"Vitamin D is generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70%"
Isn't this counter to what you previously said on Vitamin D/COVID? Have you changed your mind, or do you expect the consensus to come to an incorrect conclusion? Or just a typo?
>25. Greater than 66% of US population vaccinated against COVID: 50%
50% seems too low to me, what's your reasoning here? Already more than 50% of adults have received at least one dose, and it looks like vaccines will be approved for children too soon.
Really looking forward to the Oroxylum self-reports and the culture wars essay! I predict that your scores for these predictions will surpass all previous years.
You absotively-posilutely need to specify some kind of method or measure for 5. in advance, because it's going to depend a lot on (i) woolly estimation of numbers (ii) judgments about what constitutes "BLM" (iii) needing a dataset for this with a track record of year-to-year regular methodology
you need to define what you mean by "vaccine effectiveness." for instance, my daughter still got mild chicken pox, localized to her calf and a one-day fever, even though she was vaccinated. does this mean the vaccine wasn't effective?
>I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books
I'm sure you already have plenty of options, but you might find Professor Archie Brown's book The Myth of the Strong Leader interesting in this regard:
I haven't yet read it myself, but I greatly enjoyed and would highly recommend Prof. Brown's books The Rise and Fall of Communism (now on sale on Kindle for $2!) and The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War.
I said this last year too, but you’re way too bullish on Starship. Starship might reach space this year, but reaching ORBIT requires a fully functional Super Heavy booster, which is on version 1 “production pathfinder” right now (Starship itself is on version 15, and has still exploded every time it has flown). And Musk has some wild ass plan for catching the thing in midair with a hook on the launch pad.
My best guess for the end of the year is that Starship is flying some successful high altitude tests with non-explosive landings, but Super Heavy is at the “short hop” phase at best.
Posting predictions publicly to calibrate yourself makes sense. Not posting predictions about your and your friends' private lives publicly makes sense. The particular combination of those that you've chosen doesn't make sense.
Anyway good luck with Lorien. I'm very curious how that turns out, especially in this context since it's effectively the single biggest bet you've ever made. Really hope that it succeeds!
I have found that predicitng economics and finance stuff tends to be easy (GDP go up, stocks go up, rich ppl get richer, etc.) but outcomes of poltical events is way harder. This means you cna make easy $ by being bullish on stocks, most of the time, but prediction markets are more of a fool's errand.
I subscribe to the idea that Bitcoin has a strong correlation (70%+) to loose US monetary policy. There is no indication that the Federal Reserve will be more accommodative than it is today, quite the contrary, most likely by the end of the year there will be signaling of tightening monetary policy in the near future, negatively impacting Crypto and other ultra high growth assets.
Scott, I’m half-trolling here, but do you have enough confidence in your BTC and ETH predictions that you’re willing to put money on them? I will take the other side of one or both, at whatever size you like. We can do the bet either for personal profit or for donation to a charity of the winner’s choice.
Very excited for the essays mentioned at the end; what can I say, I love the lurid topics like climate change. Also appraisers are paid to find complications; 50% is too low. Also linking to/outing DSL is probably not a great idea.
> 30. Some new variant where no existing vaccine is more than 50% effective: 40%
Recommend you clarify this. How certain does the evidence need to be? How prevalent the variant? Like, do you get this right if there's a variant that some case study finds 10 cases of and 6 of those people die? I think you technically would, but I think it would be pretty irrelevant.
Another way of thinking about it: I'm reasonably certain that this will be true for "some variant", so the question is really about whether it matters enough for anyone to notice. If you're really looking to predict something about the prevalence of a variant that is highly resistant to the vaccine, you should re-word/clarify.
Scott, I will take the other side of your Dow Jones predictions in unlimited size. The delta on the DIA 350 12/31/2021 call (roughly the probability of the DJIA ending above 35k) is 0.417 - you're way way off market.
What do you consider to be BLM protests? Do any anti-police protests count, do they have to be endorsed by any particular group, or are you just counting any protest that is generally aligned with the goals of BLM?
Who defines clearly? "Scott Alexander thinks court packing is going to happen" or "The popular consensus (as assessed by Scott Alexander) thinks court packing is going to happen"?
Would be cool to put out these predictions first for a bit before showing your probabilities. I'd be interested in assigning my own without being biased by yours.
I don't see any major BLM riots. Police chiefs are making sure their officers aren't doing things that look horrible on video, and we now have a presidential administration that knows how to reduce tension in the black community, rather than inflame it. I see small scale protests whenever a black person gets killed by police, but nothing like what happened last year.
I'm kind of impressed you view the odds of a major problem in the China/Taiwan issue at only 5%. Most watchers I've read are nervous about that, with the feeling that China is feeling its oats and the US has been somewhat prostrated by COVID and cultural conflicts, so...the time might be right. I'm a little curious whether you read deeply on the subject and decided that's all worrywartism, or whether this is more along the line of "well nothing's happened in the past 50 years of occasional concern so..."
"[redacted] wins the book review contest: 60%" made me wonder. It seems unlikely that this is referring to one specific review, since it would have to stand out massively in a contest of some 20+ reviews (assumption based on "I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months"). It could be a categorical statement like "A fiction review wins the book review contest", but that seems too easy. My prediction is that this is commentary on a fundamental issue with contests like these, for example how people are statistically more likely to choose whichever option was presented last as their favourite.
I have added these to a foretold community (https://www.foretold.io/c/6eebf79b-4b6f-487b-a6a5-748d82524637), and predicted on the non-redacted ones. It might be a good place for the commentariat to make their own predictions. Making predictions requires an account, but viewing them doesn't.
Because the number of questions is relatively large, (75 non-redacted ones), it would be relatively simple to have a tournament, with a relatively simple scoring rule/winning criterion.
Looking forward to the reviews of Nixonland and How Asia Works. Not to snub The Scout Mindset, it was a valuable book that I'm more likely to recommend to friends than the previous two, just not as excited to see your take on it.
You can meditate with a traditional mindfulness technique for 3 minutes a day effectively and have a far greater accumulative impact than doing 10 vippasina retreats or squirming in fits of boredom alone with an app never knowing if you’re making progress. More importantly - Direct transmission from a realized lineage holder/teacher > apps or secular modern neuroscience based meditation and its rigid container. Exponentially more profound realizations of time/form/phenomena/mind/afflictive emotions vs simplistic stabilization is avail w a lineage teacher, group, setting. The focus through breath (Annapurna) or even impermanence insight meditation is scrunched into discursive mind without deeper containers.
Or.. one can just sit and do Metta/emptiness meditation properly with open heart. Even for a minute. Actual liberation is experienced rather than parlour games of dilating focus through a misapprehension of mind and causal interdependence. Just saying! :)
> Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5%
Just a reminder that the past 50 years include:
- the PRC and ROC militaries exchanging symbolic artillery fire with propaganda leaflets on alternate days during the 1970s
- the 1987 Lieyu massacre, during which 19 Vietnamese boat people were killed by the ROC military after stranding on a militarized island near Kinmen. (Kinmen and surrounding islands have since been put under civil administration starting in the 1990s.)
- the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-1996) when the PRC military fired ballistic missiles into the waters near ROC-controlled islands, including Taiwan.
- PRC military aircraft crossing the center line of the Taiwan strait in 2021, but at an angle so they were not flying directly towards Taiwan.
My guess is that when establishing the baseline of "significantly worse than anything in past 50 years," you were thinking about some, but not all of these events.
My alternative predictions:
- PRC military aircraft cross the Taiwan strait at least two thirds of the way, on a course headed straight towards Taiwan: 5%
- PRC military conducts live-fire exercises in waters near ROC-controlled islands in a repeat of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis: 2%
- PRC artillery hits land controlled by the ROC: 1%
- civilians are killed by troops fighting in the Taiwan Strait: 0.5%
- PRC gains control over Taipei: 0.1%
- PRC, ROC and US militaries continue to make plans involving a PRC invasion of Taiwan as a possible scenario: 99%
made the mistake of thinking Scott was prediction an approval rating for Biden of between 50% and 80%. Fortunately, I caught it before I posted to say Biden wasn't going to get an 80% approval rating, but I do think the prediction was easy to misread. It needs more space between the two percentages or something. Or prediction percentages should be a different color.
Also, I don't see the point of giving each redacted prediction its own line. If you want to mention them, how about just saying how many of them there are in each category?
> 21. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 20%
You probably mean specifically fully time employees who are knowledge workers at Google, correct? In this case it might be useful to add more contextual qualifiers to your predictions at the risk of making the list a bit wordier.
Am I insane or was there not already a review of Nixonland published here? I just looked in the archives, though, and this post was the only one that came up.
63. reminds me that the US is still a dystopia that accepts paper walls, flimsy houses in general and incessant TV consumption as completely normal.
Thank god for the 50+cm of solid stone all around me... No AC necessary, either!
I've recently learned about Heat Pumps and their incredible efficiency at heating and cooling no matter the surrounding temperature. Although I couldn't find numbers for how efficient they are considering the transport waste of electricity... Promising nonetheless!
6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20%
Seems too low, due to democratic control of everything at the federal level, plus corporate lobbyists not really caring one way or the other about individual tax rates, plus an unprecedented deficit and debt/gdp ratio and rising interest rates on US treasury bonds for the last ~8 months since the bitcoin bull market began (negative real interest rate bonds are a sucker bet that will lose market share to crypto)
7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20%
Seems waaaay too high. The prior is that twitter almost never unbans anyone (especially not months later -- I haven't seen a single instance of that -- errors are corrected within a couple weeks or never). Plus the social dynamics inside twitter would make it even harder to unban him. It's full of woke employees, so championing the cause of free expression as applied to that particular case would be career suicide there. The democrat controlled congress certainly isn't going to pressure twitter to unban trump either. I'd say 1%.
The likelihood of #29 is probably higher than 50% on a standalone basis.
But 40% for #30 almost requires a higher % for #29: If a new variant evolves for which current vaccines are less than 50% effective, it will surely be very widespread relative to existing variants and therefore likely responsible for >25% of cases.
The two exceptions are if there are multiple variants like this (therefore preventing either from claiming a large share on its own) or if such a variant appears very late in the year, thereby fulfilling #30 but not having enough time to reach a large share.
the DEC31 3840-5000 call spread is offered at 240 on deribit right now, that spread is worth strictly more than a binary option that pays out 1160 if this prediction is true. That is to say you are giving something a 50% probability that you can bet on at 4:1 odds for large size. That kind of disagreement with the market is bold, not necessarily wrong but bold. If you stand by this prediction in light of how stongly the market agrees you should probably try to get set up to trade crypto options, its a pain as a US citizen but not impossible.
> Fewer than 10K daily average official COVID cases in US in December 2021: 30%
Ouch, that's within a factor of 2 of where we are right now, and 70% chance we'll be worse than that. So you're really thinking this isn't going away anytime soon. I was hoping we'd see it dwindle to where we could all ignore it, especially for the sake of the kids too young to get vaccinated (and who are unlikely to die, but might get damaged in poorly understood ways).
I'd be interested to hear more about how you think the next year is going to play out. (Especially combined with your pessimism about vaccine escape).
"Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5%"
I assume that this simply means "Court packing is ... going to happen: 5%." Otherwise, I'm confused about what the 'clearly' means here. Is there then a separate prediction for it *not* clearly happening?
> 105. I finish and post the CO2 essay I'm working on
I would like to humbly suggest that you might find some useful information about CO2 on the blog Wonky Thoughts by Doug Robbins. He writes infrequently, but the posts contain a lot of data.
Redacted?
"Vitamin D is generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70%"
Isn't this counter to what you previously said on Vitamin D/COVID? Have you changed your mind, or do you expect the consensus to come to an incorrect conclusion? Or just a typo?
>25. Greater than 66% of US population vaccinated against COVID: 50%
50% seems too low to me, what's your reasoning here? Already more than 50% of adults have received at least one dose, and it looks like vaccines will be approved for children too soon.
What is the biological function of oroxylum?
Really looking forward to the Oroxylum self-reports and the culture wars essay! I predict that your scores for these predictions will surpass all previous years.
You absotively-posilutely need to specify some kind of method or measure for 5. in advance, because it's going to depend a lot on (i) woolly estimation of numbers (ii) judgments about what constitutes "BLM" (iii) needing a dataset for this with a track record of year-to-year regular methodology
you need to define what you mean by "vaccine effectiveness." for instance, my daughter still got mild chicken pox, localized to her calf and a one-day fever, even though she was vaccinated. does this mean the vaccine wasn't effective?
Have you written up why you've somewhat changed your mind on Vitamin D?
>I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books
I'm sure you already have plenty of options, but you might find Professor Archie Brown's book The Myth of the Strong Leader interesting in this regard:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XKQ52TV/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I haven't yet read it myself, but I greatly enjoyed and would highly recommend Prof. Brown's books The Rise and Fall of Communism (now on sale on Kindle for $2!) and The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War.
Not a lot of high odds on those political predictions. I don't blame you - 2021 feels like a weird year, and that's saying something given 2020.
I just don't know with Yang, since NYC has ranked choice balloting. He could lose from that I think.
Really hoping #92 pans out! I'd love to read a full review of "How Asia Works". Very interesting book.
I said this last year too, but you’re way too bullish on Starship. Starship might reach space this year, but reaching ORBIT requires a fully functional Super Heavy booster, which is on version 1 “production pathfinder” right now (Starship itself is on version 15, and has still exploded every time it has flown). And Musk has some wild ass plan for catching the thing in midair with a hook on the launch pad.
My best guess for the end of the year is that Starship is flying some successful high altitude tests with non-explosive landings, but Super Heavy is at the “short hop” phase at best.
Posting predictions publicly to calibrate yourself makes sense. Not posting predictions about your and your friends' private lives publicly makes sense. The particular combination of those that you've chosen doesn't make sense.
Anyway good luck with Lorien. I'm very curious how that turns out, especially in this context since it's effectively the single biggest bet you've ever made. Really hope that it succeeds!
I have found that predicitng economics and finance stuff tends to be easy (GDP go up, stocks go up, rich ppl get richer, etc.) but outcomes of poltical events is way harder. This means you cna make easy $ by being bullish on stocks, most of the time, but prediction markets are more of a fool's errand.
15. Bitcoin above 100K: 40%
16. Ethereum above 5K: 50%
What's the reasoning behind these?
I subscribe to the idea that Bitcoin has a strong correlation (70%+) to loose US monetary policy. There is no indication that the Federal Reserve will be more accommodative than it is today, quite the contrary, most likely by the end of the year there will be signaling of tightening monetary policy in the near future, negatively impacting Crypto and other ultra high growth assets.
Scott, I’m half-trolling here, but do you have enough confidence in your BTC and ETH predictions that you’re willing to put money on them? I will take the other side of one or both, at whatever size you like. We can do the bet either for personal profit or for donation to a charity of the winner’s choice.
"25. Greater than 66% of US population vaccinated against COVID: 50%"
Just to be clear, this means receiving tthe entire regimen of doses of a given vaccine and applies to the entire population, not just adults?
typo: I think you meant "ELON/TECH"
Out of curiosity, why exactly are you working on separate essays for climate change and CO2?
Very excited for the essays mentioned at the end; what can I say, I love the lurid topics like climate change. Also appraisers are paid to find complications; 50% is too low. Also linking to/outing DSL is probably not a great idea.
> 30. Some new variant where no existing vaccine is more than 50% effective: 40%
Recommend you clarify this. How certain does the evidence need to be? How prevalent the variant? Like, do you get this right if there's a variant that some case study finds 10 cases of and 6 of those people die? I think you technically would, but I think it would be pretty irrelevant.
Another way of thinking about it: I'm reasonably certain that this will be true for "some variant", so the question is really about whether it matters enough for anyone to notice. If you're really looking to predict something about the prevalence of a variant that is highly resistant to the vaccine, you should re-word/clarify.
> 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70%
I hate to break it to you, but...
Scott, I will take the other side of your Dow Jones predictions in unlimited size. The delta on the DIA 350 12/31/2021 call (roughly the probability of the DJIA ending above 35k) is 0.417 - you're way way off market.
What do you consider to be BLM protests? Do any anti-police protests count, do they have to be endorsed by any particular group, or are you just counting any protest that is generally aligned with the goals of BLM?
"Court packing is clearly going to happen"
Who defines clearly? "Scott Alexander thinks court packing is going to happen" or "The popular consensus (as assessed by Scott Alexander) thinks court packing is going to happen"?
Are you counting all coronavirus variants for your covid predictions? If not, I feel like you should be more precise.
Would be cool to put out these predictions first for a bit before showing your probabilities. I'd be interested in assigning my own without being biased by yours.
I don't see any major BLM riots. Police chiefs are making sure their officers aren't doing things that look horrible on video, and we now have a presidential administration that knows how to reduce tension in the black community, rather than inflame it. I see small scale protests whenever a black person gets killed by police, but nothing like what happened last year.
I'm kind of impressed you view the odds of a major problem in the China/Taiwan issue at only 5%. Most watchers I've read are nervous about that, with the feeling that China is feeling its oats and the US has been somewhat prostrated by COVID and cultural conflicts, so...the time might be right. I'm a little curious whether you read deeply on the subject and decided that's all worrywartism, or whether this is more along the line of "well nothing's happened in the past 50 years of occasional concern so..."
Wait you think supreme Court packing is just as likely as Newsom being recalled?!?! Surely that's a typo.
"[redacted] wins the book review contest: 60%" made me wonder. It seems unlikely that this is referring to one specific review, since it would have to stand out massively in a contest of some 20+ reviews (assumption based on "I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months"). It could be a categorical statement like "A fiction review wins the book review contest", but that seems too easy. My prediction is that this is commentary on a fundamental issue with contests like these, for example how people are statistically more likely to choose whichever option was presented last as their favourite.
I have added these to a foretold community (https://www.foretold.io/c/6eebf79b-4b6f-487b-a6a5-748d82524637), and predicted on the non-redacted ones. It might be a good place for the commentariat to make their own predictions. Making predictions requires an account, but viewing them doesn't.
I've also added the predictions from that community to metaforecast (https://metaforecast.org/?query=%20&forecastingPlatforms=AstralCodexTen&numDisplay=200), which provides a somewhat nicer interface (i.e., you can search for particular questions)
Because the number of questions is relatively large, (75 non-redacted ones), it would be relatively simple to have a tournament, with a relatively simple scoring rule/winning criterion.
"Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20%"
I'm assuming you mean national rates. California has already exceeded 30%.
"India's official case count is higher than US: 50%"
This seems quite low. India already has half as many cases as the US, and their healthcare system is collapsing.
Looking forward to the reviews of Nixonland and How Asia Works. Not to snub The Scout Mindset, it was a valuable book that I'm more likely to recommend to friends than the previous two, just not as excited to see your take on it.
You can meditate with a traditional mindfulness technique for 3 minutes a day effectively and have a far greater accumulative impact than doing 10 vippasina retreats or squirming in fits of boredom alone with an app never knowing if you’re making progress. More importantly - Direct transmission from a realized lineage holder/teacher > apps or secular modern neuroscience based meditation and its rigid container. Exponentially more profound realizations of time/form/phenomena/mind/afflictive emotions vs simplistic stabilization is avail w a lineage teacher, group, setting. The focus through breath (Annapurna) or even impermanence insight meditation is scrunched into discursive mind without deeper containers.
Or.. one can just sit and do Metta/emptiness meditation properly with open heart. Even for a minute. Actual liberation is experienced rather than parlour games of dilating focus through a misapprehension of mind and causal interdependence. Just saying! :)
> Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5%
Just a reminder that the past 50 years include:
- the PRC and ROC militaries exchanging symbolic artillery fire with propaganda leaflets on alternate days during the 1970s
- the 1987 Lieyu massacre, during which 19 Vietnamese boat people were killed by the ROC military after stranding on a militarized island near Kinmen. (Kinmen and surrounding islands have since been put under civil administration starting in the 1990s.)
- the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-1996) when the PRC military fired ballistic missiles into the waters near ROC-controlled islands, including Taiwan.
- PRC military aircraft crossing the center line of the Taiwan strait in 2021, but at an angle so they were not flying directly towards Taiwan.
My guess is that when establishing the baseline of "significantly worse than anything in past 50 years," you were thinking about some, but not all of these events.
My alternative predictions:
- PRC military aircraft cross the Taiwan strait at least two thirds of the way, on a course headed straight towards Taiwan: 5%
- PRC military conducts live-fire exercises in waters near ROC-controlled islands in a repeat of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis: 2%
- PRC artillery hits land controlled by the ROC: 1%
- civilians are killed by troops fighting in the Taiwan Strait: 0.5%
- PRC gains control over Taipei: 0.1%
- PRC, ROC and US militaries continue to make plans involving a PRC invasion of Taiwan as a possible scenario: 99%
made the mistake of thinking Scott was prediction an approval rating for Biden of between 50% and 80%. Fortunately, I caught it before I posted to say Biden wasn't going to get an 80% approval rating, but I do think the prediction was easy to misread. It needs more space between the two percentages or something. Or prediction percentages should be a different color.
Also, I don't see the point of giving each redacted prediction its own line. If you want to mention them, how about just saying how many of them there are in each category?
Why wouldn't the US approve the AstraZeneca vaccine? (I'm not in the USA and I don't see how this is reported there).
minor complaint regarding the conflict predictions. "Significantly worse" leaves a lot of room open to interpretation.
> 21. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 20%
You probably mean specifically fully time employees who are knowledge workers at Google, correct? In this case it might be useful to add more contextual qualifiers to your predictions at the risk of making the list a bit wordier.
Am I insane or was there not already a review of Nixonland published here? I just looked in the archives, though, and this post was the only one that came up.
63. reminds me that the US is still a dystopia that accepts paper walls, flimsy houses in general and incessant TV consumption as completely normal.
Thank god for the 50+cm of solid stone all around me... No AC necessary, either!
I've recently learned about Heat Pumps and their incredible efficiency at heating and cooling no matter the surrounding temperature. Although I couldn't find numbers for how efficient they are considering the transport waste of electricity... Promising nonetheless!
What is Prospera? I've searched and searched and just can't figure out what it might be.
Scott, who do you follow on Twitter?
6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20%
Seems too low, due to democratic control of everything at the federal level, plus corporate lobbyists not really caring one way or the other about individual tax rates, plus an unprecedented deficit and debt/gdp ratio and rising interest rates on US treasury bonds for the last ~8 months since the bitcoin bull market began (negative real interest rate bonds are a sucker bet that will lose market share to crypto)
7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20%
Seems waaaay too high. The prior is that twitter almost never unbans anyone (especially not months later -- I haven't seen a single instance of that -- errors are corrected within a couple weeks or never). Plus the social dynamics inside twitter would make it even harder to unban him. It's full of woke employees, so championing the cause of free expression as applied to that particular case would be career suicide there. The democrat controlled congress certainly isn't going to pressure twitter to unban trump either. I'd say 1%.
The likelihood of #29 is probably higher than 50% on a standalone basis.
But 40% for #30 almost requires a higher % for #29: If a new variant evolves for which current vaccines are less than 50% effective, it will surely be very widespread relative to existing variants and therefore likely responsible for >25% of cases.
The two exceptions are if there are multiple variants like this (therefore preventing either from claiming a large share on its own) or if such a variant appears very late in the year, thereby fulfilling #30 but not having enough time to reach a large share.
>Ethereum above 5K: 50%
the DEC31 3840-5000 call spread is offered at 240 on deribit right now, that spread is worth strictly more than a binary option that pays out 1160 if this prediction is true. That is to say you are giving something a 50% probability that you can bet on at 4:1 odds for large size. That kind of disagreement with the market is bold, not necessarily wrong but bold. If you stand by this prediction in light of how stongly the market agrees you should probably try to get set up to trade crypto options, its a pain as a US citizen but not impossible.
> Fewer than 10K daily average official COVID cases in US in December 2021: 30%
Ouch, that's within a factor of 2 of where we are right now, and 70% chance we'll be worse than that. So you're really thinking this isn't going away anytime soon. I was hoping we'd see it dwindle to where we could all ignore it, especially for the sake of the kids too young to get vaccinated (and who are unlikely to die, but might get damaged in poorly understood ways).
I'd be interested to hear more about how you think the next year is going to play out. (Especially combined with your pessimism about vaccine escape).
"Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5%"
I assume that this simply means "Court packing is ... going to happen: 5%." Otherwise, I'm confused about what the 'clearly' means here. Is there then a separate prediction for it *not* clearly happening?
Scott, what is the "current exercise routine" you mention in number 67?
> 105. I finish and post the CO2 essay I'm working on
I would like to humbly suggest that you might find some useful information about CO2 on the blog Wonky Thoughts by Doug Robbins. He writes infrequently, but the posts contain a lot of data.
- https://dougrobbins.blogspot.com/2019/12/understanding-source-of-rising.html