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Nonrival will very likely take this coming weekend and next week off, to spend time working on some improvements to the newsletter and its infrastructure. I want to make sure I'm making this email better, not just writing it, so that might mean skipping a couple more weeks this spring to work on behind-the-scenes stuff.
And if you want to read an article about Nonrival, the newsletter-focused website Inbox Collective wrote a nice profile. Tell your friends to sign up!
Reading this week's forecast rationales about Beyond Meat, a pretty clear story emerges about the plant-based meat industry:
My favorite comment comes from a reader who put the chances of Beyond hitting $85M in revenue at 50%, but who wrote:
And a good point about this question via the Substack comments:
The toughest part of writing Nonrival, by far, is finding forecasting questions that are a reasonable proxy for some wider trend. As Scott points out, it's very possible to be bullish on plant-based meats but pessimistic about Beyond!
Earlier this month Nonrival asked if tech layoffs had peaked. Readers gave on average a 44% chance that tech layoffs cleared 30,000 in either February or March. The forecasters on Good Judgment are more pessimistic, and give an 83% chance that one or both of those months clears that bar.
Meanwhile, Dell laid off nearly 7,000 people and Zoom just laid off 1,300. The total tally for February is still under 12,000 though on Layoffs.fyi.
"Superforecaster" Robert de Neufville writes on his Substack about the "power of simple rules":
There can be times where deep subject matter knowledge pays off, of course, or where it's even required. But there's also something to the advice: Don't overthink it. Try to gather data, use simple rules and mental models, balance multiple perspectives. You don't have to be extraordinarily clever to do these things so much as you have to be self-aware and recognize the limits of your own knowledge.
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Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions about business, tech, and politics. Thanks for forecasting. Send feedback to newsletter@nonrival.pub. In this issue Why Nonrival is ending How to keep forecasting Nearly two great years of Nonrival I won't bury the lede: I'm shutting down Nonrival after nearly two years, because I'm starting a new job as an editor on Bloomberg's new digital weekend team. I'm very excited to start that role, but sad to wind down this project...
Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions about business, tech, and politics. This is the first scoring email of Season 3 so everyone's total points have been reset, and now are based on just last week's question. Thanks for forecasting. Send feedback to newsletter@nonrival.pub. In this issue Scores: Will the preliminary April Index of Consumer Sentiment be higher than the final March index of 79.4? Date: This question was posed to readers on Sunday, April 7. Outcome:...
Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions about business, tech, and politics. Thanks for forecasting. Send feedback to newsletter@nonrival.pub. In this issue Recap: Will the preliminary April Index of Consumer Sentiment be higher than the final March index of 79.4? Average reader forecast: 59% Your forecast: [040724 GOES HERE]% The vibes will keep improving Most of you think that the April data on US consumer sentiment will improve over March's three-year high. As...