22
votes
Welcome to 2022. What are your predictions for this year?
Let's hear some crazy ones. Who's going to live and die? Which show is going to get cancelled? Will Apple release an iPhone 14? Will the Queen make it to the 22nd century? Will Texas finally secede?
Edit: Quick retrospective, same thread for 2019. Jeez has it been three years already?
I might go back and edit in some more, hard to think of a bunch off the top of my head
COVID
There will be a new variant of concern that becomes a majority of new infections (80%)
It will not "end" - as in, we'll still be talking about it, there'll still be various degrees of safety measures, and so forth (99%)
Schools will not be online (60%)
US vaccination rate will effectively be ~20% or so lower as the original immunoresponse grows weaker and each booster gets less uptake (so US adult vaccination rate is at about 63%, I expect the somewhat-up-to-date booster rate to be 40% of adults) - 70%
Pfizer and other pharmaceuticals halve the reported mortality rate in the second half of 2022 (50%)
Tech
GPUs prices remain high (80%)
Crypto will have market dips of up to 40% throughout the year but will remain around where it started (70%)
Nintendo Switch "Pro" comes out (50%)
PS5s remain difficult to buy (60%)
Ethereum will not be on proof of stake (80%)
An ARM Mac Pro will come out that will have the highest synthetic GPU scores of any consumer part (70%)
Electric versions of economy sedans like Corollas/Civics come out (50%)
etc.
Republicans win one of the houses of congress (80%)
Republicans win both of the houses of congress (60%)
Student loan repayments do not restart in 2022 (50%)
S&P500 is up in 2022 (80%)
S&P500 is up 30-40% in 2022 (50%)
Amazon expands into the real estate market via rentals (40%)
The Queen of England will not die in 2022 (60%)
Review time!
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern - Unless you count micromutations of Omicron, this appears to be false. Still 5 days to go, but I think this is a fail.
I don't know about you, but here where I hear "Covid" being talked about is only in the context of "remember 2021?". There's a few country-specific exceptions. Germany still has some covid rules in place (one of the only ones in Europe). Most notably, China still employs a zero-covid policy.
I think given your certainty about it, I would call this one a fail. Most of the world has moved on by now. Exceptions were always a given.
Yep.
I have no idea where to get the correct statistics for both of these.
GPU prices are back to mostly normal.
Oof, no. Crypto has taken a deep dive and is swimming.
Didn't come out.
This appears to be true in a lot of places, so I'm going to say pass.
Ethereum has successfully moved to Proof of Stake. Fail.
This doesn't appear to be true.
I don't know anything about cars. Did this come true?
Yep.
Nope.
"In a video statement on Nov. 22, Biden declared that the pause is being extended "to no later" than June 30, 2023, in order to give the Supreme Court time to hear the case during this term." Source
It's down 20 percent.
Nope
Sorry.
I really like everybody posting confidence scores. I think based on this, you can calculate a much better confidence-to-accuracy ratio. I'm responding to yours because it's highest-voted, and I think it's very telling how, barring republicans winning one of the houses of congress (which is an extremely high probability event on this type of midterms in the first place), all your high-confidence bets failed. Even, I would say (though ultimately it's up to you to judge that one), your highest confidence bet, the one you were absolutely sure would be true. IMO the votes mean people mostly agreed with your predictions?
Definitely thinking back myself, most of your post seemed reasonable at the time; there's nothing hugely controversial in it. And yet, almost none of it came to pass.
2022 was fucking interesting, wasn't it?
Your fails: 60, 40, 50, 80, 60, 70, 80, 60, 50, 70, 80, 99, 80
Your passes: 60, 50, 80
Unknowns: 70, 50, 50
How do you suggest tallying up? We could weigh each prediction based on its confidence score. GPT suggests the following formula:
global success rate = (sum of (confidence score * prediction outcome)) / (sum of confidence scores)
What's usually used in this case is the Brier skill score: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score
So basically you take the squares of the mean error between what happened (1 or 0) and the probability assigned and subtract them, square the result, then divide by the number of predictions. The closer the score is to 0, the more it is "unskilled", or in other words random.
You can also do calibration calculations by taking the buckets and calculating the results of each items in the bucket (e.g items in the 70% bucket should have happened at a 70% success rate), but that being said there's not enough items for that to look like anything.
Awesome! Yes, I knew there would be a proper algorithm for this :)
Okay I would love if someone who isn’t me does the prediction review thread lol. Do you want to? Otherwise I will do it tomorrow.
I would suggest the following ratio:
where
theta_i
is the true value (happened/1 or did not happen/0)w_i
is the confidence scoreE[theta_i] = w_i
is the expectation value (which is just assumed to be the weight, barring an independent estimate)It's essentially the formula you suggested except normalized by the sum of the squared confidence scores instead of the sum of the confidence scores.
If I had a computer, I'd play around with this ratio some. But I think it should tend towards 0 for overconfident guessers, tend towards 1 for perfect guessers, and tends towards numbers greater than 1 for under-confident guessers.
Also, I'd suggest a separate thread for scoring so that the scores get better visibility. (Or at least, you should advertise it more!)
Good idea on separate thread. Care to do it? :)
By all means, please go ahead without me! I think it would be fun to play around with this data/make histograms, but it'll be at least a week and a half (more likely two) before I'll have the opportunity, so please don't wait for me!
Thinking about this some more,
R
tends tosum_i [ w_i ] / sum_i [ w_i^2 ]
for under-confident guessers. In some sense, this limit measures how difficult the guess is, so I'll call itD
. For coin flip guesses,D
tends to 2 (all coin flips correct); for easy guesses (w_i = 0.999999...
),D
tends to 1.Finally, it's easy to see that
R / D = global success rate
, so you only need to calculate two of these statistics to get the third.Meanwhile, Australia is currently in the middle of its fourth COVID wave, due to what experts are calling "a soup of variants". Reported weekly infections (health departments stopped reporting them daily, a few months ago) have risen to about 50% of what they were in July - but experts estimate that the actual infections are about 5-10x the reported amount, due to testing being much lower now. Hospitalisations are back at close to the level they were during our third wave, in the middle of this year. Deaths per week (again: no longer reported daily) are back at levels we haven't seen since late July / early August. This is having a flow-on effect in our health system, as many staff are having to take time off due to being ill at exactly the same time that they're most needed, so the health system is close to being overloaded, just like it was in July / August.
These new micromutations might not literally be a "variant of concern", but they are still causing much concern.
I wouldn't write this particular prediction off as a "fail".
A variant of concern is a specific WHO term. The prediction was pretty clear IMO, left little room to ambiguity. Either way the author can elaborate as they know best what they were thinking at the time.
Resident car guy here, the answer is: Nope
This is an incredibly bold yet interesting prediction.
I think this has actually happened 30-40 times in the last 140 years.
Yet currently SPY Leaps are pricing this probability as less than three percent (SPY $620 call with expiration in Jan 2023 can be had for under a dollar)
According to actuarial tables, it's closer to 80%
I'd guess difficult to buy defined as not through the usual retail channels. I don't think best buy is doing dealer markups like dealerships are with cars.
I'll post some predictions later, but a suggestion is that you put a probability on your predictions, like if you're 70% or 90% confident or whatever. Then we can check back next year to see how we did.
I will eat a sandwich at The Bird in SF (8%); it’s always closed or something when I visit lol
How did you do on this one?
Oooof, I totally missed this!! Great throwback :D
I, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to travel to the west coast at all this year. Maybe I should keep this pending for 2023? ;)
Total: FAIL!
This post was inspired by this one on the r/france subreddit. I've put my own deathlist predictions on it, but wanted to open it up to more. Here are mine:
And for the more outlandish ones ("he knew something we didn't"): One of Justin Bieber, Jack Dorsey, or The Simpsons either dies or gets cancelled.
Cancelled as in the show gets canned, or Twitter Cancelled? Because I'd take that bet on all three.
Right? That's the fun part, it works both ways!
1/6. Heh.
My two predictions I can think of right now:
The Queen will die before April (70% sure)
Crypto/NFT bubble will burst around november and december (40% sure)
More chaotic would be her dying on April 1st
Those are the "serious" ones, the following ones are less serious
and maybe more if i can think of them
Depending on how "real" the browser has to be, there are actually a few contenders for this one:
Since i posted this, i completely forgot to track anything on there, so I'll only be quoting ones I know (or bothered to look up) the result of:
1 USD = 18.69 TRY unfortunately
Not surprised. Bonus points for musk buying twitter. i did not expect that
There are some that did it, but not as much as I thought there would be. I'll call this a fail
I can't remember anything big. Just some incremental additions. Maybe Nvidia supporting GBM would count? I'll call this a fail as there stilil seems to be a fair few issues out there. idk it Works On My Machine™
After mobilecoin or whatever I can't remember anything new, surprisingly. Fail
Fail
NFT avatars, correct
Correct
From what I remember, this is correct. Not entirely sure tho
Overall it seems like I over-exaggerated some events and generally looked at things in a more pessimistic angle than how things really turned out.
I also wrote things I can not verify, that one's kinda on me.
I think the pandemic becomes an endemic within the first four months of the year. Restrictions start to ease up again, masking becomes optional, restaurant and other venues start going back to full capacity (those that weren’t doing it already at least).
Republicans take back both the house and the senate. More information comes out about how disorganized Kamala Harris and her staff are, and how she’s really not up to the task of being president. Her popularity among the Democratic Party declines significantly. This forces her to step aside from the 2024 Democratic primary. At the end of the year one of the members of the Squad announces that they will be running for President.
Movie theaters start going back to normal, making close to the amount of money that they made in 2019 but adult dramas continue to underperform. Avatar 2 becomes the highest grossing movie worldwide (of 2022) but domestically Black Panther: Wakanda Forever grosses more.
Edit: Just wanted to add one more thing. Marvel announces the next Avengers film for 2027-2030 with Jon Watts set to direct.
Double or nothing on it being Young Avengers? Or is that the easy money?
Might be easy money. With the introductions of Florence Pugh, Hailee Steinfeld, and Ms Marvel next year it certainly makes sense.
Though I’d still think Doctor Strange, the new Captain America, Captain Marvel, Hulk, and Thor will make appearances (unless Natalie Portman takes over the role in Love and Thunder). Might be like an intermediary sort of thing where we’re introduced to young avengers.
COVID
For both of those I mean seven-day averages.
Economy
Tech
Weather
Personal
Given that seems entirely within your control, why 60%?
Either buy another accordion, or do not buy another accordion, there is no 60%.
It depends on whether I see one I really want to buy, and whether I decide to continue learning chromatic button accordion or stick with piano accordion, and on good health. I had neck and shoulder issues in 2021 so I stopped playing for a while.
Basically any way you could have specified this would have true to a reasonable extent; in 2022, there were:
COVID
Economy
Civics
Tech
That’s weird to me. Compared to the wild shit from the last administration I consider Biden a success as long as he’s not selling snake oil and spurring on failed coups. I can’t say I’m tremendously happy with him but I’ll always “approve” if he keeps up his not being Trump. I would have thought many others (obviously not Trump supporters) would feel the same way.
Oh I agree. Both that it's weird, and that I'm generally pretty OK with him, given the shenanigans of the previous administration.
But I think the long-unfolding economic fallout from the pandemic will get hung on his shoulders, and negatively impact his rating. Even though there's not a whole lot he can do about it in the short term, aside from trying to make it not as bad as it could have been.
80%: Inflation causes rates to rise, but rates remain below inflation. Economy ticks onwards and upwards. Ninja Edit: 3 Month is between 1.5%-2.5%, 10 year is between 2.5%-3.5%, and 30 year mortgage is 3.5%-4.5%.
40%: Inflation causes rates to rise. Rates rise above inflation. Yield inverts briefly. Stocks react badly but may seem to recover. Recession occurs in 2023-2024.
20%: Inflation causes rates to rise. Rates rise above inflation. Yield stays inverted until inflation is under control. Crypto-coins & NFTs lose 80%+. Hypergrowth mid cap tech stocks lose 50-80% of their value across the board. Recession occurs in 2022. Stock market starts a downward trend. Housing starts a downward trend. It's looking like a clean sweep for the Republicans in 2024.
2%: Inflation causes rates to rise. Rates rise above inflation. Yield stays inverted until inflation is under control. Crypto-coins & NFTs lose 80%+. Hypergrowth mid cap tech stocks lose 50-80% of their value across the board. The economic tide goes out and we discover a major part of the economy has been swimming naked. Due to rapidly rising costs of governmental loans, Republicans shut down the government until Democrats "balance the books." The Fed tries to step in, but turns an inflationairy spike into a deflationairy spiral. Civil unrest becomes extremely violent.
Edit 1/8/22: Separate from the above: Bitcoin trades under $12,000 USD, an 80% reduction from the all time high. (80%)
I don't know if you're serious about coming back to these, but I think they will be hard to grade. Also, when you have multi-part predictions, all the parts need to come true, so simpler ones are both easier to grade and more likely to happen.
Yeah, it's not the most interesting prediction....
Another way to put it would be....
Rates stay historically low in the next year (20%)
Rates rise back to historical levels in the next year, yield does not invert, and the economy is fine (40%)
Rates rise back to or above historical levels in the next year, yield inverts, and the economy is fine in 2022 (20%)
Rates go above historical levels in the next year, yield inverts, and the economy is not fine in 2022 (20%)
OK, here is how to score my predictions...
Inflation causes rates to rise. - Federal Reserve has stated inflation is the reason why they will raise rates. Using above benchmarks, if 3 Month is over 1.5%, 10 year is over 2.5%, and 30 year mortgage is over 3.5% then this is true. Currently only the 3 month is under 1.5%, everything else has risen. The 30 year mortgage rose higher than I anticipated, but it did rise above my minimum, so I count that as true.
Rates remain below inflation/ Rates rise above inflation. - You can see real rate of returns here. If two or more lines go positive, rates (plural) are above inflation and have reverted back to historical levels.
Economy ticks onwards and upwards/ the economy is fine. - GDP remains positive in terms of yoy% increase.
Yield inverts briefly. - All three of these numbers go negative.
Stocks react badly but may seem to recover. - S&P 500 hits a bear market, which is a 20% decline from near-term highs.
Recession occurs in 2023-2024/ Recession occurs in 2022. - NBER is the official owner of this. If this line goes up, we are in a recession. Note. This one is tricky, as we wont know if we are in a recession in 2023-2024 until 2023-2024. Also, NBER can take a while to call a recession. Lets just say people continue to expect a recession in 2023?
Yield stays inverted until inflation is under control. - All three of these numbers go negative until two or more of these lines go positive
Crypto-coins & NFTs lose 80%+. - Bitcoin trades under $12,000 USD,
Hypergrowth mid cap tech stocks lose 50-80% of their value across the board. - Tricky. I can pull a list of stocks that had a PS ratio above 30 in 2021 and we can see if their aggregate market cap halved by the end of 2022.
Stock market starts a downward trend. - S&P 500 goes negative. It has, so I think this prediction came true.
Housing starts a downward trend. - Case Shiller goes negative. It has not, and now that I think about it, it is very unlikely to until 2023 or 2024. Oh well.
It's looking like a clean sweep for the Republicans in 2024. - Hopefully PredictIt will give us some decent numbers here. Lets say the republican party hits 75% on predict it whenever we rate these predictions?
(In terms of multi-part predictions, these things are all highly correlated, so I'm not predicting as many things as you might think.)
Close but no cigar...
80%: Inflation causes rates to rise, but rates remain below inflation. Economy ticks onwards and upwards. Ninja Edit: 3 Month is between 1.5%-
2.5%, 10 year is between 2.5%-3.5%, and 30 year mortgage is 3.5%-4.5%.40%: Inflation causes rates to rise.
Rates rise above inflation.Yield inverts briefly. Stocks react badly but may seem to recover.Recession occurs in 2023-2024.20%: Inflation causes rates to rise. ~~Rates rise above inflation. ~~Yield stays inverted until inflation is under control.
Crypto-coins & NFTs lose 80%+.Hypergrowth mid cap tech stocks lose 50-80% of their value across the board.Recession occurs in 2022.Stock marketstartsa downward trend. Housing starts a downward trend.It's looking like a clean sweep for the Republicans in 2024.2%: Inflation causes rates to rise.
Rates rise above inflation.Yield stays inverted until inflation is under control.Crypto-coins & NFTs lose 80%+.Hypergrowth mid cap tech stocks lose 50-80% of their value across the board.The economic tide goes out and we discover a major part of the economy has been swimming naked. Due to rapidly rising costs of governmental loans, Republicans shut down the government until Democrats "balance the books." The Fed tries to step in, but turns an inflationairy spike into a deflationairy spiral. Civil unrest becomes extremely violent.Edit 1/8/22: Separate from the above: Bitcoin trades under $12,000 USD, an 80% reduction from the all time high. (80%)