@ImminentDownfall Welcome to Metaculus. This site is not a discussion forum, but a forecasting platform. See here for details and, in particular, note that

Metaculus aims at a high level of discourse. Comments should be on topic, relevant and interesting as much as possible. Much less welcome are highly (and especially irrelevantly) opinionated, spammy, aggressive, or low-information comments.

# michal_dubrawski Candidacy I may not be as experienced a forecaster as many of you, but I love forecasting and this community is a very important part of my life. Metaculus is for me a place where you meet fascinating people and can learn a lot. I would like to play a bigger part in our collective endeavour to forecast the future as accurately as possible as well as in our journey to improve ourselves and our skills. I believe the best way to do that is by cooperation, constructive discussion and mutual respect for each other. I have some experien...

@(D0TheMath) On the one hand, this is extremely impressive. On the other hand - come on, there's no way, right? I think this would qualify as an *[impossibly](http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges)* impressive forecast. Looking more closely at the paper, what it's saying seems to be that empirically, US political instability is cyclic with peaks every ~50 years, going back. That's pretty reasonable; maybe it's true for generational reasons. But it gives a rough estimate of "superimposed cycles with periods of 50 +- 10 years", which means that i...

I'm excited to announce that the wise and veteran Metaculite @gjm will help out with some moderating on Metaculus!

# whaffner Candidacy 1. I worked at the world’s largest hedge fund for 8 years. 3 of those years were in the Trading department, and I’ve supervised the execution of $10B+ in futures trades. While I was there I also took an internal class specifically geared towards translating market views into positions (given a thesis, how best to implement it). I never worked in actual macro investing, but I’ve learned a lot through reading the daily newsletter and through osmosis talking with senior folks. 2. I’m a data scientist professionally, so I have a solid u...

I knew we should not have put the servers in Nevada...

# beala Candidacy Hello Metaculites, I joined Metaculus in February of this year and have since found myself spending nearly all my free time thinking about forecasting. I’m drawn to it because I believe it’s one of the best ways to (1) check that my beliefs track reality and (2) encourage discussion of those beliefs in a way that is grounded in evidence and data. I’ve also found that it’s a great way to learn more about the world. My activities have so far consisted of [detailed write ups of my forecasts](http://www.usrsb.in/predictions.html), and mor...

If @datscilly doesn't get bored and lazy, probably some time in the next year. There are a few factors here. The question volume is up and I haven't been keeping up. Many questions now are range questions, which are harder to just 'wing it' for a good prediction.

Also my usual access pattern is on my phone when I have a spare moment, and the UI is broken to near unusability for range questions from the android browser. If @max.wainwright would fix the UI for android use it might give me some extra months.

I understand that Metaculites may experience some unease over this question, since it seems very unlikely to resolve positively, even given my generous resolution criterion. However, I think it's an important question in order to keep journalists and public health policy analysts in check. These types of questions demonstrate how informed communities of amateur predictors can often outperform the experts.

— edited by Matthew_Barnett

At 67 points lost with a prediction of 19%, this has got to be my worst-scoring prediction that I'm proud of.

There's a solution to the "can't lose points" side of this question: As its very last act before closing, a doomed Metaculus could resolve this question negatively and spank the predictors who thought they had a one-sided wager ;)

Alas for the rebellion, generation of tons of accounts is a clear violation of the Metaculus terms of use: > You may only have one Metaculus account for use of the Service. You may not create or use more than one account, and you may not share your account or any of the Service with others. We of course don't care about someone having a couple of accounts, but in this case many, many were created with a few "base" email accounts. So we're deliberating about what to do about this, but I don't see that allowing it to resolve as-is would be a viable opt...

I really, really want a hoody.

# ThirdEyeOpen Candidacy I've been active on Metaculus since February 2020, and I've left nearly 200 comments on various questions. I'm particularly interested in helping ensure Metaculus questions are of a high quality, are unambiguous wherever possible, are easily understandable and legible even at a quick glance, and are consistent with other similar Metaculus questions whenever it's reasonable. If you look at my comment history, you will see that I've always strived to do this throughout my engagement with Metaculus, since this enables everybody to ...

In my view, this comment section overweights: - single polls in isolation - news stories - conjecture about how certain events will affect certain voters in certain ways - prediction markets - articles from pundits that are non-empirical This comment section underweights: - the predictions of sensibly-designed empirical models based on polling 538 is at Trump 10%. The Economist is at 4%. If you differ from those numbers by more than a few points, I think you should probably ask yourself what your personal model of the election knows that these models...

@AnthonyQuestions should just resolve as originally planned. Otherwise, people could always change the resolution criteria later.

@(Tamay) I outlined my thinking as of January 24 a little more thoroughly in a thread at https://www.metaculus.com/questions/124/will-the-world-population-increase-every-year-for-the-next-decade/#comment-20441. I had become concerned about the novel Coronavirus a few days earlier and read everything I could get my hands on, particularly the epidemiology and virology scientific preprints that were starting to come out. On January 24 I wrote: "The Wuhan Coronavirus spread is still in early stages, so it is hard to get reliable estimates. One preprint fr...

I have invested a significant portion of my savings in Bitcoin, so I am going to be pretty happy if it goes to 100,000 $. But I think it is very unlikely to do so soon: 2 trillion $ of marketcap is a lot of money and to sustain it you would need very high spot volume (unreasonably high). Btw, you should be more respectful of other people opinions if you want to engage in a public forum, especially one that's focus on discussing rationally as Metaculus. This isn't the place to circlejerk.

How many times has a laboratory release caused a large-scale epidemic in humans? I'm going to define "large-scale epidemic" as outbreaks with over 10,000 cases – just to reiterate, specifically in humans. Sources used as a jumping-off point: - [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article written by a medical historian](https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/) - [Front Public Health article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128296/) that cites the above and, in retrospect, seem...

«Crazy jabowery thinks a victory over Sleepy Joe is as improbable as Randell Mill's Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics. SAD!»