At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

And here are the predictions I made for 2018. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not. Please don’t complain that 50% predictions don’t mean anything; I know this is true but there are some things I’m genuinely 50-50 unsure of.

US:

1. Donald Trump remains president at end of year: 95%

2. Democrats take control of the House in midterms: 80%

3. Democrats take control of the Senate in midterms: 50%

4. Mueller’s investigation gets cancelled (eg Trump fires him): 50%

5. Mueller does not indict Trump: 70%

6. PredictIt shows Bernie Sanders having highest chance to be Dem nominee at end of year: 60%

7. PredictIt shows Donald Trump having highest chance to be GOP nominee at end of year: 95%

8. [This was missing in original]

9. Some sort of major immigration reform legislation gets passed: 70%

10. No major health-care reform legislation gets passed: 95%

11. No large-scale deportation of Dreamers: 90%

12. US government shuts down again sometime in 2018: 50%

13. Trump’s approval rating lower than 50% at end of year: 90%

14. …lower than 40%: 50%

15. GLAAD poll suggesting that LGBQ acceptance is down will mostly not be borne out by further research: 80%

ECONOMICS AND TECHNOLOGY:

16. Dow does not fall more than 10% from max at any point in 2018: 50%

17. Bitcoin is higher than $5,000 at end of year: 95%

18. Bitcoin is higher than $10,000 at end of year: 80%

19. Bitcoin is lower than $20,000 at end of year: 70%

20. Ethereum is lower than Bitcoin at end of year: 95%

21. Luna has a functioning product by end of year: 90%

22. Falcon Heavy first launch not successful: 70%

23. Falcon Heavy eventually launched successfully in 2018: 80%

24. SpaceX does not attempt its lunar tourism mission by end of year: 95%

25. Sci-Hub is still relatively easily accessible from within US at end of year (even typing in IP directly is relatively easy): 95%

26. Nothing particularly bad (beyond the level of an funny/weird news story) happens because of ability to edit videos this year: 90%

27. A member of the general public can ride-share a self-driving car without a human backup driver in at least one US city by the end of the year: 80%

CULTURE WARS:

28. Reddit does not ban r/the_donald by the end of the year: 90%

29. None of his enemies manage to find a good way to shut up/discredit Jordan Peterson: 70%

COMMUNITIES:

30. SSC gets more hits in 2018 than in 2017: 80%

31. SSC gets mentioned in the New York Times (by someone other than Ross Douthat): 60%

32. At least one post this year gets at least 100,000 hits: 70%

33. A 2019 SSC Survey gets posted by the end of the year: 90%

34. No co-bloggers make 3 or more SSC posts this year: 80%

35. Patreon income less than double current amount at end of year: 90%

36. A scientific paper based on an SSC post is accepted for publication in real journal by end of year: 60%

37. I do an adversarial collaboration with somebody interesting by the end of the year: 50%

38. I successfully do some general project to encourage and post more adversarial collaborations by other people: 70%

39. New SSC meetups system/database thing gets launched successfully: 60%

40. LesserWrong remains active and successful (average at least one halfway-decent post per day) at the end of the year: 50%

41. LesserWrong is declared official and merged with LessWrong.com: 80%

42. I make fewer than five posts on LessWrong (posts copied over from SSC don’t count): 70%

43. CFAR buys a venue this year: 50%

44. AI Impacts has at least three employees working half-time or more sometime this year: 50%

45. Rationalists get at least one more group house on Ward Street: 50%

46. No improvement in the status of reciprocity.io (either transfer to a new team or at least one new feature added): 70%

PERSONAL:

47. I fail at my New Years’ resolution to waste less time on the Internet throughout most of 2018: 80%

48. I fail at my other New Years’ resolution to try one biohacking project per month throughout 2018: 80%

49. I don’t attend the APA National Meeting: 80%

50. I don’t attend the New York Solstice: 80%

51. I travel outside the US in 2018: 90%

52. I get some sort of financial planning sorted out by end of year: 95%

53. I get at least one article published on a major site like Vox or New Statesman or something: 50%

54. I get a tax refund: 50%

55. I weigh more than 195 lb at year end: 60%

56. I complete the currently visible Duolingo course in Spanish: 90%

57. I don’t get around to editing Unsong (complete at least half the editing by my own estimate) this year: 95%

58. No new housemate for at least one month this year: 90%

59. I won’t [meditate at least one-third of days this year]: 90%

60. I won’t [do my exercise routine at least one third of days this year]: 80%

61. I still live in the same house at the end of 2018: 60%

62. I will not have bought a house by the end of 2018: 90%

63. Katja’s paper gets published: 90%

64. Some other paper of Katja’s gets published: 50%

SECRET: (mostly speculating on the personal lives of friends who read this blog; I don’t necessarily want them to know how successful I expect their financial and romantic endeavors to be. I’ve declassified the ones that now seem harmless to admit.)

65. My partner and I come to a decision about whether to have children: 80%

66. My partner and I are engaged by the end of the year: 70%

67. My partner and I do not break up by the end of the year: 70%

68. [Secret prediction]: 60%

69. [Secret prediction]: 70%

70. [Secret prediction]: 60%

71. [Secret prediction]: 50%

72. [Secret prediction]: 50%

73. [Secret prediction]: 50%

74. [Secret prediction]: 90%

75. [Secret prediction]: 90%

76. [Secret prediction]: 60%

77. [Secret prediction]: 70%

78. [Secret prediction]: 60%

79. [Secret prediction]: 50%

80. [Secret prediction]: 60%

81. I lose my bet against Duncan about Dragon Army Barracks: 80%

82. Dragon Army Barracks is still together at the end of the year: 70%

83. I will visit Greece: 50%

84. I will visit Germany: 70%

85. [Secret prediction]: 70%

86. [Secret prediction]: 70%

87. [Secret prediction]: 60%

88. [Secret prediction]: 50%

89. [Secret prediction]: 50%

90. [Secret prediction]: 70%

91. [Secret prediction]: 90%

92. [Secret prediction]: 50%

93. Still working at my current job at the end of 2018: 90%

94. Working 30 hours/week or less at the end of 2018: 50%

95. Have switched to practicing entirely in the East Bay: 60%

96. [Secret prediction]: 60%

97. Will not finish first section of a difficult calligraphy project: 60%

98. Will not finish all sections of difficult calligraphy project: 95%

99. I will not do work for AI Impacts by the end of the year: 70%

100. I will not finish more than 25% of a new novel: 70%

Calibration chart. The blue line represents perfect calibration, the red line represents my predictions. The closer they are, the better I am doing.

Of 50% predictions, I got 6 right and 16 wrong, for a score of 27%

Of 60% predictions, I got 8 right and 7 wrong, for a score of 53%

Of 70% predictions, I got 14 right and 4 wrong, for a score of 78%

Of 80% predictions, I got 10 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 77%

Of 90% predictions, I got 17 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 94%

Of 95% predictions, I got 6 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 75%

50% predictions are technically meaningless since I could have written them either way – which makes it surprising I managed to get such an imbalance between right and wrong. I think I’m more wrong than should be statistically possible. I’m not sure what to think about that.

After that, things go okay until the 95% level, where I get a very poorly calibrated 75%. This is partly the fault of not having very many 95% predictions this year, but even so I should have done better than this.

Two things happened that screwed with a lot of my predictions. First, cryptocurrency crashed (remember, I made last year’s prediction during the height of the boom, when Bitcoin was around $15,000). I expected it would go down, but not this much. Since I made a lot of predictions about cryptocurrency and all of them were correlated, this went badly. I can hear the ghostly sound of Nassim Nicholas Taleb laughing at me.

The other thing that happened was that my partner unexpectedly broke up with me, changing all of my life plans and precipitating a move to a different house. Again, this was a black swan that affected a lot of correlated predictions. In this case, my move took a lot of money, which meant I didn’t have enough money to be worth investing, which means I didn’t bother doing any fancy financial planning like I had been dead set on doing in January 2018. I’m usually pretty good at following through on important things, so I was 95% sure I would get the financial planning done, but black swan = spend savings = no point in financial planning was something I hadn’t considered.

I’m not sure how to deal with those sorts of correlations here except to not make too many correlated predictions.

I’ll post my 2019 predictions later this week. If you’ve made some of your own, post a link in the comments and I’ll link them along with mine. And while you’re waiting, I also made some predictions last February for the next five years.