CNN: The James Webb Telescope has successfully launched. Question resolves 2021-12-25 at 12:20 pm UTC. Merry Christmas!

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WHO: Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (2020-02-24)

...absolutely fawns over China for its aggressive response to the outbreak.

@AABoyles Here's a colab notebook leveraging @ought's excellent ergo library to normalize the community estimates into consistent predictions.

There are a bunch of things Metaculus doesn't do that I want it to. Some of these can be accomplished with just a little bit of javascript. So I created this: https://aaboyles.github.io/Metaculus-Hacks/

I don't have any tracking on the site, so please let me know if you get any value from it.

Spreadsheet mapping all valid Metaculus Probabilities to "Surprising" probabilities (by the definition in this question)

Scott Alexander just launched his (quite belated) 2020 predictions post. Most of them seem covered (or close to it) by existing questions, but it could be interesting to compare his to the community estimates.

Six days later, and the case count stubbornly continues to follow the quadratic fit very closely. Looks like it's time to start closing my margins a bit. (Same Link as Last Time.)

@DanielFilan That's what I'm talking about!

Seriously, though--a swag store with some Metaculus-branded stuff would be excellent.

I figured out how to use FAOStat so you don't have to! Here's the correct data.

There's one obvious, instructive case here: [The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests). The Chinese began moving the PLA to Beijing long before they declared martial law, but [underestimated the cultural ties local armed forces would share with the residents of Beijing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/82nd_Group_Army#Tiananmen_Square_protests). They wouldn't order in more remote troops until around 24hrs before they declared martial law. Initial Martial Law enforcement attempts were stymied by prot...

It'd be really nice if the some of the raw data were exposed for download!

(Context: Tulsi Gabbard is Vegan.)

[Worldometers reports](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/) a ~8% probability of death for persons in their 70's. They cite the CCDC report, but I can't find the origin of the statistic. But I believe it's in the right ballpark, and this is imprecise enough not to matter: It should be higher for men, higher for people later in their 70's, and likely lower for wealthier people, lower for non-smokers. So it's pretty hard to pin down a direction to adjust. Let's take the 8% rate at face value. Suppose one candidate is...

ESO's ELT webpage, indicating the current first light target date is "2025"

Top posts data: ``` Year,Karma 2020,238 2019,216 2018,341 2017,288 2016,117 2015,322 2014,168 2013,127 2012,272 2011,298 2010,385 2009,300 2008,164 ``` A bit of oral history: LessWrong's popularity waned after 2010 as Eliezer Yudkowsky completed his [Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality) (now [published](https://smile.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1546042059&sr=8-2&keywords=rationality+from+ai+to+zombies) as *Rationality: From AI to Zombies*), and its other members broke off t...

Linear extrapolation on the data from the Wikipedia (log-transformed, which fits *excellently*) gives a prediction of 6.14\*10^14. However, the update frequency isn't once per year, so the harder problem is picking the date of the last update salient to this question's resolution. Updates are sort of Poisson distributed (with a low lambda)? I figure that we'll have at least one update, halfway between now and the resolution date, setting the median around 2\*10^14, but with a second peak to give a healthy margin up to the prediction should the bar be rai...

Fairly stable around 0.9 since 2018-09. Note that he could sign zero EOs before the 2021 inauguration and his rate would be 0.64. (See spreadsheet here.)

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@Sylvain Indeed, very astute of you! I'm the husband she mentioned. ;)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday she is asking the House Judiciary Committee to proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.

Looks like we're getting close to the point that 1 is no longer possible.

Seems to me like we might be underestimating the probability that an influx of new users will drive it up some.