On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
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Notes -
I don't think there is much difference between a person predicting, and an ML algorithm predicting. In other words, start with a good training set. And fine-tune with an even better validation set.
I consider myself largely vindicated in my very early (around February/March 2020, extrapolating from Diamon Princecss data) prediction that most covid restrictions would be largely useless and will have massively outsized costs because of their damage on economic and social institutions. Thank God I stuck to primary sources for covid news, If I was getting my information through any discussion forum, I would probably been derailed.
Continuing the ML analogy, Prune liberally (and add nodes judiciously). I strongly reduced the weightage I apply to the opinions of rationalists a la Scott Alexander post covid, given their initial hypochondria.
It's Random Forests all the way down.
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