@fianxu I have little doubt that an Omicron-specific booster could be rmade, the question is whether it will be necessary. It may turn out that it doesn't outcompete Delta after all, or that existing booster shots are just as good as a variant-specific one. (I believe this was the case for Delta).
"Kind of sad that I had to say ex cathedra it had happened; I was hoping to make them debate whether it counted or not.
I also hadn't realized that betting had closed in September; otherwise I would have done it then so that the people who noticed could profit off their perceptiveness."
- Scott Alexander, commenting on a Reddit submission about this question.
I was talking to Scott Alexander on AIM, and he promised me that he was going to let this question resolve as "No". Furthermore, he promised me that he'd give every user who made a prediction here $10 for every percentage point below 50% that they put in their final prediction. Furthermore, to show he was serious, we made a legally binding agreement that he would sign over all parental rights to his first-born child to me if he reneged on any of this.
What are you waiting for? It's free money!
@SimonM I don't think base rates are particularly valid for a question that depends so much on the deliberate behaviour of one individual who knows about the question.
A really simple "clueless" model of Scott might be that he's equally likely to let the question resolve positively, negatively or ambigiously, or 33% for each. 26% is not too far off that.
I think you're letting your personal preferences significantly influence your prediction about what will actually happen.
The markets have been consistently bullish on Trump - pre-election it looked maybe prescient, but they also went ~80% Trump when that just wasn't reasonable given the information available at the time. I'm inclined to 99% write this off as "dumb money".
I'd be interested in knowing the base rates of website survival. e.g. what percentage of all websites last 15 years? Given a website has been around 6 years, how likely is it to last another 9? And so on, as specific as we could get.
My guess is that the base rate of website survival would be a lot less than the current median prediction of 85%. Though it's possible that Metaculus has a number of factors that make it a lot more likely to survive.
For a few minutes I thought Trump might explicitly endorse the protestors, but now it looks like he'll get accused of failing to condemn them sufficiently, which is wishy-washy enough that I think, like impeachment, opinions on this question will fall sharply down partisan lines (and thus, it almost certainly won't happen).
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Sceptical of the 64% median prediction on efficient market hypothesis grounds (i.e. it implies the market price of Bitcoin is considerably undervalued at the moment (unless you expect high inflation) because it implies Bitcoin is worth at least $64k at the moment purely on the ability to sell at $100k).
Of course, expecting "efficient markets" with Bitcoin might seem unreasonable, given its history. Still, the Metaculus median implies that Bitcoin is a really good buy right now, and I'm sceptical of that.
This seems incredibly unlikely. Of course he's going to say that's an interesting idea to a radio host who's so complimentary of him. But I just can't see Trump ever running for an office that isn't President.
Nate Silver:
I have non-public version of our paths-to-270 interactive where I can enter in provisional ratings instead of calling states outright. If you treat NV, AZ and WI as "likely Biden", NC as "likely Trump", and GA, PA and MI as "toss-up", then Biden is 83% to win eventually.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1323…
Looks like Biden is closing strong in late counted ballots (e.g. now ahead in WI). I'm going to update to Silver's 17% + 3% for shenanigans.
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"New poll: Labour climbs to 60.9%, National at 25.1%"
There's a bunch of Omicron questions, but few really capture "How bad is it going to get?"
Maybe it could be: Covid-19 deaths and/or hospitalisations in January 2022 worldwide, or in one country (e.g. the US or UK).