@Eharding I wouldn't update on this one way or the other. I think that

P(Lukashenko says this | Putin is healthy) ≈ P(Lukashenko says this | Putin is ill)

Time has [released](https://www.today.com/news/time-2022-person-of-the-year-shortlist-rcna60072) its shortlist of contenders for Person of the Year: Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, the U.S. Supreme Court, Liz Cheney, MacKenzie Scott, protesters in Iran, Ron DeSantis, Janet Yellen, gun safety advocates, and of course, Zelenskyy. Putin is notably absent from the list, and it's hard to convincingly argue that any of those on the shortlist were more prominent this year than Zelenskyy. Musk got the title last year, and while there's no rule keeping him from getting ...

Are folks misreading this question? 1% is reasonable for a June 2022 deadline, but it seems wildly overconfident for a June 2023 deadline.

I'm at 1% on the June 2022 question, but 10% here.

Just want to point out that neither the phrase "brain emulation" nor "artificial general intelligence" is present anywhere in the question—just "em" and "AGI". Much of the Metaculus crowd will know what is meant by those abbreviations, but not all, and I think it's important that questions are accessible to new users.

I've compiled an average of about 30 presidential forecasts (plus Senate and House forecasts). It's currently sitting at roughly 78% Biden, 22% Trump.

@(dosimetrist) >I doubt the real chance is <1% even though it's not going to be high It's definitely, easily <1%. For this to happen, Loving v. Virginia would first need to be overturned by 2030—already unlikely. But what's *truly* unlikely, and may even have <1% odds in itself, is a new state law being passed by 2030 explicitly banning interracial marriage. (At first I thought, well, maybe some state has a currently unenforceable law still on the books, but it seems there are no longer any such laws—the last one, in Alabama, [was overturned](https://...

@kievalet I wouldn't call a 60% prediction a declaration so much as a mild suggestion. Given the information available at the time, it wasn't at all unreasonable—it was certainly in line with the community average here. And of course, to use a cliché, hindsight's 20/20.

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There are basically two options here: Either a new song takes the world completely by storm, or an existing top song gets to 4 billion by sheer(an) attrition. Either way, it will take a while. Some extreme examples to illustrate: * The #1 song, Ed Sheeran's **"Shape of You",** has had 2.927B streams in the 1,729 days since its release. That's an average of 1,693,000 streams a day. If it continued at that rate (a very bold assumption, since like virtually any song its popularity has decreased over time), it would take 635 days to reach 4B: June 28, 2023....

@fianxu Thanks!

Well, there you have it, folks: The power of Just Asking™.

@Nausica Interesting idea.... but was this comment meant to be on a different thread?

@Tamay I think there's just a lot of uncertainty and not too much information at the moment, and people don't want to be caught off guard like they were with covid.

Most critically, although monkeypox isn't usually all that contagious, we don't yet seem to know whether this outbreak is indicative of an increase in transmissibility. I too have ~10% on >1M, but I'll go down substantially if there's no major news about this a month from now.

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Given the current situation, it's extremely likely that Russia will control Mariupol within the next week or so. Though Russian forces are taking heavy losses, [ISW](https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-30) says it should happen "within days" and provides a useful map showing that they already control large parts of the city. I'd put the odds of Russia controlling Mariupol at some point soon around 95%. The big question is whether they can *maintain* control until June 1. Even after the city is captured, ...

As someone who's following this only loosely, the only certain thing about this situation seems to be its massive uncertainty. My updates for the past two weeks have basically consisted of going from 49% to 51% and back again.

@cmeinel Worth noting (if it's not clear already) that this protest was held in Vienna, not Russia.

@IJW Yeah, I don't see it either.

I don't speak Russian, so can't fully evaluate his speech, but from what I can see his behavior and speech look completely normal in the first video.

His behavior in the second video looked a little odd at first, but Google translated from Russian, the video title is basically "Putin traces a paper clip at a meeting." Getting bored at a meeting seems pretty normal to me!

I think there's a ~75% chance that the PotY is Ukraine-related, but as others have rightly noted, that could also mean the Ukrainian people, Putin, etc.

Also, the year is still young, and while I admittedly haven't looked into it I suspect there may be some form of recency bias that might cause Time to favor events/figures that are relevant later in a given year. So although this war seems all-consuming right now, it's entirely possible that it will be less salient (at least in U.S. media) by December.

At this point it seems like if they were going to, they would've done so already, no?

I think the probability of our first alien life encounter being carbon-based is greater than the probability of any randomly selected alien species being carbon-based, because we're more likely to realize it's alive if it's more like us.

The "cloud of interstellar stuff" mentioned in the question is a good example: Even if we (quite rudely) flew right through one, we still might not realize what it was.

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Community update reminder! About 35% of the community's probability mass is now on dates that have passed.

Tagging @admins; this resolves as August 23. FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine:

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older.

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