The Metaculus Journal

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/11200/war-of-attrition-updated-endgame-forecasts-for-the-ukraine-russia-conflict/

Robert de Neufville is a superforecaster and former Director of Communications of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He writes and forecasts at Telling the Future.

Russia appears to have counted on a quick, decisive victory in Ukraine. Its goal was to quickly take Kyiv and other key targets, kill or capture Zelensky, and install a new regime friendly to Russia. If Russia could achieve its objectives within the first few days of the war—so that the conflict was resolved almost as soon as it began—the US and Europe would be unable to unify behind severe sanctions.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9527/will-the-great-resignation-spread/

In 2021 there were many stories about workers quitting jobs. Pundits dubbed this phenomenon the Great Resignation.

Statistically, the best measure of quits in the United States comes from the government's Job Openings and Labor Market Survey, or JOLTS. As of this writing, the latest release from the Department of Labor covered November activity. It reported that "the quits rate increased to 3.0 percent, matching a series high last seen in September." So we are seeing the Great Resignation in the data.

As background, the Labor Department reports three major monthly national surveys. Two of these, the Household Survey and the Establishment Survey, have been used for many decades. The JOLTS survey is more recent, with no data prior to the 21st century.

The Household Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau but reported by the Labor Department, contacts a sample of 60,000 households in order to find the employment status of the adults. This survey is used to calculate the unemployment rate.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8339/life-on-the-icy-moons-and-ocean-worlds-of-the-outer-solar-system/

The following essay was contributed by space systems engineer Kostas Konstantinidis

The search for life elsewhere in the universe is one of the driving forces behind space exploration. Its discovery would be one of the great scientific discoveries of the 21st century.

Some of the strongest candidates for hosting life in the present day that are closest to us are the so-called icy moons (also known as the "ocean worlds") orbiting around the gas giant planets in the outer solar system. By closely investigating these moons we could discover a second genesis of life, or at least constrain the conditions under which life could emerge and thrive.

This essay is grounded by the following forecast questions asking:

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9826/renewables-forecasting/

Published by RyanBeck on Feb 14, 2022.

In a recent article about solar power, Tom Chivers described how growth in solar power has outpaced many forecasts, as well as the challenges involved in accurately forecasting trends in solar power. Making accurate forecasts about the future of solar is important for understanding what future CO₂ emissions may look like and what our chances of mitigating the effects of climate change are. In this essay I attempt to estimate the bounds of solar and wind growth.

The first stage of putting together an energy forecast is to understand the relevant background information. What the different units mean, how different energy types can be compared directly, and what the previous trends look like are all essential if we want to understand the future of electricity generation.

When electricity generation is talked about it can be easy to confuse power and energy. Power is a measure of the rate at which work is being done. Power is commonly measured in watts when discussing electricity generation. Energy is how much work has been done, or the amount of power exerted over time. It is commonly measured in watt-hours, as it is the amount of power (watts) multiplied by the amount of time that power was exerted (hours). We can imagine power as the rate of water flowing out of a hose, while energy is the amount of water in the bucket that the hose is filling after a given period of time.

These are important concepts when talking about electricity generation. When a new power plant is installed it's usually described in terms of either its power or its capacity. But discussions about what a power plant produces are in terms of energy–such as descriptions of how much energy the plant generated in a given year.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9885/action-ontologies-computer-ontologies/

The following essay is by Jacob Falkovich who writes at Putanumonit.com

Out in the universe, there are merely atoms¹ and the void. On the table in front of you, there's a ripe tomato. Inside your skull is a brain, a collection of neurons that have no direct access to either atoms or tomatoes — only the electrochemical state of some other neurons. And yet your brain is able to perceive a tomato and various qualities of it: red, round, three-dimensional, real.

On the common how-it-seems view of perception, there is no particular mystery to this. In this view, light from the tomato hits your eyes and is decoded "bottom-up" in your brain into simple features such as color, shape, and size, which are then combined into complex perceptions such as "tomato." This view is intuitively appealing: Whenever we perceive a tomato we find the actual tomato there; thus we believe the tomato to be the sole and sufficient cause of the perception.

A closer look begins to challenge this intuition. You may see a tomato up close or far away, at different angles, partially obscured, in dim light, etc. The perception of it as being red, round, and a few inches across doesn't change even though the light hitting your retina is completely different in each case: different angles of your visual field, different wavelengths, etc.

Take color for example. Naively, the perception of color is the detection of wavelengths of light, and yet you perceive the same color from green light (530 nm) as you do from a mix of blue (470 nm) and yellow (570 nm). A white piece of paper will appear white in your perception even though it actually reflects the wavelengths of the light around it: blue under a clear sky, green if held close to grass, orange by candle light. The strawberries in the image below appear red even though there isn't a single red-hued pixel in it. Wherever the perception of color is coming from, it is certainly not the mere bottom-up decoding of light wavelengths.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9828/competing-institutional-solutions-to-housing-supply-restrictions/

n the last few years, increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum and across the developed world have begun to recognize the effects of restrictive housing rules on high housing prices in many global cities. In these cities, the physical cost of producing an additional unit of housing is lower than the value at which one could sell it for, but people do not produce more because of regulations. And importantly, the implications of restricted housing development don't end with elevated prices, as those prices create economic and social ripples.

Robert de Neufville is a superforecaster and former Director of Communications of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He writes a Substack on forecasting called Telling the Future.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10164/monetary-policy-in-2050/

There is a broad consensus that monetary policies set by central banks like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank are critical to avoiding depressions like the global Great Recession, and for ensuring that real economic shocks like COVID-19 do not have unnecessarily harmful economic consequences.

These central bank monetary policies have evolved significantly in the 15 years since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10025/space-debris-and-the-kessler-syndrome/

The following essay was contributed by space systems engineer Kostas Konstantinidis