Another aspect of Metaculus that draws me to it is that it can act as a kind of news-filtration-system; where users bring up events only if these have the potential of actually having an effect on your beliefs (and therefore predictions).
@Jgalt With an IFR of 1/10,000 and a population of 66.65M, 36K deaths means that [checks notes] 540% of the UK population must have been infected!
Congratulations @ege_erdil, @marius.hobbhahn, @AABoyles, and @steven0461!
“What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown” — Immanuel Kant
@luppercut Sorry if that sounded apathetic, I want to make sure the question is resolved correctly. Needless to say I'm heartbroken over the events tonight.
@PabloStafforini Perhaps we should start a clock that measures the time till the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists's credibility has been eroded by crying wolf too many times.
Congratulations @AABoyles @PeterHurford and @haven! We'll be in touch with you shortly regarding the details of your prizes!
@KeenlyBlind I don't think we should consider a nuclear plant a "weapon", so my guess is not.
Hereby pre-committing to analyse the results at a total of 3,500 combined predictions.
The community currently assigns 10% chance to at least 1M infections being estimated to have occurred before 2023. Very worrying indeed...
@mattaway64 Perhaps that's not a great idea. The question specifies:
For the purpose of this question, only Metaculus accounts created prior to this question's opening date count.
And I'm afraid your account was created after the question opened.
I've created this Sheet so that you can more easily find all the metric-timeframe combinations for all the questions in the tournament. This might be helpful to cross-reference predictions for the same metrics for different time-frames, to check for consistency, and so forth.
Is there any interest on when cancer will be basically cured? I imagine this could be operationalised as something like:
When will the odds of survival increase by 10-fold relative to 2013 odds, for cancers at 5 out of some 10 common sites
Like if you're interested, dislike otherwise.
I've set the close date to March to make the scoring more incentive compatible, and so that forecasters receive more points in case this resolves soon. Enjoy your tendies!
Last chance to report a positive test result, @predictors. If you want to report it in private, you can find mods on discord or my email on my profile.
Not taking a moral stance here, just a prediction.
This disclaimer is not needed on Metaculus :)
Unherd.com, a British news website, references these predictions in an opinion piece:
The coronavirus outbreak is a disaster in its own right; the death toll could very easily reach the millions. The forecasting site Metaculus, which crowdsources predictions for wisdom-of-the-crowds purposes, has a median estimate of 2.1 million deaths by 2021; its 95% certainty intervals are 210,000 and 27 million. This really could be the most dangerous pandemic in at least 100 years.