Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Old Danish saying (not Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra)
I have been inspired by Philip Tetlock and Matt Yglesias about the value of making public predictions. Predictions should include a degree of certainty. Predictions must be specific enough to be measurable (at the end of 2023, it must be clear if a prediction was correct or not). Because they are probabilistic, success is not any one prediction. Success is that if we look at just the predictions I gave an 80% probability score to, about 80% of them actually occurred. (It seems like 70% is my default.)
In that spirit, here are Muttroxia predictions for 2023:
- Biden officially announces his re-election campaign (90%)
- Donald Trump doesn’t spend any time in jail, house arrest etc. He lives the year free. (90%)
- Congress passes no significant legislation about immigration (90%)
- Muttroxia will not have any months with over ten posts after January. (80%).
- The NBA MVP will be Jokic or Giannis (80%) if the Celtics don’t win the championship. Luka, you don’t make your bad team any better and no one likes you. Hard to win an MVP that way. As good as Taytum is, if he doesn’t win the banner, all his stats will be discounted (“He just had a better team”).
- Donald Trump doesn’t have any final civil judgements found against him personally (that is, no fines or consequences) (70%)
- Inflation is below 4% by the end of 2023 (70%)
- Average Gas Price ends the year below $2.50. (70%)
- The Justice Department does not charge Donald Trump personally for anything related to Jan 6th. (70%)
- Celtics make it to the Eastern Conference finals (70%) (Yes, I’m keeping this low, there are a lot of good teams in the East. Things go wrong, winning is hard.)
- Electric car sales top 10% in the USA. (70%) They are currently at 6%, this would be almost a doubling of share in one year.
- UGA will repeat as college football champs. (Sorry Michigan, I gotta call ’em like I see ’em.) (60%)
- With abortion policy at the state level, there will be some further degradation, but generally there won’t be a massive rollback of abortion rights. (60%, but don’t know how to measure this.)
DeSantis generally has more support than Donald Trump, and is “winning” the GOP campaign. (70%, not sure how I’ll measure). Nah, I’m gonna back off this one.- Joe Biden is not impeached (The House does not formally approve and bring impeachment charges to the Senate.) (60%)
- By the end of 2023, I’ll forgot I made this post and need a reminder (80%).
