[Situation in South Korea is very encouraging](https://i.imgur.com/kXofqt4.png) with 0.6% case fatality rate. WHO thinks that this virus can be controlled and contained with efforts similar to China or South Korea. Fundamentals of epidemiology work, tracking people and isolating works. IMO testing, tracking down contacts and response of the general population will be the biggest factors determining the scale of the outbreak and whether it will grow out of any hope of control. This is true for rich countries, the question is also how countries poorer th...
About phosphine... Seems like it may have been a 12th-order polynomial fit producing spurious results. > [Re-analysis of the 267-GHz ALMA observations of Venus: No statistically significant detection of phosphine](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761) > Context: ALMA observations of Venus at 267 GHz have been presented in the literature that show the apparent presence of phosphine (PH3) in its atmosphere. Phosphine has currently no evident production routes on the planet's surface or in its atmosphere. > Aims: The aim of this work is to assess the statist...

@Nostradamnus As far as I know, part of Metaculus mission is to collect users track record on short term question in order to use that record as a proxy for assigning credibility in long term predictions.

But most importantly, it's just an important question to ask :) .

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[Seroprevalence in Dheli seems to be around 20%](https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/over-23-of-delhi-s-population-affected-by-covid-19-shows-serosurvey-results/story-Sq1XXdPkfmDdggyNwGdlSK.html) based on [tests with 92% sensitivity and 98% specificity](https://twitter.com/DrJarlov/status/1285546389821325321/photo/1). Dheli reported overall 3628 deaths and has population of 19 million. $$ \frac{3600\ deaths}{0.2*19*1000^2\ infected} * 100\% \approx 0.1\%\ IFR $$ If these results hold under scrutiny this will significantly decrease my prediction....
@(Jgalt) wrote: > Given the tremendous cost and time overruns (already more than a decade late and billions of dollars over budget) I suspect NASA will have been extremely thorough in ensuring that the JWST is as likely as possible to succeed before they finally launch it. A critical failure after this much effort has been expended would be a public relations disaster for the agency and seriously damage public confidence in their competence. I agree 100% and this is also why I think this question is very important. And NASA made mistakes in calculating...
Poland is a good reference point. From European Commission: [First results of Poland’s Family 500+ programme released](https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?langId=en&catId=1246&newsId=9104&furtherNews=yes): > Under the programme parents can receive a tax-free benefit of PLN 500 (about EUR 120) per month for the second and any consecutive children until they reach the age of 18. The additional support is roughly 12% of the average gross wage in Poland in 2016. > Families are also eligible to receive the benefit for their first child if the family incom...
@Roko @Jgalt @alexrjl @Sylvain I've compiled a spreadsheet from ranking with points and resolved question count per user. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fy7uqy_KgFAZhL_2br_O9_sV2vzki6Vzhzx-xvJ1_b4/edit?usp=sharing Seems like a ranking based on points per resolved question would look a lot different and would benefit a lot people with low number of resolved questions. Notable outliers with high current ranking: traviswfisher, datscilly, AndrewMcKnight, DanielG - their ranking would decrease only by 6 to 9 positions. Bernhard, tragedyofthecomme...

@Linch See this Twitter thread:

Our daily update is published. We’ve now tracked 5.2 million tests, up 300k from yesterday, another huge day.

Note that we can only track tests that a state reports.

(...)

After a time when it seemed testing numbers had settled down, there is a lot of change in the statistics coming out of the states right now. Testing is ramping; new systems are coming online; old reporting mistakes are being discovered; numbers are being restated.

The question hinges on the definition of "superhuman performance".

What does it mean to be superhuman? Does it mean better than any human in their respective field of expertise or just better than an average human across all field of expertise?

One is genuinely extremely hard. Another one is not that far away from what Google or GPT-3 is able to do if we think about question answering.

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I have a feeling that the community confidence comes from wrong reading of the NYC.gov data. My understanding of how this disease works in other places just gives me a low priori on sudden drop. It's easy to think that hospitalization will drop like a stone taking NYC.fov graph at face value. But I think there is more like 30% chance that it will dip below 200 in the next 9 days. And if it does, it will be mostly because of weekends drops and/or bigger than 7 day delay in reporting. Besides random fluctuations there doesn't seem to be clear downward tre...
I'm curious what is the average age of Metaculus users and how well does it coincide with the range 1984 - 1992 - 1998 of the current peak :) . I give people in this range 5% to live up to 1000 years. The oldest known specimen of the the Greenland shark is 392 ± 120 years old. From mammals Bowhead whales can reach up to 200-300 years of age. So, 1000 years for complex organisms seems to be doable. IMO the highest chance of success will have children already born with specifically designed DNA. I would also expect AI to contribute to this type of devel...

@casens I don't believe it's possible even in principle to solve control problem. It's an ill posed problem, and it's highly unlikely that there could be any consensus around solution to that problem. But I think it's highly likely that AGI will be beneficial.

For example, corporations are super human entities that are generally beneficial. But corporate law is not a problem that can be solved. So I'm at 3% for this question.

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@Reprisal The question states:

Currently, with 53 seats, the Republican Party occupies a majority of the 100 seats in the Senate.

The 53 seats count does not include VP, even tough he is a republican.

Therefore, it's clear that the question can not count VP in 51 seats count needed for positive resolution and be internally consistent.

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@(Anthony) BTW - I suspect that there may be a small systematic problem with open questions. If I'm very uncertain about open question then quite often most likely outcome I can foresee is that I will loose points, so I don't predict at all. I remember looking at this question specifically and that I wanted to predict a lot wider tails - just because I don't really understand what nonfarm payrolls are, how they are computed etc. - but after looking at points distribution I've decided to not make any prediction at all. I'm curious if there are more pred...
I'm getting quite confident that Russia will not invade Ukraine. At least not Ukraine controlled territory and not right now. Russia will recognize independence of the separatists, then separatists will ask to join Russia or ask for Russian army presence. The army around Ukraine is in case Ukraine decides to respond to the attempt at annexation. In case Ukraine responds to annexation with force, Russian army will proceed to force Ukraine to surrender with siege of Kyiv. If Putin thinks he needs this whole show around recognizing the separatist, he wo...

In "Community stats":

The Metaculus prediction is 0.6%

Cool, Metaculus can go below 1% :) .

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Based on increasing interest in neural theorem proving and Minerva I've updated from 40% to 60%.

I want to say it publicly because I'm far away from the community.

— edited by isinlor

Cool! I'm kind of warming up to the new design. I also see that some of my comments were addressed :) . There is one remaining thing that jumps at me - the choice of font for the question content. IMO it's really unappealing font that seems to conflict with the new design. Serif and rounded corners just don't go together. I would really, really want to see some non-serif font. I just randomly switched the font to Ubuntu and it looks so much better. You can compare the two here: https://imgur.com/a/o2kXqAS Additionally, I have a question: Was the ab...