Why I started Nonrival
A hope for the internet.
Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions about economics, business, and tech.
How it works
On Sundays, read the newsletter and make a forecast by clicking a link at the bottom.
On Wednesdays, see what other readers predicted and how your forecast compares.
Over time, you’ll get scores based on how accurate your forecasts are.
I started Nonrival because the internet that I hoped for never really arrived.
In 2006, law professor Cass Sunstein published a book called Infotopia in which he explored the internet’s potential to transform knowledge. Information is spread out across society, he argued, but the internet offered “new… and revolutionary methods for aggregating the information held by many minds.” He wrote about blogs, wikis, and prediction markets and concluded that “in countless domains, the internet is now serving to combine dispersed wisdom.”
He also warned of echo chambers and online mobs—warnings that sadly proved prescient. The internet did deliver vast troves of information and the ability for any of us to contribute to them. But the tools we used to do so played to our worst impulses. Social media, in its relentless push for “engagement,” built an internet that appealed to our biases, our tribalism, and our hubris.
As a result, we’re now at a curious point where lack of information is seldom the limiting factor to knowledge. Instead, we’re limited by the systems we use to access and interpret information—and by our own biased, tribal psychology.
But the problem isn’t hopeless. We can change the ways we find and interpret information and we can hone our own judgment, too. That’s where forecasting comes in.
My interest in forecasting started with a desire not to predict the future but to form more accurate beliefs. As I understand it, this is what led Philip Tetlock, the psychologist and leading scholar of forecasting, to the topic as well. He wanted to identify a way of measuring political judgment “that would command assent across the spectrum of reasonable opinion.” One such criteria was forecasting, on the grounds that “We should… credit good judgment to those who see the world as it is—or soon will be.”
Of course, forecasting isn’t the only test of good judgment, as Tetlock understood; his books discuss the difference between explanation and prediction, between “getting it right” and “thinking the right way,” and the spectrum from unpredictable forces to trivially obvious ones. But, he concluded, “a balanced assessment would recognize that forecasting is a fallible but far from useless indicator of our understanding of causal mechanisms.” (In that spirit, here’s hoping Nonrival can be a far-from-useless newsletter.)
Three lessons from Tetlock’s research stood out to me: open-mindedness leads to more accurate predictions, keeping score helps improve your thinking, and the combined judgment of the group is often more accurate than most of its members. I started Nonrival because I thought a news publication could harness these three ideas to live up to Sunstein’s vision. If a publication and its readers committed to weighing multiple perspectives every week and keeping track of how their predictions turned out, maybe their combined viewpoints could create a new, more accurate, more nuanced form of journalism.
The author Julia Galef distinguishes between “scout mindset”—where we actively search for what’s true—and “soldier mindset”—where we defend our existing worldview against information that threatens it. By default, we spend most of our time in soldier mindset and much of the internet as it exists today encourages us to stay there. My hope with Nonrival is to create a little corner where scout mindset is the default.
A central part of that project is learning from each other. Sunstein’s point, that information is spread out across many minds, reminds me of a quote from the film critic A.O. Scott. He’s talking about interpreting art, but the line applies more broadly to our collective search for knowledge: “Truth is the lovely echo of our noisy, contending ways of being wrong.”