Did Human Forecasters Improve Preseen’s Performance?

In the Summer 2026 Metaculus Cup, Scott Eastman and Robert de Neufville worked with the Preseen bot as Symbiosis. They had four main ways to intervene:

1. They could initiate new forecasts.
2. They could give the bot additional context to use in making its forecasts.
3. They could manually override the bot’s forecasts.
4. They could prevent the bot from automatically submitting new forecasts.

The overall result was inconclusive. Symbiosis finished slightly ahead of the baseline bot, but this tournament doesn’t tell us whether human interventions reliably improved performance.

Disclosure: I work at Preseen and coauthored the retrospective.