Those yearly “predictions for next year” posts are starting to reach the limit of their usefulness. Not much changes from year to year, and most of what does change is hard to capture in objective probabilistic predictions.
So in honor of this blog’s five year anniversary, here are some predictions for the next five years. All predictions to be graded on 2/15/2023:
AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the spectacular achievements signify anything broader. AI will beat humans at progressively more complicated games, and we will hear how games are totally different from real life and this is just a cool parlor trick. If AI translation becomes flawless outstanding, we will hear how language is just a formal system that can be brute-forced without understanding. If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling. Nothing that happens in the interval until 2023 will encourage anyone to change this way of thinking. There will not be a Truckpocalypse before 2023. Technological unemployment will continue to be a topic of academic debate that might show up if you crunch the numbers just right, but there will be no obvious sign that it is happening on a large scale. Everyone will tell me I am wrong about this, but I will be right, and they will just be interpreting other things (change in labor force composition, change in disability policies, effects of outsourcing, etc) as obvious visible signs of technological unemployment, the same as people do now. AI safety concerns will occupy about the same percent of the public imagination as today.
1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%
2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
3. At least 5% of US truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%
4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%
5. AI beats a top human player at Starcraft: 70%
6. MIRI still exists in 2023: 80%
7. AI risk as a field subjectively feels more/same/less widely accepted than today: 50%/40%/10%
The European Union will not collapse. It will get some credibility from everyone hating its enemies – Brexit, the nationalist right, etc – and some more credibility by being halfway-competent at its economic mission. Nobody will secede from anywhere. The crisis of nationalism will briefly die down as the shock of Syrian refugees wears off, then reignite (possibly after 2023) with the focus on African migrants. At some point European Muslims may decide they don’t like African migrants much either, at which point there may be some very weird alliances.
1. UK leaves EU (or still on track to do so): 95%
2. No “far-right” party in power (executive or legislative) in any of France, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, at any time: 50%
3. No other country currently in EU votes to leave: 50%
Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).
1. No overt major power war in the Middle East (Israel spending a couple weeks destroying stuff in Lebanon doesn’t count): 60%
2. Mohammed bin Salman still in power in Saudi Arabia in 2023: 60%
3. Sub-Saharan Africa averages GDP growth greater than 2.5% over 2018 – 2023: 60%
4. Vladimir Putin is still in charge of Russia: 70%
5. If there’s a war in the Middle East where US intervention is plausible, US decides to intervene (at least as much as it did in Syria): 70%
Religion will continue to retreat from US public life. As it becomes less important, mainstream society will treat it as less of an outgroup and more of a fargroup. Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom, much like Buddhists do. Everyone will agree evangelicals or anyone with a real religious opinion is just straight-out misinterpreting the Bible, the same way any Muslim who does something bad is misinterpreting the Koran. Christian mysticism will become more popular among intellectuals. Lots of people will talk about how real Christianity opposes capitalism. There may not literally be a black lesbian Pope, but everyone will agree that there should be, and people will become mildly surprised when you remind them that the Pope is white, male, and sexually inactive.
1. Church attendance rates lower in 2023 than 2018: 90%
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
1. Trump wins 2020: 20%
2. Republicans win Presidency in 2020: 40%
On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party. The worst-case scenario is Kamala Harris rising to the main contender against Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. Bernie attacks her and her followers as against true progressive values, bringing up her work defending overcrowded California prisons as a useful source of unpaid labor. Harris supporters attack Bernie as a sexist white man trying to keep a woman of color down (wait until the prison thing gets described as “slavery”). Everything that happened in 2016 between Clinton and Sanders looks like mild teasing between friends in comparison. If non-Sanderites rally around Booker or Warren instead, the result will be slightly less apocalyptic but still much worse than anyone expects. The only plausible way I can see for the Dems to avoid this is if Sanders dies or becomes too sick to run before 2020. This could tear apart the Democratic Party in the long-term, but in the short term it doesn’t even mean they won’t win the election – it will just mean a bunch of people who loathe each other temporarily hold their nose and vote against Trump.
1. Sanders wins 2020: 10%
2. Democrats win Presidency in 2020: 60%
It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?
1. At least one US state has approved single-payer health-care by 2023: 70%
2. At least one US state has de facto decriminalized hallucinogens: 20%
3. At least one US state has seceded (de jure or de facto): 1%
4. At least 10 members of 2022 Congress from neither Dems or GOP: 1%
5. US in at least new one major war (death toll of 1000+ US soldiers): 40%
6. Roe v. Wade substantially overturned: 1%
7. At least one major (Obamacare-level) federal health care reform bill passed: 20%
8. At least one major (Brady Act level) federal gun control bill passed: 20%
9. Marijuana legal on the federal level (states can still ban): 40%
10. Neoliberals will be mostly Democrat/evenly split/Republican in 2023: 60%/20%/20%
11. Political polarization will be worse/the same/better in 2023: 50%/30%/20%
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
1. At least one US politician, Congressman or above, explicitly identifies as alt-right (in more than just one off-the-cuff comment) and refuses to back down or qualify: 10%
2. …is overtly racist (says eg “America should be for white people” or “White people are superior” and means it, as a major plank of their platform), refuses to back down or qualify: 10%
3. Gay marriage support rate is higher on 1/1/2023 than 1/1/2018: 95%
4. Percent transgender is higher on 1/1/2023 than 1/1/2018: 95%
5. Social justice movement appear less powerful/important in 2023 than currently: 60%
First World economies will increasingly be marked by an Officialness Divide. Rich people, the government, and corporations will use formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions. Poor people (and to an increasing degree middle-class people) will use informal gig economies supported by Silicon Valley companies whose main skill is staying a step ahead of regulators. Think business travelers staying at the Hilton and riding taxis, vs. low-prospect twenty-somethings staying at Air BnBs and taking Ubers. As Obamacare collapses, health insurance will start turning into one of the formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions limited to college grads with good job prospects. What the unofficial version of health care will be remains to be seen. If past eras have been Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, etc, the future may be the Ability-To-Circumvent-Regulations Age.
1. Percent of people in US without health insurance (outside those covered by free government programs) is higher in 2023 than 2018: 80%
2. Health care costs (as % of economy) continue to increase at least as much as before: 70%
Cryptocurrency will neither collapse nor take over everything. It will become integrated into the existing system and regulated to the point of uselessness. No matter how private and untraceable the next generation of cryptocurrencies are, people will buy and exchange them through big corporate websites that do everything they can to stay on the government’s good side. Multinationals will occasionally debate using crypto to transfer their profits from one place to another, then decide that would make people angry and decide not to. There may be rare crypto-related accounting tricks approximately of the same magnitude as the “headquarter your company in the Cayman Islands” trick. A few cryptocurrencies might achieve the same sort of role PayPal has today, only slightly cooler. Things like Ethereum prediction markets might actually work, again mostly by being too niche for the government to care very much. A few die-hards will use pure crypto to buy drugs over the black market, but not significantly more than do so today, and the government will mostly leave them alone as too boring to crush.
1. 1 Bitcoin costs above $1K: 80%
2. …above $10K: 50%
3. …above $100K: 5%
4. Bitcoin is still the highest market cap cryptocurrency: 40%
5. Someone figures out Satoshi’s true identity to my satisfaction: 30%
6. Browser-crypto-mining becomes a big deal and replaces ads on 10%+ of websites: 5%
Polygenic scores go public – not necessarily by 2023, but not long after. It becomes possible to look at your 23andMe results and get a weak estimate of your height, IQ, criminality, et cetera. Somebody checks their spouse’s score and finds that their desirable/undesirable traits are/aren’t genetic and will/won’t be passed down to their children; this is treated as a Social Crisis but nobody really knows what to do about it. People in China or Korea start actually doing this on a large scale. If there is intelligence enhancement, it looks like third-party services that screen your gametes for genetic diseases and just so happen to give you the full genome which can be fed to a polygenic scoring app before you decide which one to implant. The first people to do this aren’t necessarily the super-rich, so much as people who are able to put the pieces together and figure out that this is an option. If you think genetics discourse is bad now, wait until polygenic score predictors become consumerized. There will be everything from “the predictor said I would be tall but actually I am medium height, this proves genes aren’t real” to “Should we track children by genetic IQ predictions for some reason even though we have their actual IQ scores right here?” Also, the products will probably be normed on white (Asian?) test subjects and not work very well on people of other races; expect everyone to say unbelievably idiotic things about this for a while.
1. Widely accepted paper claims a polygenic score predicting over 25% of human intelligence: 70%
2. …50% or more: 20%
3. At least one person is known to have had a “designer baby” genetically edited for something other than preventing specific high-risk disease: 10%
4. At least a thousand people have had such babies, and it’s well known where people can go to do it: 5%
5. At least one cloned human baby, survives beyond one day after birth: 10%
6. Average person can check their polygenic IQ score for reasonable fee (doesn’t have to be very good) in 2023: 80%
7. At least one directly glutamatergic antidepressant approved by FDA: 20%
8. At least one directly neurotrophic antidepressant approved by FDA: 20%
9. At least one genuinely novel antipsychotic approved by FDA: 30%
10. MDMA approved for therapeutic use by FDA: 50%
11. Psilocybin approved for general therapeutic use in at least one country: 30%
12. Gary Taubes’ insulin resistance theory of nutrition has significantly more scholarly acceptance than today: 10%
13. Paleo diet is generally considered and recommended by doctors as best weight-loss diet for average person: 30%
There will be two or three competing companies offering low-level space tourism by 2023. Prices will be in the $100,000 range for a few minutes in suborbit. The infrastructure for Mars and Moon landings will be starting to look promising, but nobody will have performed any manned landings between now and then. The most exciting edge of the possibility range is that five or six companies are competing to bring rich tourists to Bigelow space stations in orbit.
1. SpaceX has launched BFR to orbit: 50%
2. SpaceX has launched a man around the moon: 50%
3. SLS sends an Orion around the moon: 30%
4. Someone has landed a man on the moon: 1%
5. SpaceX has landed (not crashed) an object on Mars: 5%
6. At least one frequently-inhabited private space station in orbit: 30%
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. Along with the obvious ramifications, there will be weird consequences for censorship and the media, with some outlets discussing other kinds of biorisks and the government wanting them to stop giving people ideas. The world in which this becomes an issue before 2023 is not a very good world for very many reasons.
1. Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
2. …at least five thousand people: 5%
3. Paris Agreement still in effect, most countries generally making good-faith effort to comply: 80%
4. US still nominally committed to Paris Agreement: 60%
And just for fun…
1. I actually remember and grade these predictions publicly sometime in the year 2023: 90%
2. Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it: 80%
3. At least one prediction here is horrendously wrong at the “only a market for five computers” level: 95%
If you disagree, make your own predictions with probabilities. I’m tired of people offering to bet me on these and I’m not interested unless you provide me overwhelmingly good odds.
Current list of updates here.
<>
I suspect you have no IDEA how significant “headquarter your company in the Cayman Islands” is for worldwide tax evasion. Estimates are tens of trillions of dollars of wealth held offshore with (at a very conservative level) hundred of billions of dollars of tax lost, and with knock-on effects in that
– more of the losses affect poorer countries
– large pools of untracked money have severe consequences for political distortion everywhere.
Your argument would be like someone saying “hey, worst case, marijuana legalization only gives us another problem the size of alcohol”. I suspect your response to that would be something like “you, buddy, have no idea how large is the alcohol problem”.
More generally, it’s now, as I write this, 17 days on, and already the list seems dated, concerned with a set of events that are already in the past. (Does the Trump who says “We should try having a dictator for life” still seem quite so cuddly and mainstream? Is the NRA quite so non-controversial an organization?)
Which might say something about the value, or relevance, or making predictions in times of such flux…
A couple of contrary things on your religion prediction:
1. Worldwide church attendance will rise – 80%
Asia long ago hit peak atheist/none. It is experiencing rather large declines in those populations with the loosening of militant atheism in the “no seriously, we’re still communist states” and everywhere the irreligious have far fewer children than Christians. This also holds true for such trendy groups as Buddhists, Jews-outside-of-Israel, and Hindus to greater or lesser degrees.
The generational affects in Europe and North America appear likely to be swamped by those in Asia and Africa; these are by far the largest movements in play from current trends.
2. US church attendance will rise – 25% (depending on accounting method)
Church attendance in the US has always been a bit wonky. We are currently attending multiplicatively more than in the Revolutionary era. This has happened several times. Maybe there will be some degree of religious revival, or maybe the trend towards non-Sunday services will continue and we will have more online/weekday “services” that muck up the statistics.
Likewise, cohorts may muck around with the statistics. We have the largest generation ever, Millennials, entering their peak child rearing years. Typically, this results in increased church attendance by nominal attenders (as happened with Gen X, the Boomers, etc.). Depending on how you want to score those who attend irregularly I could expect a bounce here just due to cohort aging and size. The numbers will be very different depending on if you use simple survey data, diary reporting, or official church statistics.
Likewise, the secularization process that is driving this appears to have a very strong asymptote. The percentage of regular church attenders has been basically flat for 25 years at around 8% of the population. The drops in attendance have basically come entirely from the nominal attenders (i.e. those who attend monthly or less). I expect secularization to return ever diminishing effects – the bulk of church attendances are already by the people who have not been affected by secularization trends in the US for 25 years.
This also runs into trouble as minority populations will be increasing size and they start from a much higher religious observance baseline.
Ultimately US church attendance needs a pretty strict definition of how you want to measure it. I suspect that rigorous accounting (number of times a human body sits through a religious service) to go up, but less rigorous analysis to go down (mostly from people lying less out of social desirability bias diminishing).
3. Religion will be a major element of American society with at least one major party referencing God, seriously, in their party platform. 97%
The percent of people who believe that the Bible is the “literal word of God” has not budged in 25 years. The percent who identify as “Evangelicals” has not budged in 25 years. The percent of Americans who pray multiple times a day has … actually been increasing.
Depending on how you slice the data, something like a third to two-fifths of Americans belong to a highly coherent group of people who have maintained their size or grown for the durations of the entire Clinton-W-Obama-Trump era so far. Imagining they go into freefall tomorrow and lose (net) 2% of their relative numbers per year (i.e. faster than Europe secularized). In five years, this group, which opposes basically all the hot buttons of the Blue Tribe, will shrink all the way down to … 29%[36%] of the population.
Electorally this means that we can expect Red Tribe Christians to be dominant in basically all the states they currently dominate excepting maybe a few edge cases like Georgia (the loss of voting power is greatly diminished due to places like California, New York and the like having huge absolute Red Tribe Christian populations). That is a huge block in the Senate, so we can expect competitive Dems to pander in those states (pissing off more militant secularists within the Democratic coalition) and local Republicans to play up their Christianity as a tribal marker.
This ensures a lot of conflict in the future over gay rights/religious freedom which will likely be joined by conflict over euthanasia, polygamy, and charitable tax deductions. There is always the outside chance that significant elements of the religious black/Hispanic vote will go over to the Republicans and more of the Libertarian Republicans will flee to the Democratic Party.
Sadly, I do not have money to back up these predictions, but the Demise of Religion is extremely overhyped and pretty much always Voxed to inanity. Five years is way too short of a time for secularization to make a serious dent from the status quo.
Does that include things like avoiding genes that increase the risk of things like Alzheimer’s or breast cancer ect, or just straightforward genetic diseases?
Things like genes that increase risk of Alzheimer’s or breast cancer are very easy to test for now, and I expect some service to offer to do pre-implantation genetic testing for stuff like that before 2023 (75%); actually using CRISPR or something to remove the gene I’d say is lower, maybe 40% in 5 years but 70% in ten.
For this statement, testing actually doesn’t matter, because it specifies editing.
Selecting one embryo for implantation from a set which doesn’t have a particular deleterious allele which is already known about is already done.
The technology for patching a fix isn’t good enough for prime-time yet – even for high-risk diseases… with the exception of the low hanging fruit of replacing defective mitochondria, which has been in the news recently as “world’s first three-parent baby”.
Presumably any genetic editing would have to be essentially not disease-related to qualify – something cosmetic in the normal range like eye, hair or skin colour, height or so on.
The single payer in one state prediction seems way too optimistic. Oregon and Tennessee took steps toward it a while ago and found it way too expensive and quickly backed off. Medical prices are much higher than they were back then so it would even be more expensive. Vermont took a look two years and backed off when they saw how much the cost would be. Basically any state that that tried to implement single payer would have to at least double their tax burden. Tiebout competition means that states really don’t have the flexibility to raise taxes that much.
California is the politically the most likely to try, but it is already one of the highest taxed states in the country. Their constitution prevents property taxes going up enough so they would have to raise income taxes. This would push marginal rates just for income state and federal combined over 60%. Income inequality is so pronounced there that they are especially vulnerable to rich people moving away.
A better estimate would be in the 10-25% range.
One subject of more interest to me than to Scott for a prediction:
There will be respectable evidence that at least one dietary supplement extends the human lifespan. 30%.
The basic problem is that humans are so long lived. But five years should, with luck, be long enough for some observables correlated with life expectancy to show an effect. Mortality data are probably too noisy, but there might be biomarkers of age that would work, provided something currently in use has a significant effect.
As above, with the additional provision that the supplement is either Nicotinamide Riboside or some combination including it: 10%.
My predictions for 02/15/2023:
1. At least a thousand people have had IVF babies chosen among the resulting embryos for some predicted physical and/or psychological traits – 70%
Probably it will predict (although not really precisely) traits like intelligence, height, hair and eye color, general face traits, non-violence and other personality traits. Maybe it will be done in fertility clinics outside the West (but with many Western clients), maybe in Mexico, Ukraine, Russia or China. Or maybe there will be fertility clinics in the West that will circumvent the ethical objections by offering the raw DNA data of all embryos to the prospective parents, and the future parents will analyse it online with 3rd party software to find the predicted traits that matter to them and choose.
2. Thousands of people will have android “girlfriends” (sex robots capable of conversations – see “Harmony”). – 80%
They will be realistically looking (they are already), but with limited movements (although probably more thanthe head, like today) and not yet really passing the Turing Test (but creating the illusion of conversation for a while).
3. There will be a medicine claimed to prevent male homosexuality if taken by the mother during (or before) pregnancy. – 60%
It will work by reducing mother’s antibodies against proteins (like NLGN4Y) supposedly implied in the masculinisation of fetus’s brain . It will be probably produced outside the West (maybe in China or Russia) and bought (probably illegally) especially by the religios families with many children.
Isn’t this pretty much already the case?
Either way, I am absolutely certain that this was pretty much the case when I was growing up. In fact, the way that religion was seen by all the trendy people as basically a Good Thing was what opened the door for all the fundamentalists to rise up and try to grab power (because if they had a Good Thing, why shouldn’t that Good Thing be placed in charge of society?), which in turn led to the rise of New Atheism, which in turn…
… oh God. So help me, if I find myself on a message board in 2040 complaining about the Fourth Wave Feminists who are attacking the New New Atheists who are comparing them to the Neo-Evangelicals, I will officially lose all hope for the world!
We can only hope. Once, I dreamed of victory – now, I dream only of a war where I can stand the people who are theoretically on my side.
Gasp! No! Not regulations! How are the nerdy white men going to save the world with their superior smartness if they can’t do whatever they want?!
:p
“Once, I dreamed of victory – now, I dream only of a war where I can stand the people who are theoretically on my side.”
That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen lately, and only funny because it’s all too true.
—— AI ——
Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one city (with functionality comparable to Uber): 40%
…in at least five of ten largest US cities: 25%
At least 5% of US truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%
Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000 (a true self-driving car, not Elon Musk’s hype): 10%
AI beats a top human player at Starcraft: 40%
MIRI still exists in 2023 (though it may change its name again): 90%
AI risk as a field subjectively feels more/same/less widely accepted than today: “Near” risks (e.g. hacking, malfunctions): 70%/20/10%, “Far” risks (e.g. paperclips): 20%/20%/60%
Supervised learning widely integrated “under the hood” in most (>90%) large (>1M user base) commercial software: 90%
Less breakthroughs (on the level of ATARI DQN and AlphaGo) than the last 5 years: 70%
Machine translation still below the level of professional translators on high-resource languages (e.g. German, French, Chinese): 75%
… on low-resource languages (e.g. Finnish, Turkish): 85%
Accuracy on the Winograd Schema Challenge below 90%: 70%
… below human level: 90%
Perception in academic and industry circles that deep learning has run out of steam: 70%
Reinforcement learning still not widely applied outside gameplaying: 60%
RL agent can complete the “Universal Paperclip” game (or equivalent) trained only on raw pixels or text and the paperclip number as the reward signal, in less than 5 playthroughs: 20%
No widely accepted way of doing unsupervised learning: 70%
GANs retroactively recognized as having been overhyped: 75%
No satisfactory way of dealing with adversarial examples in ML: 70%
Security attack on commercial or government system on based on misleading the AI components (e.g. by adversarial examples) demonstrated in the lab: 75%
Security attack based on misleading the AI components carried out causing significant disruptions (service denial, loss of funds, property theft/destruction, etc): 65%
Significant disruptions due to accidental AI malfunction: 65%
Concerns over AI reliability slow down the adoption of self-driving cars: 70%
—— EU ——
UK leaves EU (or still on track to do so): 99%
No “far-right” party in power (executive or legislative) in any of France, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, at any time (considering parties like Front National, UKIP or Lega Nord as “far-right”): 30%
No other country currently in EU votes to leave: 60%
—— Other world politics ——
Mostly agree with Scott, except:
Vladimir Putin is still in charge of Russia: 85%
If there’s a war in the Middle East where US intervention is plausible, US decides to intervene (at least as much as it did in Syria): 50%
—— Religion in the US ——
Church attendance rates lower in 2023 than 2018: 60%
—— Republican Party ——
Trump wins 2020: 65%
Republicans win Presidency in 2020: 70%
—— Democratic Party ——
Sanders wins 2020: 10%
Democrats win Presidency in 2020: 30%
—— Other US politics ——
Agree with Scott or I don’t have enough information
—— Cryptocurrency ——
1 Bitcoin costs above $1K: 50%
…above $10K: 45%
…above $100K: 5%
Bitcoin is still the highest market cap cryptocurrency: 30%
Someone figures out Satoshi’s true identity to Scott’s satisfaction: 20%
Browser-crypto-mining becomes a big deal and replaces ads on 10%+ of websites: 5%
——
I don’t have enough information on the rest, so I won’t touch them.
70%: One or several US states will pass a law banning non-renewable power sources, including nuclear, in-state between now and 2023.
60%: California will pass a law against non-renewable power sources, including nuclear, in-state between now and 2023.
50%: Some sizable American city or county (>3*10^5 inhabitants) will pass a local ordinance against gasoline cars between now and 2023.
50%: At least one fusion plant will generate excess energy no later than 2023 (without necessarily being able to harvest it).
To make the last prediction more precise: at least 50% excess energy and at least 10 times (i.e. in a reproducible manner).
ITER won’t be doing DT fusion until the early twenty thirties, and thats if it stays on schedule. There is no way there is going to be a working tokamak before that date. Now if you’re talking about one of the high beta designs like the Polywell, those are projects that are relatively early in their development cycle, and have had difficulty getting financing. I think there is maybe a one in ten chance before twenty thirty.
Honestly, I am not keeping up with their progress, so you’re probably right that I’m overly optimistic. But we’ll see.
Collectible and Breedable Blockchain Horses
Year 2017 was a game changer for the block chain technology both in terms of valuations as well as their usability and reach.
Despite such huge expansion, the reach is still limited compared to traditional systems. An average person can just pronounce the word – Cryptocurrency and expecting them to understand the nitty gritty of technology behind it as of now is no less than mirage.
The contribution of Gaming Industry to the overall economy is gaining a lot of traction. Not only the subscriber base is increasing but the revenues for the early starters are rising astronomically. The theme has received a lot of attraction especially from media and companies generating them revenue through sponsors and advertisement. According to SuperData, games accounted for 91b $ worldwide.
But the moot question remains the same: What an average user gained from it?
So with above two issues in mind, we expect to deliver the project which not only shall teach the basics of this amazing block chain world to every user in a very subtle manner but at the same time they shall be able to monetize their newly found use case with a fun, interactive and informative game.
No day goes by without the big media reporting on the blockchain. We want everyone to be able to participate in globalization, regardless of whether they are sitting in the street cafe with their smart phones in New York, Moscow, Tokyo or New Delhi.
We want to connect the world. The idea of keeping horses is very old and connected by all cultures.
During the development of CryptoHorse, we have always seen the enormous potential of consensus and driven by the motivation to create a worthy product. We do not intend to collect any money through ICO rather we strive to deliver a product that has worth right away and potential to create a steady source of revenue in future.
http://www.CryptoHorse.ch is the first block chain platform in the world where you can buy, sell, collect, breed & race horses as well as develop their community.
CryptoHorses are digital collectible horses which are created on Ethereum Blockchain. Each horse is unique not only in its appearance or colour but their genetic composition is different which shall be stored on the block chain. They have 9 different colours and 35 different attributes.
These CryptoHorses are not just collectible rather they can be bought and sold for Ethereum or bred to create new horses that have varying degree of traits of its parents. Depending on the traits they acquire from its parents, they can be sold or traded on Ethereum blockchain.
Each CryptoHorse have a particular gender – it can either be a mare or a stallion.
Initially there shall be 20,000 Gen-0 horses that will be created and stored on Ethereum block chain. There is no provision for creating new horses after the initial 20,000 Gen-0 horses are sold.
Each of the 20,000 horse is unique and has a price depending on its colour and attribute. Some attributes are rare and some are common. Rarer the attributes, higher is the price.
The price of a horse is determined on the basis of following attributes:
1. Generation
2. Appearance
3. Colour
4. Name
5. Special features
6. Speed
7. Fertility
We have planned some exciting new features for the CryptoHorse as our community grows and trust of our user increases.
We have planned an entire city for the horses later in Q3. The land in this city will be very limited and have few buildings.
A user can then buy land in the city and rent as shop. The shop for example shall offer horse food, water, hay, and much more. The land owners can also organize beauty contests or you can organize in your own store in the Horse City. The items that a user can sell in a rented shop provide a bonus for the horse in the race and other competitions. It is also possible to buy land and rent it yourself.
For more information https://www.cryptohorse.ch
Media:
https://www.cryptohorse.ch/pressRelease.html
Most predictions look good except:
UK has bad half-decade: 30%
Taubes accepted: 60%
And if the Republicans win the next election it will be Trump. No way another candidate will win for them.
What do you think the prospects are for a Conservative-Progressive alliance?
Sensible progress.
Scott:
Here are some bets you can have to compare to your own bets. Some of them are absurdly aggressive, just to keep things interesting-
55% stock market crashes at some point (crash defined as S&P dropping 25% from all time highs)
60% a new political party with a catchy name gains national press coverage (catchy is not defined, or meant to be a significant qualifier here)
70% Bernie chooses not to run in 2020.
60% The Democrats choose a female as their front runner in 2020.
80% Higher voter turnout in 2020 than in 2016.
50% No nuclear weapons go off in a populated area.
65% A nuclear war between great powers does not start.
80% China continues to outpace the United States in economic growth.
60% Trump spells nothing wrong on twitter again during his time as president.
51% computer AI still fails to beat humans at Starcraft, much to the glee of AI skeptics.
75% No new federal laws are passed significantly regulating A.I. on the internet, in spite of bots controlling more and more of internet activity.
70% neoliberal ideas become even more commonly believed and deeply entrenched, in spite of evidence from China, elsewhere that they actually are wrong/ bad national strategy.
90% Bitcoin breaks $30,000 at some point.
51% Federal law is passed in the United States prohibiting self driving vehicles from functioning without a human driver present. This destroys the self-driving car industry in the short run.
65% Crude oil prices break $200 a barrel at some point.
99% The European Union dissolves completely.
55% Trump is impeached before 2020.
99.9% Mike Pence wins the presidency in 2020.
65% Age adjusted obesity rates are lower in 2023 than in 2018 in Mexico.
85% Age adjusted obesity rates decrease in at least 5 other countries besides Mexico between 2018 and 2023.
55% Age adjusted suicide rates are higher in 2023 than in 2018 in the United States.
80% One of Tarantino’s next two movies is a “huge flop” by his standards (receives less than 7.5 on imdb) to the great disappointment of fans such as myself.
51% Elon Musk lands a female astronaut on the moon, whose name ends in an “a.”
60% a premature baby is born that breaks the current record (set in San Antonio in 2014). Artificial womb technology also improves with animal subjects.
Ok that’s probably enough.
Your vision of the future is rather grim…
Nuclear war seems a lot worse to me, but I agree, Pence isn’t probably the hero we’ve all been waiting for.
But I basically agree with Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” that things have been getting better in a lot of ways. I just think the next 50 years or so might be kind of rough.
I notice that you seem to put a lot of emphasis on China’s GDP growth rate. But is this really accounting for catch-up growth? China’s GDP per capita is less than a third of the US’s per capita GDP and convergence economics would imply that we should expect faster growth from the lower productivity country due to having more low hanging fruit to pick. I’d say your guess that China grows faster than the US is low on that basis, but that your comment that China’s growth is significant evidence against neoliberalism is therefore overstated (though to be fair that’s not really an important part of any of your predictions).
Also, wow! You’re remarkably pessimistic about the possibility of nuclear weapons being used against populated areas. That implies an approximately 7/1 odds any given year of nukes being used against a populace. Given that the observed odds have been 72/2 odds of an inhabited area being hit per year (and 0 if you exclude the outlier year of 1945), that’s a huge increase in the chances of nuclear weapons being used. Care to expand upon why?
You make a good point about China, it could easily be catch up growth rather than evidence of neoliberal theories being inaccurate. It’s my personal opinion that neoliberal assumptions about markets vs. government tend to oversimplify complex issues by always saying the same thing: “less regulation/ government involvement, more free market policies.” Rarely do such a wide array of problems all have the exact same answer. Such solutions might be philosophically ideal, from a Hayekian “eliminating coercion” perspective, but in a world of international power politics I doubt they are always the best way to outcompete potential strategic rivals. I doubt we would have implemented things like gas rations and the draft during World War 2 if the free market was always the most efficient possible way to run things.
Regarding nuclear weapons, my pessimism is hopefully unfounded. I believe most articles about North Korea being guaranteed to act in their own self interest and never using nukes because they care about self preservation to be unconvincing. People follow their hearts, not their self interest (we aren’t often smart enough to know what is actually in our “self interest”), and in a country that has been pushing anti-US propaganda for decades and has playgrounds and billboards with nuclear warheads on them, I think an irrational missile launch is not out of the question. Hopefully our missile defense technology could stop such an attack, however. In general it just seems to me amazing that we have made it this far without a nuclear weapon going off, and I see some unexpected bomb going off under mysterious circumstances as much more likely than a North Korean missile launch.
(To make a long story short, no, I fortunately don’t have concrete evidence that the next five years will be especially dangerous in a nuclear sense. It’s just a stupid prediction on a smart person’s website.)
On the neoliberalism point, my take on the overall neoliberalism idea is that it’s a LOT more complex than it’s left leaning critics take into account. Once one takes into account that local, non-governmental logic involves hard to quantify metis and that government bureaucrats whose job security depends on finding things to regulate are not necessarily the best people to decide where regulation is needed, a prior that government intervention is likely bad follows. That being said, plenty of people I’d count in the broad neoliberal/liberal camp (see my comment on Sniffnoy above for my views on where liberalism is really situated in a Western context) would argue for various kinds of regulation. My personal stance is more a “not more or less regulation, just better regulation in the specific places its needed”. Honestly, politics is too broad a field given all the pies that governments want (or need) their fingers in. Liberalism broadly construed (basically what the democratic countries of the West/East Asia have been doing since WW2) works and a lot of other systems fail to varying degrees (some to EXTREMELY BAD degrees). So my prior is still there. China if anything started growing when they became more neoliberal, though the correct balance of regulations and free enterprise is a rightly contentious issue!
For the nukes, I think putting at least decently plausible numbers on odds helps. Once we’ve got some base rate to work off of, then better predictions can be made. I’m decently convinced that nuclear war is more likely than the 90’s-00’s, but probably still less than the Cuban Missile Crisis or the late 80’s. I’m very interested if there’s information increasing that chance since it means I really need to move out of the city I’m in (Atlanta is big enough target to be worried about)! But if the chances remain in the less than 10% chance over 5 years (about 2% per year), then I figure I should continue living my life as normal for now.
Thanks for your thoughts. I have nothing more to say about nuclear weapons as that is not an area I have studied deeply. Hopefully I get my 65% bet right.
Regarding our debate on neoliberalism: I certainly agree with the “better regulation in the specific places its needed” concept, with more in certain areas and MUCH less in others. I also agree that a lot of regulation is of the kind you mentioned- eg employees protecting their jobs- but this happens to some degree in larger businesses as well. You get big enough, you attract parasites; it’s how organisms tend to work. So in general we seem to mostly agree (but I’m just going to argue about this subject for a few more paragraphs anyways).
I just think the argument neoliberals commonly make- that governments by definition are comparatively inferior to private businesses because they aren’t subject to market pressures- is actually faulty reasoning. Governments rule this world; corporations are just their chess pieces. If they fail to rule competently, other governments will replace them and rule in their stead. This doesn’t mean nobody is actually capable of ruling competently, just as the fact that many businesses fail doesn’t mean that business owners are incapable of ruling competently. There are many perverse incentives in business (golden parachutes, short term investor interests, employee shirking, etc) that can lead to bankruptcy. And yet some CEOs still manage to work around these and succeed.
I just find the assumption that individual freedom= economic strength to be a moral/ spiritual claim, rather than a factual/ evidence based one. We won the cold war, but we did kind of have an industrial head start/ less Nazis pillaging our countryside during WW2. I think we should take how well the Russians were able to keep up with us in the cold war arms race as a tribute to the terrifying power of top-down systems, not a morality tale along the lines of:
“Communism doesn’t work because people can’t be equal, LOL.”
If this is the big lesson we decide to take from the last half of the 20th Century, we are in for a wake up call later on in my opinion. Because I am guessing the best geopolitical economic strategy is not actually to just “let it be.” I mean, hopefully we can cooperate better with the other nations of the world and just get that nuclear option/ war in general off the table at some point (maybe a few thousand years down the road..). But until that day comes we need to be smart about our economy if we want to survive.
1. Church attendance rates lower in 2023 than 2018: 90%
Scott, your religion prediction is unclear. Do you mean Church worldwide or religion in America?
Church attendance rates lower in 2023 than 2018: 60%
For Catholicism, attendance in America does not decrease. 60%
Religious attendance for Christian denominations worldwide will increase. 80%
Are each of the three ideological poles tied to a different corresponding terminal value?
Liberals prioritize individual freedom and liberty above all else. Neoliberals and Classical Liberals and Libertarians all have different views on the best methods for achieving and maximizing freedom, but that’s a disagreement over ends rather than means.
Progressives prioritize equality and egalitarianism above all else. The Economic Leftists and the Social Justice crowd have differing opinions over the primary cause of inequality in modern society, with the former blaming the socioeconomic class divide and the latter blaming identity-based discrimination, but they’re both united in seeing inequality itself as the dominant problem to be overcome.
Finally, Traditionalists prioritize security and stability above all else. They see strict hierarchies and traditional values as bulwarks ensuring that society remains stable, and view social and cultural (and in some cases, religious and/or ethnic) hegemony as the most efficient way of keeping civilization safe from the threat of the Other. Divisions within this group are based around idiomatic particulars more than anything else (e.g. Western vs. Eastern culture, Christian vs. Islamic fundamentalism).
Left-Liberals and Social Democrats want both liberty and equality, but they’re willing to sacrifice stability to get it, undermining traditional values and cultural boundaries; that’s why they see Traditionalists as their primary enemy.
Establishment Conservatives (i.e. Right-Liberals) and Fusionist/Paleo-Libertarian types want both liberty and stability, which is why they tend to conflate freedom with nationalism (“America is the land of the free, therefore opposing American values means opposing freedom”). However, they’re unconcerned with equality, so they’re willing to allow identity-based discrimination and let the class divide increase, which puts them at odds with Progressives.
Authoritarian Leftists want both equality and stability at the expense of freedom, which is why they despise Liberals/Libertarians and vice-versa. State Communists fall into this group, but some Right-Populists and Fascists (Strasserist Nazis, Ba’athists, National Bolshevists, etc.) could also be seen as examples, with the caveat that they only want socioeconomic equality for the people within their ethno-nationalist tribe.
Finally, Centrists could be seen as promoting all three values equally, seeking to find balance between them rather than prioritizing one or two over the others. I would place the more hawkish and authoritarian Neoliberals into this category, the ones who support foreign interventionism and draconian security measures and gun control and “nanny state” policies (Hillary Clinton being a prime example of such).
My impression is that Hillary Clinton discovered the alt-right made a convenient bogeyman and created it basically ex nihilo – yeah, a few people were using the term before her, but Google Trends says that search volume increased 25x when she started talking about it. Before she talked about it, “alt right” was a much less popular search term than eg “Nation of Islam” – as soon as she talked about it, it shot way up and has been much higher since.
People who were generally far right before and want to be edgy have identified as alt-right since, but I don’t think there was much actual movement, and I don’t expect there to be any actual movement in the future.
I have to disagree here as a matter of history. Hillary did not create the alt-right, though her talking about may mark the point where it entered the general consciousness.
I can actually date my awareness of the movement fairly well; my introduction was somebody’s link to a Heartist post on the Petraeus affair, which would date it to late 2012. By that point, the manosphere was already a thing, and a part of the larger constellation of groups that would have counted themselves part of the alt-right. It was very loosely defined, and contained a number of different groups which don’t seem to necessarily have much connection to one another. If I had to find a unifying theme, I would pick these two points:
1. We have been lied to by the broader culture.
2. The leaders on the right are ineffective/not even really on our side. We need to try something new.
Here’s a map of the different groups from early 2013, which matches my gut on who would be included (note that the term “alt-right” is already in use there). Running through a few of the groups, you can see how they are united by the two factors I mentioned up above. The PeeYouAs feel they were lied to about the nature of dating and women(1). The Ache Bee Dees feel they were lied to about evolution and race(1). The ethno-nationalists relate to that(1), often with a side of feeling that whites are uniquely denied a right to ethnic pride, and that denial is usually carried out by the leaders of the right(2). Death Eaters complain that the Cathedral lies to us about its nature (1) and have a whole inner/outer party theory dedicated to point (2). The Christian Traditionalists have long felt that Republican leaders hold them in disdain(2) and don’t actually want to fight for them; those feelings were vindicated both by how quickly they gave up the fight on gay marriage and how all the official Republican 2012 post-mortems recommended abandoning social conservatism in favor of more economic libertarianism.
These are distinct but also very overlapping groups. It’s easy to see how some feed into the others. The PeeYouAs give evo-psych explanations for their techniques, and once you accept those it’s small step to thinking of race in similar terms (and note that Heartist is a big proponent of both). Taking ethnos seriously lends itself well enough to ethno-nationalism. And of course they all have a common enemy in The Cathedral.
(Also, I cannot emphasize the importance of Point 1 enough. When you feel somebody got something wrong, you can still find a lot of common ground with them. When you feel they have lied to you, you are primed to reject everything they taught you.)
Now, of course this is just a bunch of people talking on the internet. Compared to the population of the United States, they’re a rounding error. But the intellectuals and people who talk over ideas are *always* a tiny minority of the people who are moved by those ideas. The bit that you could see on the internet was like the bit of an iceberg you can see; it indicated a much bigger mass underneath. And come 2016, the members of the right had so little faith in their leaders (and those leaders’ ability to deliver the goods) that Trump was able to come in and claim the nomination, then the presidency, with the Republican party apparatus unable to stop him.
tldr: The alt-right is significantly older than Hillary’s comment, it is a manifestation of the general discontent on the right, this should not be taken to mean that most of the right or even most Trumpists are properly considered alt-right.
(Man, that was hard to get past the filter.)
An aside: To really get into the mindset of those of us on the right in 2010is and beyond (I don’t consider myself alt-), think of how you felt when the Republicans passed Tax Reform. This is how it felt when Obamacare was passed. (Indeed, that was what set the precedent for the party in power using its majority to pass sweeping changes over the strenuous objections of the minority that the Reps later used to pass Tax Reform.) When the outgroup did even for something like a tax cut it felt so bad that it had you wanting to vote for Bernie Sanders. Imagine how we felt when the original precedent was broken for far more sweeping changes.
I think something that you’re sort of pointing at here, without explicitly saying, that I think is core to the “alt-right” cluster of ideas, is that the alt-right is biodeterminist, and one doesn’t find very much biodeterminism within the Overton window today, especially in ways that would be relevant to politics and society (eg, nobody is denying that genetics has a lot to do with height, but height is much less of import to society than intelligence). Mainstream politics, and the non-mainstream left, are all social determinists; as are some non-mainstream right-wingers (a traditional hardcore social conservative is usually a social determinist).
To take an example – let’s talk about kids doing badly in school. The mainstream right-wing (conservative, Republican, whatever) response is going to be to blame the culture the kids grew up in, the teachers’ union, the kids themselves, the kids’ parents, etc. “The kids would be doin’ fine if their parents raised them right, there wasn’t such filth on the teevee, and they pulled their goshdarn pants up – those corrupt teacher’s unions ain’t helpin’ neither.”
Mainstream left (and this includes most people who get called “leftists” around here; both the Bernie-types who would be NDP in Canada or social democrats in Europe) says the schools need more money, usually make some gestures towards racism and classism, but nothing too spicy – the overall message tends to be something like “these poor kids are suffering due to poverty and racism, and the way to fix that is to give those fine people in the teacher’s union more money, have more parental leave so the kids aren’t home alone, encourage people to read to their kids, have some subsidized daycares maybe, and of course hire more public servants to deal with all this.”
Non-mainstream left tends to blame society in general. It’s not enough to give more money to the schools and so on. Society itself needs a radical change. Usually their line is something like “these students are held down by patriarchal white supremacist capitalism, which must be smashed, and then in the brave new world all students will be brilliant.”
The biodeterminists on the far right are the only ones who think that the kids doing badly in school is best explained by the kids being dumb, which is best explained by genetics, and they usually expand this into racial theories.
There’s no unbreakable reason why biodeterminism has to be a right-wing-and-outside-the-mainstream idea – you could easily conceive of a left-wing biodeterminism in which those gifted with a given attribute owe some kind of responsibility to those less gifted, as nothing genetic is due to merit – high IQ, being tall, etc could all be seen as the ultimate unearned privilege. (The Rise of the Meritocracy by Young is an interesting look into this sort of thing)
Bio-determinism as actually practiced is just racism with a coat of paint, because..
Well, “All human genetic diversity is the same color, and it is black”. The exodus from africa was a quite small founding population, and it was also recent enough that the diversity among all non-african populations is completely dwarfed by that of african populations.
Thus, if you believe genetic potential is all, well, the most gifted group of people in that regard is overwhelmingly likely to be some african tribe you never heard of who are only now coming into a social context where they might utilize their superiority… Because, all of the outliers are in africa.
By extension, you cant say anything meaningful about african americans as a genetic line, except that they should be more diverse in potential than average, because their ancestors were more or less randomly sampled from across Africa. They dont form a clean line of decent from any tribe or people, but were the victims of war charted off in ships and their bloodlines mixed at random.
To the extent they can be meaningfully treated as a common class of people it is by their circumstances, not their blood.
This does not follow. The populations which left Africa were subject to a different (but mostly overlapping) set of selection pressures than those that stayed in Africa. And all humans are so closely related that drift is highly unlikely to have led to any noticeable changes in intelligence since their divergence. Genetic bottlenecks could accidentally have created high intelligence subgroups, but you seem to be saying Africa has less of those. I’m not sure which way it goes. If not due to bottlenecks, there’d have to have been varying selection effects on intelligence to cause meaningful differences between human populations. Obviously, biodeterminists think there was.
I think the strong extrapolations are way overboard, but on some specific subgroups like Ashkenazi Jews, I’m uncertain. A lot of it looks culturally related to me. I am very uncertain so I’d guess that a few decades after Africa catches up in nutrition, etc., then the odds that Africa contains the highest IQ subgroup will be roughly equal to its share of the total population.
This is not true although exact origins are not easy to unearth. African American slaves were predominantly taken from West Africa. African-Americans also have a high rate of European admixture.
I’d guess the most genetically unique/diverse Americans should be some multiracial group which could be African Americans but might be Mexican Americans or Hapas.
@dndnrsn
I think this is pretty accurate. Biodeterminism does loom large in the alt-right. I think it’s for different reasons, though. The heebeedee crew cares about it for its own sake; they’re the people who who were raised on the idea that believing in evolution is super-important and actually believed it. They go in strongly on the “we were lied to” angle. I think far more people came in via the manosphere, because most people care a lot more about getting laid than about any particular theory. But once they accept “you were lied to, women are different from men, here is why,” that again gets you at a level of biodeterminism.
I don’t think the moldy ones care too much about biodeterminism beyond accepting it as basically true (not that everything is 100% biodetermined, but that’s it’s a much larger factor than the Overton Window will admit). But then, I’m pretty sure the proprietor of this blog also believes that, and he’s not even right, let alone alt-right.
I don’t think we need to imagine what a left-wing biodeterminism would look like. We had it in the early 1900s: eugenics.
What you envision is an ancient idea, taking forms ranging from noblesse oblige to Aristotle’s idea of “natural slaves.” I think the modern left is more likely to embrace eugenics 2.0.
@Jaskologist
Have you read The Rise of the Meritocracy? I shill that book every chance I get. I don’t think a left-wing biodeterminism would need to be “eugenics 2.0” – you’re right that eugenics was a Progressive (in the capital-P sense) cause back in the early 20th century. But you’ve got, say, I think at one point Freddie acknowledged the possibility of genetic differences (not racial) in intelligence. I think that a good left-wing biodeterminism would look like noblesse oblige:
Something related that I’ve been thinking about: a lot of intelligent people who think that intelligence isn’t genetic, or “IQ isn’t real”, or “IQ is just the result of study”, or whatever – I think unconsciously a lot of them want to have something that was largely outside of their control – their intelligence (given that a bunch of it is genetic, and a lot of environmental factors are decided by one’s society or one’s parents) – as something they can consider a personal achievement.
@Jaskologist
Using eugenics to achieve equality of outcome requires destroying diversity, which is currently a major value on the left.
Scott, the most polite thing I can say about that is that your impression is utter nonsense.
The term alternative right was coined by Paul Gottfried, a writer with a long career at the margins of American politics, and onetime member of a reactionary clique of intellectuals who dubbed themselves “Paleo-(as opposed to neo)-conservatives”. Gottfried himself is Jewish, but nevertheless has held a long admiration for some, obviously non Nazi, forms of Fascism, and the ideas of the Paleocons were deeply anti-democratic. They resented Neoconservitism’s internationalism, belief in universal human rights, and tendency to view the cold war as a struggle for political equality in the face of Leninist totalitarianism; rather than a defense of natural privilege against Bolshevik hordes. Gottfried was a close friend of Samuel T. Francis, a vocal white supremacist and leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern rebranding of the White Citizens’ Council movement of the civil rights era (if your not familiar with that particular part of American history, when my father was growing up in Texas they were known as “the country club Klan”). Francis was interestingly an opponent of any form of white separatism arguing in a editorial for American Renaissance that:
Instead he argued for the forcible sterilization of racial undesirables writing that:
The paleocon movement was more or less stillborn as a real world political force, and it’s adherents spent the nineteen nineties meeting in shabby hotel conference rooms, and advocating for such implausible, and obscure causes as western backing for Slobodan Milošević’s ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
After 9/11 Gottfried would turn much of his ire on the Bush administration and it’s supporters, not out of any humanitarian objection to their warmongering, but out of the belief that the it was dominated Israeli interests, and naively committed to “liberating” people unfit for self government. Despite his ethnic background, when it came to his political enemies Gottfried often used rhetoric that would not be out of place on the antisemitic fringe:
With may of his Political compatriots having passed away, Gottfried has cultivated connections with a younger generation of the far right, and has moved ever further towards openly embracing white nationalism himself, rather than just associating with it’s proponents:
These days he semi-regularly writes for Taki Theodoracopulos’s magazine that also hosts such “luminaries” as Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, and of course Richard Spencer, for whom he has been somewhat of a mentor. Spencer is the man most responsible for popularizing the ideas of alt-right, and helped to organize last year’s infamous “unite the right” rally along side Matthew Heimbach, of the Traditionalist Workers Party; an organization that which now part of an coalition called the Nationalist Front, alongside the League of the South, Vanguard America, and the National Socialist Movement.
Spencer has effectively been a kind of pied piper among the American ultra-droite, and has served as a bridge between the relatively elite intellectual forms of white nationalism, and the hard line “American history X” style Neo-Nazi movement that traces it’s origins through William Luther Pirece’s National Alliance back to the American fuhrer himself, George Lincoln Rockwell.
If you want a simple summary of what the alt right is, it is a self conscious movement to mainstream Fascism, and extreme racism, and it has succeeded beyond it’s founders wildest dreams. These people are motivated, they have been around for decades, and while their appeal is far too limited for them to ever constitute an effective electoral force on there own; with a some portions of white America increasingly frighted by the changing demographics of our country they are likely to be around for a long time.
Sadly, I suspect that the most likely result for the alt-Right is that they will grow to a critical mass, before their more extreme elements launch a wave of Oklahoma city style anti-government violence some time in the 2020s after Donald Trump, the would be champion of white American identity, leaves office. After that they will probably fold under a federal crackdown, and a wave of public disgust.
Hopefully then the mainstream American right will do the necessary house cleaning to once again purge their movement of white supremacists, and broaden their appeal to non white minorities.
Time will tell.
“1. At least one US politician, Congressman or above, explicitly identifies as alt-right (in more than just one off-the-cuff comment) and refuses to back down or qualify: 10%”
This skips over the possibility that the term alt-right doesn’t get co-opted and then stolen by a far less radical group. That is what happened to Ron Paul’s “Tea Party” and almost no one actually knows what alt-right even means other than ‘bad group’ so I expect it could easily happen again.
Matt M wins the thread. Correct. The left has a strong, probably inevitable, historical tendency to progressively move the goalposts to the point where anyone who isn’t *sufficiently* leftist has a closet case of Hitler-loving.
People on the right have made whole careers out of calling everybody to the left of Genghis Khan a Communist sympathizer. Amusingly when Obama was in office they managed to call him both a Communist and a Nazi.
You should probably define this further. For the prediction to be true, do private health plans need to be banned in that state? Or heavily restricted? Or are you just talking about a public option?
Given that AFAIK private healthcare is only banned/restricted in a tiny minority of places with single payer, presumably not.
Scott, what’s the point of these predictions? Unless you can explain your model, so that we too can use it to predict the future (excuse me for a moment while I’m laughing), then you are just acting like another biased random generator.
He’s testing his calibration, and also making himself accountable to his readership. Should we trust him, or shouldn’t we? Is he usually right, or usually wrong? I mean, he can write convincing articles all damned day, but if he’s not right about stuff, then what’s the point?
Why describe him “another biased random generator”, like it’s a bad thing? A prediction is biased almost by definition. What would unbiased predictions look like? “In the future, stuff will happen”?
1. Test my calibration in general.
2. See how my predictive abilities fail. For example, if everything goes worse than I expect, I’m overly optimistic. If things are more likely to continue on extrapolations of current trends than I expect, I’m falling victim to an “exciting narrative” bias. If technology advances less quickly than I expect, maybe I’m too technophilic. If companies get their products out slower than I expect, maybe I’m too quick to believe deceptive press releases. All of these seem like useful calibrations to do.
3. Have skin in the game. It’s very easy to offhandedly claim to be able to predict social trends, but I think it’s clarifying to have to put numbers to it and see what I really think, in a way that will embarass me (a little) if I’m wrong.
4. See Part 6 at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/23/some-groups-of-people-who-may-not-100-deserve-our-eternal-scorn/
5. Why does anyone do anything?
This does sound useful, so I’ll make a few predictions for myself and hopefully remember to check back in five years:
AI is reaching an even more disconcerting level but not yet taking over the world or ushering in a new utopia 95% (all other bets off/adjusted for 5% scenario)
Trump wins 2020: 35%
Some other Republican wins 2020: 10%
Dems win 2020: 50%
Third Party wins 2020: 5%
A US state or subregion votes to secede from the US: 30%
And carries it off: 15%
SJW left is as or more prominent than today: 60%
But met with more vigorous resistance from alt-right or something like it: 70%
Identity politics is significantly less prominent in US public life than today: 20%
A candidate running for national office explicitly claims to represent white interests and doesn’t back down/clarify: 30%
And wins: 15%
The Democrats move are more identity-focused than today: 60%
The Democrats are more populist/”labor”-centric than they are today: 35%
The Republicans have moved in a Trumpian, populist direction: 75%
The Republicans have moved in a more neoliberal/hawkish direction: 20%
Fox News is more alt-right and less neoliberal: 70%
Alternative media is more prominent relative to establishment networks, papers: 80%
But the NYT et al. are still not wholly discredited: 70%
Jordan Petersen is not as prominent as today: 60%
But not because he was credibly me-tooed, discovered to have sex with fish, etc.: 30%
Ted Cruz is not more prominent than today: 70%
Eurozone is significantly diminished/broken up, though Euro is still around: 65%
Anti-immigration nationalist parties are more prominent in Europe: 75%
Brexit is fait accompli: 75%
But nobody in Europe has seceded: 60%
Blockchain and crypto are a much bigger deal in 2023 than now: 75%
But the US Dollar is still pretty strong: 70%
Despite a pretty big financial crisis of some sort: 60%
But that financial crisis doesn’t cause any sort of fundamental overturning of the world financial status quo, hyperinflation, etc.: 30%
BRICs will be widely perceived as enjoying much better economic times, relatively speaking, the past five years than the US and EU: 80%
The new crop of crypto libertarian millionaires and billionaires are donating heavily to causes like AI research, aging research, and free state project: 85%
But most of their projects haven’t yet come to fruition in e.g. serious anti-aging breakthroughs: 60%
I still can’t use stem cells to grow myself a new foreskin (TMI?), but some new breakthroughs in e.g. helping paraplegics regain function have occurred: 70%
Self-driving cars are still pretty unusual: 60%
Addenda:
Overall, by 2023, the “culture wars” in America (discord over race, gender, and other “identity” issues) seem to have:
Gotten even “hotter”: 60%
Continued at a steady burn: 20%
“Cooled off”: 20%
The percentage of Americans high school seniors applying for college is:
Lower: 40%
Higher: 10%
About the same: 50%
And when I said
I meant 70% probability (as in, no more than 30% chance of major restructuring of the world financial system, such as by the RMB or Bitcoin dethroning the dollar).
I’d like to report the above comment as spam, but the report button is still broken.
I don’t know whether we would even survive until the year 2023 due to the lack of food and water level coming very low. Few points are agreeable though I don’t agree most.
“No “far-right” party in power (executive or legislative) in any of France, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, at any time: 50%”
This can possibly make sense only if you count AfD, UKIP, Swedish democrats etc. as far-right, which I’d really like to hear your justify. Connotations of the phrase “far-right” are dominated by ww2 fascism, whereas these modern parties’ basic aim is just to limit immigration. I’m sure you find lots of media labeling these parties far-right, racist, anti-human or whatever, just like media likes to interpret gender equality studies creatively to find sexism even in cases where the data doesn’t merit it. You are better than this in the latter case, why would you fail so hard in the former?
The UKIP is often described as far right in the press.
I’m open to the idea that they’re not. But why not? What’s the true definition of “far right”, and why are you the arbiter of it?
At least Scott seems to have common usage on his side.
I think Wikipedia’s introduction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics) is reasonable:
“Far-right politics is a term used to describe politics further on the right of the left-right spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of more extreme nationalist,[1][2] and nativist ideologies, as well as authoritarian tendencies.[3]
The term is often associated with Nazism,[4] neo-Nazism, fascism, neo-fascism and other ideologies or organizations that feature extreme nationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, racist or reactionary views.[5] These can lead to oppression and violence against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority, or their perceived threat to the nation, state[6] or ultraconservative traditional social institutions.[7]”
Golden dawn (Greece) and Jobbik (Hungary) follow this definition (though Jobbik has tried to soften its image I’d still count it as far-right for now). If I write “Golden dawn Greece” to Google image search I see swastika-like symbols. If i write “AfD Germany” I see corporate-like symbols and people in suits. I’d call only one of these far-right.
Of course it is. Because such an association benefits those on the left, who are largely dominant in education, media, and pop culture.
The republican party is “often associated with fascism and nazism” in American culture. Does that make them far right?
And if I write “AfD Germany” into Wikipedia’s search window, I see “[AfD] is a right wing to far-right[14] political party”.
Citing The Economist, Reuters, BBC, the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, NPR, Bloomberg, The Independent, The Guardian, and CNBC to support the “far right” part of that.
So are we still saying that Wikipedia is a reasonable authority on the far-rightness of parties like AfD?
Common usage of a very large number of words is inane gibberish, everyone who uses them is just simply babbling.
I’d call the AfD/FN far-right but not Ukip. A brief Google seems to suggest this is usual use.
But is it meaningful and coherent? A ton of common usage is meaingless, incoherent gibberish.
Leftism/Social Justice is clearly a religion, so I call balderdash on the notion that religion is becoming irrelevant.
He doesn’t predict that religion will become irrelevant, but that it will “continue to retreat from US public life” and be “less important”. Jeez, sometimes I feel like basic reading comprehension skills nearly counts as a superpower in SSC comment threads.
This is a distinction without a difference.
Further, since leftism is an explcitly political religion this claim is *by definition* false.
The claim that leftism is explicitly political religion, is the false one here. And I think it is charitable to interpret Scott’s comments as applying only to things that are explicitly religion, not things that share some characteristics of religion and/or fill a religion-shaped hole in people’s minds.
I call/hope Poe’s law.
To call “poe’s law” and then just run away without explanation is intellectually dishonest. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin made investigating and documenting modern political religions the main focus of his work.
Leftism/social justice is a religion.
And the congregation repeats: “Leftism/social justice is a religion.”
..apparently incorrectly!
Your original comment is exactly the kind of contentless SJ bashing I would write if I wanted to troll this comments section (the reference to Is Everything A Religion? is a nice touch).
What definition of “religion” is this by? What differentiates a political ideology that’s a religion from one that’s not?
This was a pretty low-effort inflammatory comment. Please consider yourself warned that further similar comments will result in a ban.
(especially after I specifically said that in the future “social justice might become no more of a religion than Christianity”. Jeez, you can’t satisfy some people)
Are more people finding the alt-right appealing? Or is the left continuing to move the goalposts as to what counts as alt right?
As discussed here previously, Jordan Peterson has been described as alt right. Hell, I’ve heard Dennis Prager described as alt right. I’m sure some alternative weekly newspaper in Utah is currently composing an editorial to denounce the senate candidacy of alt right Mitt Romney…
I’m guessing mebbe 70 to 80 pct of people who call themselves “alt right” reject “white nationalism”. More out of it being incoherent gibberish than morally objectionable. The term being bandied about for Spencer-types is “alt retard”.
No, I think it’s usually used to describe anyone who does not make great effort to constantly signal opposition to Donald Trump.
Spencer did not coin the term “alt right”, Paul Gottfried did. The only reason you associate “alt right” primarily with Daily Stormer types is because of the leftist propaganda machine. I was calling myself “alt right” before I even knew who Richard Spencer was. The likely reason for “usually used to describe” is that you don’t much venture outside of your ideological bubble.
Spencer is such a clown I’m tempted to think he is a false flag operation ( I don’t but the notion is tempting)
“Alt Right” really isn’t a side. It just has the following criteria:
A) wants to defeat the left
B) doesn’t think the Republican Party, or various subordinate “conservative” political parties, is the vehicle to defeat the left
The problem with that is Spencer was using “alt right” to label all sorts of people who were not white nationalists. Further, the left uses the term “alt right” to try and lie about people who are not white nationalists, hoping the term will imply those targets are white nationalists. I highly doubt Spencer even originated the term as there were a number of terms floating around at the time to describe people who were not leftist but who didn’t consider the Republican Party competent to go to war with the left.
That last line is pretty much all “alt right” means, it’s very, very big tent. Yes, I’m perfectly willing to temporarily ally with Hitler-lovers to decisively defeat the left. This is very much not semantic.
We already have such a label: white nationalist. It’s been around for decades. Why the sudden need for an additional, and co synonymous, label? I’ll tell you why. Spencer is trying to maneuver a bunch of non white nationalists into his corner. And the Left is trying to imply that vast portions of the non Left in western countries have closet cases of Hitler-loving.
In the formulation “progressives, neoliberal, and conservatives,” The last ought to be broken into Reaganite/FOX News conservatives (anti-tax traditionalists) and populists (welfarist traditionalists).
The U.S. elite is indeed divided into progressives, neoliberals (and libertarians), and Reaganite “conservatives.” But the broader U.S. electorate is divided into progressives, Reaganites, and populists. The partisan duopoly has a progressive/neoliberal coalition and a Reaganite/neoliberal. Populists generally vote against whichever of these has irritated them most lately, rather than for either coalition.
Trump ran on unusually populist themes, but has governed as a Reaganite. The fact that populists are about a third of the U.S. electorate, but without any representation among higher S.E.S. opinion-makers (to the point where even as observer as acute as Scott can conflate welfare-statist populists with small-government Reaganites) will likely continue to destabilize U.S.politics (75% confidence) over the next five years.
Here’s an article with an excellent chart of the U.S. electorate. Clockwise from bottom left, it’s what I’m calling progressives, populists, Reaganites, and neoliberals. Note how very few neoliberal voters (as opposed to pundits and pols) there are: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what-really-happened-in-the-2016-election.html
Fingers crossed that that the “only a market for five computers”-wrong prediction isn’t the bioengineering one.
I believe this older prediction technically goes under cryptocurrency.
(~80% IMO)
That’s somewhat vague. What is the metric for political polarisation?
> AI translation will become flawless, and we will hear how language is just a formal system that can be brute-forced without understanding.
I don’t think so, at least for literary translation.
Everything I’ve read about it says that there are always tricky tradeoffs because languages don’t divide up the world in the same ways. There are languages which use relative location (right and left) and languages which use absolute location (north and south).
The challenges become more intense the older the text is, since the world described is more different from the modern world.
If you give the reader contextual clues, it’s not the same as it would be for readers who don’t need the clues.
I’d settle for a Turing test, I think– computer translations of literary texts which can’t be reliably detected by experts.
Even translating between computer languages is hard. How close might we get to flawless translation in 5 years?
Not sure if there are any rosy precedents for that if, as per your scenario, said class war is a defacto race war at the same time.
The Model 3 with full self-driving hardware costs less than $100,000, and Tesla insists the software for Level 4 Autonomy will be functional (though not necessarily pushed out to consumers) in around 6 months. Are you referring to Level 5 Autonomy for your prediction, or do you expect Tesla’s prediction to be off by four years?