@elspeth Not even just selection bias. He predicted Gore would win in 2000 and Trump would win 2016. Either he's predicting electoral college or popular vote, and either way he missed one of those two.

A short fuse question about the three gorges dam would be good. "partial collapse before End of September" would be the thrust of it I think

I'd be interested in the related question "how many states does 538 miss?". As I recall, in 2016, their model output included a prediction of number of missed states -- i'd be interested to see if the community thinks that the model's predictions of its own mistakes were approximately correct.

Really hard to imagine. I get the "condition on superintelligence" argument, but to me, that makes a strong case for the 10k-500k range. Getting 1 million humans to mars (and having them all alive at once) involves massive resources, and the timeline isn't long enough for population growth to make up the difference. If you start talking about 2100 or 2125, I think that 1 million becomes feasible. More generally, my basic model is that in the future we get things that are both *futuristic* and *economically sound*. This is why we have iphones but not f...

Recall campaign claims to have gathered 1,825,000 signatures as of this morning.

https://recallgavin2020.com/recallgavin2020-r…

Based on an 82.1% validity rate, that would be sufficient for the recall to happen.

— edited by cd

I think >60% is overconfident.

Yang has a lead in head-to-head polls. But this is a ranked choice election. A 25-15 (what it seems to be?) lead in polls is just not that hard to overcome with peoples second and third choice picks.

I don't think it would be shocking if Yang won. I just don't think it would be shocking if he lost either. I'm sceptical of people putting down 70+%. I doubt the polls are really high-quality enough to get us there in this setting, and I don't see anyone citing other reasons.

@eibbett I think you're right.

But it does make it hard to argue that Yang is out of touch if he had the 'most correct' answer. As this was one (large) piece of opposition case against Yang, it may be useful for him to advertise.

@cd Further update. OWID puts the first date of 100mil fully vaccinated (across all vaccines) as March 20th.

This... represents a lower bound. If all the vaccines they are counting qualify, then March 20th (or April 3rd with a uniform 2-week lag) would be the earliest date this could resolve positive.

I predict a 40% chance. My forecast is based on the (updated) numbers by @AABoyles. But I believe in a substantial correlation. #Senate probability As indicated in that discussion, the upper bound on this percentage, is the lowest probability of any of the events. In this case, Dems winning the senate is the lowest probability event, with a probability of ~45%. Other sources indicate possibly higher probabilities (predictit implies 49/102 = 48% at the moment). #Model beyond P[Senate] The question then, is how often do I think the dems win the Senate, ...

@Tamay Or more concretely, in the US, if every single individual had been infected, a 0.15% IFR would imply ~495,000 deaths. The US has already surpassed this count of deaths attributed to covid (at ~560k today according to NYT), indicating a higher IFR, and the US has new cases every day, indicating less than a 100% infection rate (again, indicating a higher IFR).

This is not a probabilistic sanity check, this is a pure bound on the IFR. We know the IFR (in the US) is above 0.15%. It cannot be below that.

Perhaps a silly question, but when we consider the amortization, how do we think about the timeline? What I mean is the following. In your example, building a plant and removing one ton cost $1billion, so the cost per ton was $1billion. Now (for simplicity) suppose the marginal cost is 0. Once the plant has removed 20 tons, the cost of removing a ton is $1billion/20 = $50million -- for every ton _including the first one_. Once the plant removes 20 million tons, the cost was $50/ton _for every ton including the first one_. So now my question is -- did th...

# Model As with the dem trifecta, I'm going to start with the least likely event, and think about how likely I think it is that it happens, without the other two events happening in order to make my forecast. This is the easiest way to comprehend the correlation between the events that I've seen. # House Odds By far the least likely of the three events is that the republicans win the house. [PredictIt puts this at a 16% chance](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/4365/Which-party-will-control-the-House-after-2020-election), [JHK puts this at 9%](h...

## Trend Uncertainty Agree with @nagolinc, it seems likely that the [global trend](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty) will continue. I think reason 1 -- that companies seek out cheap labor -- is important. In the link to global trend above, we can see this pattern play out -- first decreasing rates in East Asia, then South Asia. Consistent with that, I think it is likely that Sub-Saharan Africa will start to see improvements in the next ten years. I'd say there is a ~1/3 chance I'm wrong about this, and structural regional factors prevent the t...

@Anthony @Sylvain Totally understand, and very much appreciate all your work. Glad to hear this is on the list.

I would like a setting to make it so that metaculus displays of 'median forecast', etc are all based on all forecasts but my own. (I haven't dug into things in depth, but I don't believe that this is what I see).

I.e. I want the option for my changing forecasts to not affect what I see the metaculus median as being.

@(JavierSouto) There have been a few people saying you misunderstood the 538 model. I'm going to elaborate for them. No polls are suggesting that Biden has a 73-27 % lead in the popular vote. Most polls are suggesting a popular vote lead between 5-15% for Biden. 538 takes that poll information, and uses information about likely polling error sizes, electoral college divergence from popular vote, etc. With all that information, 538 concludes that Biden is about a 7:3 favorite to win the election. You are of course right. If the polls were even marginal...

Wow, I've never had so much trouble coming up with a reasonable point estimate.

PredictIt puts GOP senate chances at 40%.

I refuse to bet on this and related scenarios.

Personally, I feel that in-depth gaming out of these situations normalizes them and brings them way too far into the overton window for my preferences. Self-fulfilling prophecies are real, and as it is said, we must snip "the threads of destiny one by one".

There is of course value in the forecasts and discussion -- and I certainly don't intend to disparage or discourage others. I merely intend that forecasters know of another filter (of many) in who participates.

Nate Silver says 10%. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1308…