Decision Desk HQ has called the election. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. will be the 46th U.S. President.

@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.

	refugees	population	refuges / population	implied Ukrainian refugees
Syrian Civil War	6,800,000	18,000,000	37.78%	16,358,734
Yugoslav Wars	2,400,000	23,400,000	10.26%	4,441,285
Iraq War	2,000,000	35,572,269	5.62%	2,434,623

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

Thanks to the excellent [Metaforecast](https://metaforecast.org/?query=putin): - [GJOpen](https://www.gjopen.com/questions/2287-will-vladimir-putin-cease-to-be-the-president-of-the-russian-federation-before-1-january-2023): 80% - [Manifold](https://manifold.markets/Nostradamnedus/will-putin-be-overthrown-during-202): 71% - [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10002/presidency-of-vladimir-putin-on-feb-1-2023/): 76% - [Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/market/will-vladimir-putin-remain-president-of-russia-through-2022): 77% - [PredictIt](https...

I found this podcast episode of the Ezra Klein show with Nate Silver ("Why 2020 isn't 2016") pretty informative. As a side note, when asked at the end of the show to mention a few books he liked, two of his three choices are Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and Toby Ord's The Precipice.

There's now a petition to the New York Times requesting that they respect Alexander's wish to remain pseudonymous, signed by many prominent figures.

The methodology employed to generate this ranking seems very questionable to me. For Chinese cities, the authors relied on the most recent figures they could find (often going back several years) and adjusted them by a constant 20% rate of yearly growth. Thus, for the city of Chongqing, which tops their ranking, they used a figure from 2011 (500,000) and multiplied it by \(1.20^9\) to reach their estimate of 2,579,890. All they say by way of justification for picking that particular growth rate is that it has been "indicated by the Chinese Ministry of Pu...

Next Metaculus question: "By 2022, the mystery surrounding Metaculite wolfish_wrath's comment will have been resolved."

@FranekŻak Don't touch your face!

@Jgalt McAfee has shown repeatedly that he has little concern for the truth. I don't see the point of signal-boosting his pronouncements, which are largely devoid of evidential value.

— edited by PabloStafforini

Here's the relevant series, from the [source](https://sipri.org/sites/default/files/Data%20for%20all%20countries%20from%201988%E2%80%932020%20as%20a%20share%20of%20GDP%20%28pdf%29.pdf) provided by casens: | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | |------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------| | 4.4% | 4.2% | 4.5% | 3.8% | 3.8% | 4.0% | 2.7% | 3.1% | 3.3% | 3.5% | 3.8% | 3.7% | 3.3% | 3.3% | | | | | | | | | ...

This is a proper occasion for reminding Metaculites that Travis Fisher holds the rare distinction of predicting the Covid pandemic back when few were even paying attention. See this Twitter thread for details. Fisher, to quote Slate Star Codex, will "g[o] down in legend."

Why follow the news when you have @Jgalt to keep you informed?

@nextbigfuture There are many more predictions than users, since many users make multiple predictions. Furthermore, some of these predictions are from users who registered after the question was posted, and who are as such ineligible to trigger positive resolution. With that said, I'm still very surprised that no positive cases have yet been reported.

@Matthew_Barnett

When the facts change, we change our constitution. What do you do, sir?

[*copying comment from the predecessor to this question*] These are the top ten recipients of US foreign aid in 2020: - Afghanistan ($3.95 billion) - Israel ($3.31 billion) - Jordan ($2.59 billion) - Egypt ($1.47 billion) - Ethiopia ($1.21 billion) - Iraq ($1.18 billion) - Nigeria ($1.11 billion) - South Africa ($1.11 billion) - Democratic Republic of the Congo ($965 million) - Syria ($837 million) Total foreign aid spending was $51 billion. Here's how US foreign aid to the following countries evolved over the years: - [Afghanistan](https://foreigna...

[Gwern](https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood): >Online & mainstream media and social networking have become increasingly misleading as to the state of the world by focusing on ‘stories’ and ‘events’ rather than trends and averages. This is because as the global population increases and the scope of media increases, media’s urge for narrative focuses on the most extreme outlier datapoints—but such datapoints are, at a global scale, deeply misleading as they are driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers. >At a global scale, anything tha...

How does the question resolve if the reason three or more European countries no longer buy gas from Russia is that Russia refuses to sell its gas to them?

Here's the data series: | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | |------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------| | 6.1% | 5.9% | 5.6% | 4.9% | 5.0% | 4.6% | 4.2% | 3.9% | 3.6% | 3.4% | 3.2% | 3.1% | 3.1% | 3.1% | 3.4% | 3.8% | | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | |------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|------|...