Hey everyone, I (Ryan) have been working on a fun experimental project that I'm excited to share. I've put together a Metaculus World Map page on my personal website that allows you to view Metaculus questions geographically. Want to see where we have open election questions? Filter by 'Elections' and check out the map.

Want to see the most popular questions relating to France? Click on France on the map or select it from the country selector, and see what appears.

I'm curious for your thoughts on this, and the team is interested in feedback too, as we may add a world map like this to Metaculus in the future. Let us know what you think!

And in the spirit of Metaculus going open source, if you're interested in tinkering with or improving it you're welcome to contribute to the Github here. (Many thanks to Atakan from the Metaculus team who has already contributed by improving the styling). I won't have a lot of time for updating this, but ideas or pull requests that improve this feature are certainly appreciated.

How It Works

The Metaculus World Map takes all Metaculus questions on the platform, sorts them by activity just like you'd see on the home feed, and then (crudely) searches through them for mentions of different countries. So if the resolution criteria or question text contain a form of that country's name or abbreviation, that question will display as related to that country on the map. It also uses some of the categories from Metaculus so you can filter by category—primarily ones that might be of interest when viewing geographically.

Still, this is currently fairly crude. For example, some space-related questions mention AU, or astronomical units, and unfortunately AU can mean not only a distance in space but also a big island here on Earth populated by about 27 million people (Australia). So unfortunately the map shows some unrelated space questions as being relevant to Australia. AU is an annoyingly common abbreviation too, so even questions about Monthly Active Users (MAU) show up there as well. The smarter way to do this might be to use tags, though that could potentially exclude some relevant mentions.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you have!