorly on.

Among my best:

• I got 8th out of 109 forecasters in a question about the MLB opening day with a Relative Brier Score of -0.2804
• I got 9th out of 77 forecasters in a question about COVID in New Zealand with a Relative Brier Score of -0.0904
• A question about Top Gun’s box office performance where I got a Relative Brier Score of -0.0097
• A question about Zelensky and Ukraine where I ranked in the top 10%
• A question about COVID deaths where I was in the top 25% with a relative Brier Score of -0.0228

Among my worst:

• I got 60th out of 64 on a question about COVID in the US with a Relative Brier Score of 0.749
• I was in the bottom 30% in a question about the UEFA Champions League

2022 Habit: Spend an Hour A Week Managing Forecasts

I’m 8.5 for 13 in Q2. Overall I’ve been pretty good at finding time to make predictions, but for the last month it has been particularly difficult to find the time.

2022 Exemplar: Steve Jobs

In the second quarter I watched a movie called ‘The Man in the Machine’, which digs into how Steve Jobs worked a bit. It focuses more on his personal interaction style and decisions than his forecasting ability, but I did get some unique insight out of it. In many ways it seems like Jobs didn’t imagine the future so much as compile the vision from others and make it happen. In the end, I’m not sure that is against my goal for this year, which was to be better at seeing the future. Jobs had an incredible knack for one very specific thing, and a time when that very specific thing proved very successful – designing computers that humans liked to use.

2022 Bucket List Item: Finish the Cascade Crest 100

Well, here we are again. I’m not quite ready for this race, but it is coming up. I guess I get a chance to find out how I do untrained but without COVID (hopefully).

Last year, by race day I had run 692 miles, covered 51k ft of vert and spent 265 hours walking on my treadmill desk.

This year, the race is five weeks earlier in the year, and I’m at ; 458 miles, 68k ft of vert and 209 treadmill hours. More or less the same.