Has there ever been a significant build up that has taken this long, this well publicised, by Russia before an invasion? Not for the last 3 or so decades. This doesn’t fit the fast-moving, extreme ambiguity MO of the Russians. If the main objective is to keep NATO out of Ukraine, (which it is https://intelwombat.com/russian-geopolitical-manoeuvres-the-ukrainian-question/) then what benefit is there in allowing NATO time to respond, sending in thousands of anti-armour weapons and giving western trainers time to skill-up the Ukrainians? Russian commande...

@(Glossy) I am skeptical that raising alarms about a full-scale Russian invasion of the Ukraine is a means to the end of attempting to reconquer the Donbass, especially if it's Washington that wants this to happen and Zelensky and co who are reticent. "Yo Zelensky" "Yes Washington?" "We want you to attack Donbass. Now is the time! Reclaim your lost territory!" "Why now of all times?" "Because the Russians are massing troops on your border! Perfect, right? They could invade any minute now!" "What?!?" Seriously, isn't launching an offensive into Donbass...

US State Department just issued a Do Not Travel warning for Ukraine in response to potential Russian military action. Apparently when this was done for Azerbaijan in 2020, the war with Armenia broke out two days later.

https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1485394…

@jmason It would be helpful to know how often the Do Not Travel warning is followed by a lack of invasion. I wouldn't be surprised if it's "90%+ of the time." This would be a more useful piece of evidence than the anecdote about Azerbaijan.

Sent to [Goddard's Office of Communication](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/about/email-goddard.html): > Subject: Has Webb's NIRcam captured images, even just for mirror alignment? When were such first captured? > Good day, I'm emailing on behalf of myself and a few other users of Metaculus, the crowd-sourced amateur forecasting website (like PredictIt or Polymarket but with play money). We're trying to resolve a question we ran about the James Webb Space Telescope returning images within 6 weeks of launch – any images, not just externally useful ...

@(jmason) > That the community is still at 45% is quite surprising. What's going on here? Media frenzy is not the full story. (I'm at 10%) Here are a few reasons: 1. the question excludes Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia may easily move their forces–officially this time–and annex them. It would cost them very little. The question would still resolve negatively. 2. Russia is a master of brinkmanship (the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict). Russia did similar ...

Apparently, just a rock.

After weeks of anticipation, China’s Yutu 2 rover has finally reached an intriguing object that appeared on the lunar horizon last December, revealing it to be nothing more than an irregularly shaped rock.

@jack @alwaysrinse I read the emails bectween @alwaysrinse and Scott, and Scott confirmed that he intentionally put the text "Astral Codex Ten mentions this Question" in his latest ACX post. This convinces me that he did in fact, even if very sneakily, refer to this question in the post. I've resolved it postively.

@Glossy This line of reasoning would be a lot more convincing if Russia hadn't already deployed troops and resources in a way that independent analysts believe would allow them to conduct a land invasion. The Iraq/WMD analogy makes little sense here.

With community odds now at 38%, I think I may go ahead and create a question about whether Russian troops enter Kiev by the end of the year. If we think the invasion has a significant chance of happening, a question like that would be important it would be useful to then see what kind of incursion it would be.

@RedBox Brier scores are for nerds, let's go

First (known to me) preprint, that gives an estimate for mortality, arriving at a significant reduction of deaths for Omicron: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.…

@(johnnycaffeine) 1999 NATO bombings in the Kosovo war is a better comparison. The military of Ukraine is similarly trained as Serbs and not as incompetent as Iraqi forces were. NATO's air campaign against the Serbian military was a failure. Serbs used decoys and were able to hide their forces. Only after NATO changed the strategy and started to bomb stationary targets like factories, Serbian government yielded. Apache helicopters stayed mostly grounded due to Serbian air defenses. NATO did 38,000 sorties, over 200 per day causing only 1200 milit...

New York Times: [In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-pig-bennett.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur) >A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs. >It is the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Ben...

@(jowo) This would be a good question to investigate. You can do a Google search using custom range for date. When did the Russian build up begin? When did the "shouting" begin? I don't have much time myself for a proper study at the moment, but doing a quick search I found the latest round of build up started being reported in March: https://www.google.com/search?q=russian+troop+buildup+ukraine+before%3A2021-03-31 Stories about a possible Russian invasion came after that: https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+invade+ukraine+before%3A2021-04-30 Not r...

Update: 75%. With Russian troops moving into Belarus, I believe that commonly reported 175k-200k troops are not needed for invasion. I guess current 100k may suffice due to 3 reasons: 1. Ukrainian ground forces are around 170k. Only 130k are combat-ready, since the rest are conscripts, who are legally prohibited from serving on frontlines. Out of those 130k more than half are stationed near frontline at Donbass. So this leaves at most 60k troops to defend other parts of the border. With Russia creating threat from Belarus, there is about 3000km of bord...

@pasha1237654 Oh come on. Even Russia does not deny that they are building up their forces near the Ukrainian border. They just insist they're not going to attack, while threatening to enforce their demands with unspecified "military-technical measures".

You can make of that what you will in terms of predictions (diversity of opinion is important for making these markets function!), and of course have your own opinion about whether it's justified or not. But insisting that it's not happening is just denying reality.

@GoldbergMachinations The fine print on this question says, “If the question title or text is present but obscured (such as being incorrectly transcribed), this is sufficient to resolve positively.”

Thus, it does not matter that the “q” was lowercase.

— edited by Matthew_Barnett

I'm going to predict far below the current community prediction of ~25% at 8%. For the record, I think polyamory is morally acceptable and perhaps underappreciated, but I don't see polygamy being legalized in every U.S. state by 2050. For one, in contrast to the legalization of gay marriage and interracial marriage, which could be incorporated quite easily into the existing legal framework of "marriage", the legalization of polygamy would involve somewhat significant changes to, e.g., marriage law, divorce law, and tax law which could slow down any legis...

I tried this problems with OpenAI Davinci - Codex and it solves basically all of them with maybe minor issues here and there. I have concerns that it may be memorizing solutions to the specific set of problems from the question. But it is solving pretty much all of them. It manages to solve quite a lot of them even if I modify them. For example I tried this modified elementary problem 9: ``` Write a guessing game where the user iteratively has to guess a secret random letter. Indicate whether the secret letter is before or after the guessed letter in t...