### isinlor (8) How many infections of COVID-19 will be estimated to have occurred before 2021? [50k-1B range]

[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...

### isinlor (8) Will life on Venus be confirmed before 2035?

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...

### isinlor (8) Will there be a positive transition to a world with radically smarter-than-human artificial intelligence?

@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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### isinlor (8) What will be the ratio of fatalities to total estimated infections for COVID-19 by the end of 2020?

[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....

### isinlor (8) If the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, will it succeed in transmitting cosmological data?

@(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...

### isinlor (8) What will Hungary's total fertility rate be in 2023?

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...

### isinlor (7) Will there be a US-Iran war in 2020?

@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...

### isinlor (7) LRT 1.1: What is the number of total confirmed cases in the US that COVID Tracker will have in the daily report this coming Sunday, April 26th?

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.

### isinlor (7) Will an oracle superintelligence be developed before a general superintelligence?

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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### isinlor (7) When will AI achieve competency on multi-choice questions across diverse fields of expertise?

From DeepMind, a 280 billion parameter language model: Gopher, Ethical considerations, and Retrieval

Gopher gets 60% on this benchmark, seems like forecasters were predicting this to happen between 2022 - 2023. I love that they compare to forecasters.

Also, mathematics seems like tough nut to crack. This question requires at least 70% accuracy on all math tasks.

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### isinlor (7) LRT 1.6: When will the daily number of new hospital admissions for COVID-19 illness in New York City drop below 200 for the first time since mid-March?

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...

### isinlor (7) Will the control problem be solved before the creation of "weak" Artificial General Intelligence?

@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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### isinlor (7) Will Democrats win a majority in the senate in the 2020 elections?

@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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### isinlor (7) What will the May 2020 US nonfarm payrolls figure be?

@(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...

### isinlor (6) Will Russia invade Ukrainian territory before 2023?

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...

### isinlor (6) Will any states flip from the current projected winner?

In "Community stats":

The Metaculus prediction is 0.6%

Cool, Metaculus can go below 1% :) .

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### isinlor (6) Will the next Millennium Prize Problem be solved by AI?

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.

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### isinlor (6) A New Design Language For Metaculus

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...

### isinlor (6) Will President Trump be relieved of his duties under section four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment before inauguration day?

Please, don't change Metaculus into a political forum.