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 -
Zero people predicted a pandemic
About zero people predicted double-digit inflation (except for the usual people like Peter Schiff who make this prediction every year)
A lot of people predicted that the GOP would return to pre-Trump normalcy
No one predicted Dall-E, Chat GPT, etc.
No one predicted Putin making a major move
...goes to show how hard predicting is.
A pandemic is the prototypical black swan event. If you asked people what are the odds of a largely asymptomatic highly contagious coronavirus mutation that crosses over from bats/other reservoirs or is engineered in lab spreads into a worldwide pandemic over the next 30 years, I'm sure many people would have given sensible probability estimates.
Pandemics are largely excluded under force majeure clauses, but take Wimbledon, for example, that following the SARS outbreak in 2002 bought pandemic insurance under an infectious disease clause. They paid roughly 31.7mm USD over 17 years in premiums for 142 mm USD payout. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the payout would be the same every year, i.e. Wimbledon's profits don't increase corresponding to premium increases, which of course in reality they do) suggests that the risk analysts estimated that a Covid-scale pandemic happens at most every 78 years or so. Since they probably factored in losses due to more probable minor diseases, the Covid-19 pandemic was roughly a once in a century event. This passes a cursory sniff check with the last global pandemic being the 1918 Spanish flu.
Safe to say people were thinking about, and even buying insurance against, the risk pandemics posed, so your first point is wrong.
How about conditioning on the aforementioned black swan event and stipulating that US M0 practically doubled and M2 grew by about 5T USD (25% from 15T in 2020) whilst US treasury yields were kept at historic lows? The low interest low inflation free money paradigm that has dominated the past decade, under a historically axed lens, seems more like an exception than a new rule.
The GPT model was novel, sure, but also came out in 2018, so roughly 5 years ago. It was designed specifically to avoid the problems of supervised learning in NLP. What's surprising is perhaps how far it scaled?
EDIT: amusingly, we both forgot to reread Scott's post
This is basically GPT-3 and DALL-E. ChatGPT is GPT-3.5 fined-tuned with RLHF. So Scott did essentially envision this event, although maybe he didn't assign a high enough probability on it for your taste.
This has been discussed in the other threads, but again, once faced with the question, would people really ascribe that low a probability to it? Putin and the other minds in the war rooms cannot have been aiming for a protracted land war, this is more a political decapitation with a puppet substitution gone horribly wrong. If you rephrase war to political/military intervention that aims to replace the Ukrainian head of state, the odds might climb further, and now you can just ask what are the odds of that surgical strike devolving into full-scale war. The Russians were what, 100 miles from Kiev? There is an other timeline where Zelenskyy is either dead or in exile, and Ukraine is not in rubble.
Sure? It's a chaotic system, and the conditional probability trees have exponential branching factors? No one is pretending to be prescient or an augur here, the exercise is just in estimating probabilities.
The "prescient" fool confidently spouts "predictions", whilst the wise man merely scribbles down a few numbers and replies, "Wanna bet on it?"
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Peter Zeihan in 2015:
https://zeihan.com/ukraine-just-the-beginning/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OtdOZEgaFIw
C'mon man.
October 2016:
https://scroll.in/pulse/818562/the-next-black-swan-will-illegal-exotic-meat-cause-the-next-pandemic
Unless the fact that this focused on Africa and not China disqualifies it in your eyes.
If you were at all plugged into X-risk analysts then global pandemics, especially possibly bioengineered ones were pretty high on the list.
Nassim Taleb was warning about international travel sharpening the risk of pandemics for like a decade prior to 2020.
David Sinclair put a decently long section in his book, published 2019, about trying to mitigate global pandemic risks via biotracking.
I dunno if you mean that nobody predicted this exact sort of pandemic to arise from that particular region, but it seems obvious to me that people predicted a nontrivial chance of a pandemic arising well before on actually arose.
For what it's worth there are a lot of people who make a lot of predictions and most of them are wrong. You'd be WAY harder pressed to find an event that somebody DIDN'T predict in at least an obtuse way.
being 7 years early is as good as wrong. this comes off of the Crimea conflict.
Regarding a pandemic, I think you are right. That 2016 article was prescient.
But still, the rationalist community is really obsessed with forecasting and predicting, yet missed so many of these big things.
I have never taken Zeihan that seriously, but will conceded that with respect to Russia I think his record is actually pretty good. I mean his book explicitly stated that he thought Russia would invade sometime during the 2020’s and they did, seemingly for the reasons he thought they would (I.e Russias bad demographics and obtaining a more defensible border with Europe).
Good ?
It's just bullshit.
Moscow would have taken Ukraine perhaps whole if they could, though they'd probably have left Galicia to the Bandera fans because why invite more pain. Azerbaijan ? Armenia ? Moldova ?
Belarus is only close with Russia because the West got fed up with Luka and tried to remove him. Hence he has no choice but to cozy up to Russia.
I follow a scholar who's concerned with China and speaks the language, he doesn't even mention Zeihan. He's not taken seriously at all.
He's really a joke, in his talk on China in an interview with Rogan, 80% of what he said were obvious lies. (China can't build high tech, China can't innovate, etc)
I’d be interested in who you follow on China (I agree Zeihan is a clown on China).
Tanner Greer - @scholars_stage on twitter.
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How do you know those were reasons that actually factored into the decision? That's just Zeihan's own hobby horse, he always explains things with demographics, hell, he predicts AI being essentially a nothingburger because the world will start running out of 20-somethings in 30 years!
For all we know Putin was mainly driven by the impression that his subversion network is successful. Russian demographics are at least better than Ukrainian, and on par/perhaps better than European. Zeihan's «natural borders» story is, uh, I'm not sure it's even a sincere argument – he oscillates between treating it as a realistic consideration and some Russian neurosis from the time of Mongols and warfare dominated by low-tech infantry.
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"Compared to what?"
All that's required to win the forecasting game is to be somewhat more right somewhat more often than the people you're actually competing with, while also being capable of withstanding the shocks you DON'T see coming.
I don't know of any community in particular that came across as somehow more prescient than the rationalists, and plenty who were less prescient.
Sure, if you're playing to win "the forecasting game." If you're playing to win the more general "prediction game" or the even more general game of life, other things like the latter part (being prepared to withstand shocks you don't see coming) matter a whole lot more. I think this article about it is pretty good. In summary the easiest way to be a good predicter is simply to predict that the status quo will remain the same, which will get you a very high forecasting score will rendering you unprepared for all of life's most significant events.
Rationalists are pretty great at this too, but I'd say there are other groups (top government officials, anyone in a cutting-edge tech industry, anyone in a cutthroat business such as hedge fund trading) who are as good or better.
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John Mearsheimer? https://youtube.com/watch?v=aedKFv_ABr4
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