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Folamh3  1yr ago (slatestarcodex.com)   3186 thread views

Five More Years | Slate Star Codex

slatestarcodex.com

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.

  1. Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
  1. …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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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.

No one predicted Putin making a major move

Peter Zeihan in 2015:

https://zeihan.com/ukraine-just-the-beginning/

And so the Russians are coming. Coming for Crimea, and Donetsk and Torez and Luhansk and Slovyansk and Odessa. And not just for Ukraine, but for Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan and Moldova and Belarus. And when that is done Romania and Estonia and Lithuania and Latvia and Poland. In an era when there enough Russians to man Russia, Moscow thinks of the independence of all of these places as a disturbing academic exercise. In an era where Russia is running out of Russians, the independence of all of these places is a mortal threat. The Russians will not stop until either they re-anchor or are made to stop, and there currently simply isn’t a recognition in Europe that this has already gotten very real.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OtdOZEgaFIw

C'mon man.

Zero people predicted a pandemic

October 2016:

The next black swan: Will illegal exotic meat cause the next pandemic?

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.

Peter Zeihan in 2015:

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 ?

And so the Russians are coming. Coming for Crimea, and Donetsk and Torez and Luhansk and Slovyansk and Odessa. And not just for Ukraine, but for Georgia and Armenia and Azerbaijan and Moldova and Belaru

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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