i believe they mentioned on their podcast that they weren't releasing a live forecast this year.

US embassy in russia releases a security alert today:

According to media sources, there have been threats of attacks against shopping centers, railway and metro stations, and other public gathering places in major urban areas, including Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as in areas of heightened tension along the Russian border with Ukraine.

Actions to take: [...] Have evacuation plans that do not rely on U.S. government assistance.

@mtrazzi someone could also choose to retire, or the court could expand their size

@casens (the pig represents all of us)

note how kurzweil and kapor judge whether or not an AI has "passed" the test: >At the end of the interviews, each of the three Turing Test Judges will indicate his or her verdict with regard to each of the four Turing Test Candidates indicating whether or not said candidate is human or machine. The Computer will be deemed to have passed the "Turing Test Human Determination Test" if the Computer has fooled two or more of the three Human Judges into thinking that it is a human. >In addition, each of the three Turing Test Judges will rank the four Candida...

@Reprisal while we may eventually recieve evidence that COVID-19 was not natural, we're unlikely to recieve definitive proof that it wasn't. so, yes, we could wait 5 years, or we could accept the null hypothesis.

@Uncle Jeff sounds like we should start a question "if puerto rico becomes a state before 2030, will its first 2 senators be members of the democratic party?" i think i would sit close to 50%

@oriscratch in the fine-print:

While this question is intended as an operationalization of "herd immunity", because herd immunity is difficult to ascertain, the resolution criteria is not herd immunity itself, but rather reaching 230M (~70%) either vaccinated or having been previously infected, as a proxy indicator.

it seems to me that the most fair way to interpret the question is to resolve on 230M infected or vaccinated against vanilla COVID-19, even if vaccines give no immunity to some highly deadly COVID-21.

all news sources i know of have projected at least 50 republicans in the senate. this question doesn't resolve positive on a 50-50 tie, so it should resolve negative.

ping @admins

@(notany) "no *more* shy trump voters"? trump voters are not what i think of as "shy". in 2016, there were more undecided voters between 2 candidates with low approval ratings, and they broke for trump. trump had the advantage of being a high-variance candidate, with no previous public service for comparison. this year, trump has a clear record to judge. additionally, polls in 2016 underrepresented white voters without college degrees. both of those factors easily explain the upset in 2016, where "shy trump voters" is a just-so story with no eviden...

google calculated 10^14 digits this year.

@Grogu-Daveinsea i'm not saying the articles are wrong, or that there's anything wrong with you sharing them, i'm just pointing out a counter-argument

@NoUsernameSelected i can confirm that i personally do take unaligned AGI as a possible outcome in any long-term question (such as, "when will english wikipedia reach its 10 millionth article"), and that apparently i give much higher odds to unaligned AGI than the median metaculus user. the only default assumption i preserve on all questions is that metaculus continues to exist, i continue to care about metaculus points, i value metaculus points at the same level as i do now, etc.

@Anthony like any true compromise, unambiguous resolution should leave everyone unhappy.

instead, i would prefer picking one of the two values by quantum RNG.

@(aleks) i think it's pretty easy to find questions or sets of predictions where you can say "the magnitude of the award/penalty doesn't line up with how challenging the forecast or how correct A was in comparison to the community", but it's extremely difficult to come up with a scoring system that can be applied to all questions. for this FIFA question for example, perhaps we shouldn't be scoring the ~5 months of predictions prior to the tournament beginning with the same weight as when the tournament actually began, when substantially more information...

in a paper written in november 2021 in collaboration with NASA/spaceX employees, jennifer heldmann writes:

SpaceX is aggressively developing Starship for initial orbital flights, after which they intend to fly uncrewed flights to the Moon and conduct initial test flights to Mars at the earliest Mars mission opportunity, potentially as soon as 2022, or failing that in the 2024 window

in a paper written in november 2021 in collaboration with NASA/spaceX employees, jennifer heldmann writes:

These first crewed Starships will likely each have about 10- 20 total people onboard with an additional 100+ metric tons of available cargo mass per Starship

looks like i over-weighted andy weir's the martian

@maybenotdepends most people aren't going to make 500-1000+ predictions to be meaningfully "well-calibrated" in that range.

@predictors please note that the current resolution criteria have been edited and clarified. in particular, the current SCOTUS case (dobbs) will count for resolution.

@cd suppose biden is impeached or resigns. should the question resolve early as well?

if not, i suggest we just say "will DC be a state by Jan 20, 2025", and be done with it. tying it to biden's term seems like it opens up more uncertainty and edge cases, and the potential for people to misread it (thinking it might mean biden's presidency if he has 2 terms)

— edited by casens