Just want to say that I moved from Kyiv to Lviv on Feb 13 /entirely/ thanks to this prediction thread and the Metaculus estimates. (Still in Lviv but leaving Ukraine later today.)

It’s hard to estimate the impact, but at the very least I have saved myself an enormous hassle trying to move all my possessions, finding an apartment in Lviv, etc on very short notice — which would have happened otherwise. Of course, worse outcomes were possible too if things had played out a bit differently.

Thank you, everyone.

— edited by availablegreen

@GameTheory both your comments are in violation of our Etiquette rules 1 through 7 and our Moderation rule 3. I believe that's a record. To be explicit, your comments are:

• Low quality.
• Disrespectful.
• Insulting.
• Conflictual.
• Strongly political.
• Intolerant.
• Calling for violence.

As a consequence I will ban you for a week. Please change your behaviour when you are back.

As of right now, today is the first day since GJI launched their question on Jan 28 that the superforecasters are above the Metaculus community when you aggregate their options, 80% vs 75%:

• 64%: Donetsk and/or Luhansk oblasts + other Ukrainian territory
• 15%: Donetsk and/or Luhansk oblasts only (includes separatist- and Ukrainian-controlled areas)
• 1%: Only other Ukrainian territory

Moscow Bureau Chief for the FT on Twitter:

Putin speaking now: he says Russia has recognized the separatist's claim to the whole Donbas. This is as close as you can get to declaring war.

For context, Ukraine controls ~70% of that territory.

— edited by ClayGraubard

Prior (Poisson process): Russia has invaded three times in the past 20 years (Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, Ukraine 2022). Call that \(\frac{3 + 1 invasions}{22 + 1 year} \approx \) 20%/year. Remove a 1/6th because we are 1/6 of the way through the year to get \(\approx\) 17% In the past there's been 3-month+ lead times where Russia's amassed troops around another country. If we say Russia does not have such a troop build-up now and a 3 month lead-time is required 80% of the time, we're down to 13% chance of an invasion this year. But perhaps Russia _...

Resolving positively today, February 23, 2022 at 6:49pm Pacific Time based on: 1. Russian President Vladimir [Putin's emergency speech](https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1496718133746405377?s=20&t=8Y5JHlLf4bdKX2yyaefk5Q) stating ["We have decided to launch a special military action"](https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1496678639911510024). 2. US President Joe Biden's [statement](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/23/statement-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine/): "The ...

My predictions in the last few weeks (~80%) have been quite a bit higher than the community's for some time. So I thought it would be worthwhile to write out where I'm at. Thoughts/critiques are always welcome. I think it's worth trying to take a step back from the daily (or hourly) updates and think about what the likely endgame scenarios are. I see four major ones, starting with the clearest and ending with the muddiest.  1. **Ukraine folds**. Ukraine agrees to implement the Minsk agreement according to Russia's interpretation, and swear off applying ...

@mumpskin But the US IC often makes bad predictions, such as, e.g. the prediction that the Afghani government would be able to keep control over Kabul for some time after US troops left.

There is a highly popular entertainment website in Russia called [Pikabu](https://pikabu.ru/), with about [100M](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B1%D1%83) visits per month. Basically, it's a Russian copycat of Reddit. Yesterday, the site's admins posted a quite interesting [report](https://pikabu.ru/story/pikabu_i_botyi_8860371) that might be of relevance. Some highlights: * the admins detected a massive increase in activity of bots / sock-puppet users * since January, they've deleted 35K bots * another large wave of the bots s...

I confidently (85%) predicted this invasion a month ago, never going below 75% during the time. I think the following tricks helped me to better understand the situation: * Understand the soviet and the Russian culture (I was born in the USSR, so I'm having an unfair advantage here). This helped me avoid the common mind trap of believing that the grave consequences of the invasion will stop Putin * Know the history of the conflict. Many people still don't know that Russia has been making preparations for this war since 2004. Some people even missed the ...

I strongly urge people to start thinking about and writing new forecasting questions about the potential escalation of this conflict and its impact in the near and long term. What scenarios should we be watching for? What are the potential tail risks? What information would be the most useful for those working on de-escalation?

The collective insight of forecasters is needed right now. @moderators will be prioritizing relevant question submissions.

I’ve been working on developing a very rough casualty projection model to help answer these related questions. Bottom line, estimating under 25,000 deaths requires a near term end to the war. If it drags on, deaths in excess of 50,000 to 100,000 are very likely. Feedback is always appreciated. TL;DR for the normies who don’t spend their Friday nights doing this, with my pre-model guesses in parentheses. All will go upward as the war drags on: **Over 25,000: 62.5%** (up from 58%) **Over 50,000: 40%** (up from 31%) **Over 100,000: 30%** (up from 13%)...

@rQ9J-gBBv+sm

Areas of Ukraine already occupied (officially or de facto) by Russia as of December 11, 2021, will not trigger resolution.

Some similarities to the situation in Georgia in July-August 2008 (though on vastly smaller scale). I don't know much about that situation, just citing the articles here. ["Russia railway soldiers leave Georgian rebel region"](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-georgia/russia-railway-soldiers-leave-georgian-rebel-region-idUSL062719320080730) was published 1 day before the start of the conflict by Reuters: > The last of 400 Russian soldiers sent by Moscow to repair a railway in Georgia’s rebel region of Abkhazia began to pull out on Wednesday, en...

Unfortunately, I was really wrong and am now going to make a PCR test and find a plane ticket to somewhere outside Russia. Fortunately, I also have Israeli citizenship, so I have somewhat more options

— edited by mishasamin

@kievalet I mean, they both predicted that there was a 40% chance of Russia invading Ukraine. 40% isn't 0%.

Interesting how much more hawkish the comments section has been & continues to be compared to the community guesses, as well as general opinion. Going out on a limb on the latter somewhat and ofc need to point out I am biased, I predicted 30% on Jan 28 and have been revising down since then. Have thought all along true odds were and are 10% or fewer & the sole reason I haven't been at those percentages is the points risk/reward (I am allowing for the fact that this is a hard market to have a lot of certainty on). "This is a hard market to have a lot of ...

@availablegreen If you, or sb u know, need a place to stay, let me know. Together with flatmates, we offer our space. We're 3 math students living in Poland. Take care!

OpenAI: [Solving (Some) Formal Math Olympiad Problems](https://openai.com/blog/formal-math/) >We built a neural theorem prover for Lean that learned to solve a variety of challenging high-school olympiad problems, including problems from the AMC12 and AIME competitions, as well as two problems adapted from the IMO. >The prover uses a language model to find proofs of formal statements. Each time we find a new proof, we use it as new training data, which improves the neural network and enables it to iteratively find solutions to harder and harder stateme...

@(johnnycaffeine) OK, I'll jump out there: I downvoted this not because I don't appreciate points of view outside the "echo chamber" but because it was just an off-topic news article from almost 20 years ago with no analysis or explanation for why it's relevant. If you want to make the case that we should be skeptical of US/UK claims of impending war because of what happened in the leadup to the Iraq War (assuming I'm inferring your point correctly, based on your edit?) then please go ahead. Personally, I'm very skeptical they're analogous situations: ...