### ege_erdil (11) Will 2021 be the hottest year on record according to NASA?

Community forecast on this is ridiculously high. In the GISS temperature record since 1880, the difference between the January-May average anomaly for a year and the average temperature anomaly for the entire year has mean zero, standard deviation 0.071 and excess kurtosis -0.66. The January-May average for the year 2021 was 0.782, and the annual mean temperature anomaly that has to be surpassed for 2021 to be the hottest year on record is 1.02. That means we want the difference between the two to be 0.24 or more. The base rate for this in the entire re...

### ege_erdil (8) How many consecutive Presidents of the United States will there be?

I think there's an important wrinkle in the resolution criteria for this question: would we say that the reign of the last Roman emperor ended in 476, or in 1453?

### ege_erdil (8) Will the price of bitcoin drop below $10K USD in 2021? There's a straightforward way to calculate this kind of probability in the Black-Scholes model. People have talked before about using straddles and Black-Scholes to obtain the probabilities at a specific time horizon and then doubling it per the reflection principle, but this doubling is not exact when the Brownian motion has a drift term, which in this case it does because of the concavity of the logarithm function: in the Black-Scholes model, the underlying follows $\frac{dS}{S} = \mu \, dt + \sigma \, dW$ so Ito's lemma gives \[ d \log(S) = \le... ### ege_erdil (8) What will Peru's GDP per capita (PPP) be in 2030? I'm surprised at the low community forecast on this question. I suspect that people are overlooking the fact that the quantity to be forecasted is GDP per capita (PPP) in *current international dollars*, not constant international dollars. This means inflation in the US is going to increase the final value along with real GDP per capita growth in Peru. Bond markets currently forecast around 2.5% annual inflation (looking at TIPS spreads) for the US over the next 10 years, and Peru's GDP per capita growth in recent years has averaged around 1.5% per year... ### ege_erdil (7) Will Andrew Cuomo be governor of New York on June 30, 2021? In this list of 90 state lawmakers accused of sexual misconduct since the start of 2017 compiled by Associated Press, 33 of the lawmakers involved have had to leave office after the allegations against them had surfaced. That gives a naive base rate of 1 - 33/90 = 63% that Cuomo survives the scandal without being forced to leave office in some manner. — edited by ege_erdil ### ege_erdil (6) Platform feature suggestions Add a "points gained over the community forecast" metric, averaged (or not, or possibly both) over all questions answered by a user. (Perhaps with standard errors as well?) The scoring system currently awards the user points for both reducing entropy relative to a uniform distribution and also being more accurate than the community. While the second term in the scoring is zero for someone who exactly mimics the community forecast for a question, the information gain term rel to the uniform distribution isn't. This means a user can reliably accumulate po... ### ege_erdil (6) What will be the total stock of crude oil and other petroleum products for February 2021? My forecast comes from a (1, 1, 0) x (1, 1, 0, 52) seasonal ARIMA estimated on the past 5 years, where shale oil seems to have caused a shift in the past trend. The Python script along with the csv file of past weekly data to run it on can be found here. I add some additional variance to the forecast to reflect model uncertainty. The model ends up with a median of 1.305, with a 50% confidence interval (1.297, 1.313). — edited by ege_erdil ### ege_erdil (6) Maximum price of Bitcoin in 2021? Similar to @SimonM's approach, but with a slightly different model and a different spot price at$48.5k. I end up with 10-90th percentiles

[58399, 58399, 58481, 63715, 70181, 78044, 89504, 105414, 138002]

### ege_erdil (5) When will be the next "Great Power" war?

The resolution criteria for this question are unclear. > A great power is a nation generally considered to have large amounts of military might and influence. While there is no established definition, for the purpose of this article, a great power is one of the top 10 nations by military spending according to the most recent report released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (see latest report here). As of 2020, the great powers are therefore the United States, China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom,...

### ege_erdil (5) Will a reliable poll of physicists reveal that a majority of those polled accept the many-worlds interpretation by 2050?

The fact that there is no restriction for the poll to be representative makes this question very likely to resolve positively. You can easily get such a result if you poll a specific subset of physicists, say, a subset working at an institute where the Everett interpretation is particularly popular.

### ege_erdil (5) Will oil consumption over the 2020-2025 period be lower than in 2019?

A dumb AR(1) estimated on the log transformed past oil consumption data and then simulated forward from 2020 using Monte Carlo gives about 29% odds for this. It's not a perfect model because the residuals in the AR(1) still look autocorrelated, but correcting for the autocorrelation doesn't do much to the result, so I stopped searching for better time series models at this point. I doubt the estimate would change much even with better models. Obviously this approach is rather stupid but I don't think we have any other way of grappling with the question ...

### ege_erdil (5) Will Andrew M. Cuomo still be governor of New York on 31 December 2021?

This is a technical point, but the question asks whether Cuomo will be governor on 31 December 2021; not whether he'll be governor throughout the entire period from 3 August to 31 December. The question is pretty much resolved in a practical sense after Cuomo's resignation, but technically he *could* still somehow become governor before 31 December, so the early resolution of this question seems unjustified given that no early resolution criteria are specified in the question itself. Of course this case can be handled by re-resolving the question later,...

### ege_erdil (4) Will Marine Le Pen win the 2022 French presidential election?

Betfair has this at 20%.

— edited by ege_erdil

### ege_erdil (4) Will the federal minimum wage increase in the United States before 2025?

There's a strong base rate in favor of this happening. Since the minimum wage increase in 1981, the US has had a minimum wage increase whenever the ratio of annual median family income to the hourly federal minimum wage has exceeded 10k, and this ratio stood over 11k in 2019. Fitting a logistic regression model to the past data gives very strong chances that there's a minimum wage increase - about 40% per year taking 2019 as a reference point. That alone gives a base rate of 1 - 0.6^4 = 87% in favor of there being a minimum wage increase, even if median ...

### ege_erdil (4) What will the China-to-USA GDP ratio be in 2050?

There's a simple model proposed by Robert Lucas for the dynamics of "economic miracles" in real GDP per capita growth terms: the GDP per capita growth of a well managed country X is growth_c = growth_(leader) * ((GDP per capita of leader)/(GDP per capita of X))^(theta) where theta is some exponent to be estimated on the data, usually about 2/3. This model describes past economic miracles remarkably well, that of Japan for example. Estimating it on the Chinese data from 1990 to 2018 gives a theta of about 0.64, in which case we can simulate the model fo...

### ege_erdil (4) When will China officially cease to be a socialist state?

@(Jgalt) Good point. If the constitution states that the state is communist, I think the question shouldn't resolve, i.e. for the purposes of this question socialism == communism. However, I think generic references to socialism and communism (as opposed to an explicit statement that the state is socialist/communist) should be insufficient to prevent resolution. The current constitution has a preamble in which these words make many appearances, and I can foresee something like that being kept in a new constitution which doesn't actually assert that the ...

### ege_erdil (4) Will the US rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal before 2022?

@RyanBeck You can find an archived public version of the article here.

### ege_erdil (3) Will the publicly-traded company GameStop (GME) reach a $420.69 stock price by the end of 2021? @admins Resolves positively. ### ege_erdil (3) Bitcoin Extremes: Will 1 bitcoin be worth$100,000 or more before 2025?

@SimonM 25% agrees exactly with the prediction of this bootstrap script at a 1 year horizon.