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Learn more at Stripe.com. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the show where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and I'm here with Anthony Aguirre. He's a theoretical cosmologist at

UC Santa Cruz. He's the associate director of the Foundational Questions Institute and co-founder of

the Future of Life Institute. But today we're going to be talking about Anthony's most recent project,

Metaculous. It's a site that aggregates predictions about science and technology. So questions like,

will SpaceX land on Mars by the year 2030? Or will someone in the U.S. be killed by a drone by the end of

2018? Things like that. So Anthony and I are going to talk about why is it useful to have

predictions, to aggregate predictions about

questions like these, what some of the challenges are of running a prediction engine like this

and some potential solutions, hopefully. So Anthony, welcome to rationally speaking.

Thanks. It's very nice to be here. So first off, you know, there are other sites that aggregate

predictions in a kind of a similar way as Metaculous, like predict it or in trade.

Probably listeners will be most familiar with prediction markets that have markets on, say, the outcome of political elections or of a vote like Brexit.

So how is Metaculous different?

What's the sort of unique reason for existence?

I would say it's different both in sort of a mode that it uses.

...