My 'never predict on a question where the main thing you're forecasting is how a third party will evaluate a thing rather than the thing itself' rule may be long and poorly-written, but every once in a while it saves me 300 MIPs.

— edited by j.m.

In my view, this comment section overweights: - single polls in isolation - news stories - conjecture about how certain events will affect certain voters in certain ways - prediction markets - articles from pundits that are non-empirical This comment section underweights: - the predictions of sensibly-designed empirical models based on polling 538 is at Trump 10%. The Economist is at 4%. If you differ from those numbers by more than a few points, I think you should probably ask yourself what your personal model of the election knows that these models...

@Tamay

"stick to noumena or kiss your mips goodbye" - Hume

##Some rough impeachment math ###State Assembly The NY state assembly has to pass articles of impeachment. **You need 76 out of 150 members** to do this. 40 Democrats and ~43 Republicans have said they're on board so far. This represents 83 achieved out of 76 required, although the Democratic leadership specifically would have to give the green light on this. ###State Senate and trial The jurors for impeachment in NY are made up of 62 state senators and seven court of appeal judges. Two thirds is required to convict, so **you need 46 yes votes**. ~38...

I really recommend that Metaculus, whenever possible, discourage these resolving-positive-on-a-negative formulations. It's confusing and makes prediction results less accurate, in part because you have to account for people who've misinterpreted the question. Also, as others have noted, it's not even clear that's what's happening in this question because the resolution language seems to conflict with the headline.

@mishasamin Everyone conscientious enough to report for this question was conscientious enough to avoid covid. Everyone not conscientious enough to avoid covid was not conscientious enough to report for this question.

Getting horrible flashbacks to the “what month will Covid-19 peak?” question of 2020, when we were sure that every wave was the last one.

Although it's not the question upon which resolution rests, the community forecast for this AI question dropped from 2025 to "uh, maybe in a few months" in a matter of hours on Thursday (down from 2032 a few days earlier).

Maybe the canonical example of AI progress literally surprising the community!

@alwaysrinse

Internet was adopted quickly all at once.

Global internet penetration took 25 years to go from <1% to 50% (1993 to 2018). If cultured meat takes off as fast as the Internet did and replaces slaughtered meat at a 1:1 rate and if there's no additional growth in slaughtered meat demand, this question would still resolve negative.

I think the only way this resolves positive is an asteroid strike or similar catastrophe.

— edited by j.m.

@krmchoudhary92 Classic Anthony question, lmao. Super interesting idea whose resolution centers on some hypothetical test that’s hugely unlikely to ever be performed and involves, like, shooting fifty third graders into space.

I think Metaculus would benefit from questions that directly predict the issues underlying bets rather than bets themselves. I'm quite interested in the underlying question here, but the metagame bet angle makes the title opaque and predictors' views harder to interpret (e.g., how many are betting that Holden will 'beat the spread' and how many are betting on the underlying infection curve question? and are these predictions properly calculated to account for Holden and Zvi 'betting at 60%' rather than at 50%?). Basically, I think the site is better of...

The community timeline (largest probability mass c. 2044, median 2061) is too optimistic, even conditional on fusion breakthroughs relatively soon. 10% is a larger and more distant target than it seems for any energy source. For example, hydropower, which rolled out in the 1800s and is a highly effective and widespread power source, has never reached ten percent. Ditto for fission nuclear. Even huge fossil fuel mainstays, like coal or natural gas, took centuries to reach 10% after they'd been discovered and decades after hitting 1% of global supply (its...

@kalos Yeah, it's a shame this question tried to use experimental resolution, because the actual topic turned out to be (i) fairly interesting, (ii) fairly uncertain, and (iii) without a lot of good existing sources that clearly resolve it one way or another, all of which make a good community prediction more valuable that it would otherwise be.

— edited by j.m.

@EvanHarper I was about to make the opposite joke — the first prediction in 2016 was 2036 and the current consensus in 2021 is 2041!

Looks like an "input yes, output no" resolution, based on my reading of the GPT-4 release. The GPT-4 paper: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf

I'm predicting below the community average for the first time in about seven months (when Trump was (in my view, inexplicably) around 55%). We're now past Labor Day; polls are more predictive, and polling models like 538/Economist have Trump between 16% and 25% as of this morning. Unless I think I know something those models don't, I should be much closer to their views. I've been quite conservative on this question but I think the weight of the evidence is now strong enough to trust the evidence much more than my priors (my priors nudge me closer to...

I wonder how Metaculus would evaluate the probability of one million Antarctic residents by 2075.

@(alwaysrinse) this seems like an example of overindexing on one highly visible but not particularly consequential aspect of the thing you're trying to predict and underindexing on base rates, long term trends, boring fundamentals, etc. Every few years half the population convinces itself that some highly visible culture-clash issue will explain some rapid and scary crime rate change (long hair and weed are destroying society! duke nukem causes school shootings!) when in reality crime rates since AD 1600 are generally on a long slow downward slog drive...

I think this question has its order of magnitude wrong. Consider this article: https://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/biggest-budget-cut-in-u-s-history/ The US Federal government has never cut the budget by more than $100b, with two exceptions: drawdown following WWI (peaking at about a ~$130b cut) and drawdown following WWII (peaking at ~$425b). All numbers are inflation-adjusted (as this question should be, but appears not to be?). Yearly cuts at the peak of the Great Recession austerity era never got above $40b. The only plausible way this resolves pos...

Another upset for the community tonight, as Warnock and Ossoff appear to have won in GA, giving Dems control of the Senate.

— edited by j.m.