Last year I made a number of predictions for 2016 to see how well calibrated I am. Here is the results:
| Prediction | Correct? |
| No nuclear war: 99% | 1 |
| No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 95% | 1 (Orlando: 50) |
| I will be involved in at least one published/accepted-to-publish research paper by the end of 2015: 95% | 1 |
| Vesuvius will not have a major eruption: 95% | 1 |
| I will remain at my same job through the end of 2015: 90% | 1 |
| MAX IV in Lund delivers X-rays: 90% | 1 |
| Andart II will remain active: 90% | 1 |
| Israel will not get in a large-scale war (ie >100 Israeli deaths) with any Arab state: 90% | 1 |
| US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 90% | 1 |
| New Zeeland has not decided to change current flag at end of year: 85% | 1 |
| No multi-country Ebola outbreak: 80% | 1 |
| Assad will remain President of Syria: 80% | 1 |
| ISIS will control less territory than it does right now: 80% | 1 |
| North Korea’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 80% | 1 |
| The US NSABB will allow gain of function funding: 80% | 1 [Their report suggests review before funding, currently it is up to the White House to respond. ]
|
| US presidential election: democratic win: 75% | 0 |
| A general election will be held in Spain: 75% | 1 |
| Syria’s civil war will not end this year: 75% | 1 |
| There will be no NEO with Torino Scale >0 on 31 Dec 2016: 75% | 0 (2016 XP23 showed up on the scale according to JPL, but NEODyS Risk List gives it a zero.) |
| The Atlantic basin ACE will be below 96.2: 70% | 0 (ACE estimate on Jan 1 is 132) |
| Sweden does not get a seat on the UN Security Council: 70% | 0 |
| Bitcoin will end the year higher than $200: 70% | 1 |
| Another major eurozone crisis: 70% | 0 |
| Brent crude oil will end the year lower than $60 a barrel: 70% | 1 |
| I will actually apply for a UK citizenship: 65% | 0 |
| UK referendum votes to stay in EU: 65% | 0 |
| China will have a GDP growth above 5%: 65% | 1 |
| Evidence for supersymmetry: 60% | 0 |
| UK larger GDP than France: 60% | 1 (although it is a close call; estimates put France at 2421.68 and UK at 2848.76 – quite possibly this might change) |
| France GDP growth rate less than 2%: 60% | 1 |
| I will have made significant progress (4+ chapters) on my book: 55% | 0 |
| Iran nuclear deal holding: 50% | 1 |
| Apple buys Tesla: 50% | 0 |
| The Nikkei index ends up above 20,000: 50% | 0 (nearly; the Dec 20 max was 19,494) |
Overall, my Brier score is 0.1521. Which doesn’t feel too bad.
Plotting the results (where I bin together things in [0.5,0.55], [0.5,0.65], [0.7 0.75], [0.8,0.85], [0.9,0.99] bins) give this calibration plot:
Overall, I did great on my “sure bets” and fairly weakly on my less certain bets. I did not have enough questions to make this very statistically solid (coming up with good prediction questions is hard!), but the overall shape suggests that I am a bit overconfident, which is not surprising.
Time to come up with good 2017 prediction questions.