Number 5 is my somewhat lame attempt at a feature request. What I mean is that, for example, on #6, I'd like to be able to say, that I assign, say, a 15% chance to there being 0 such papers, a 15% chance of 1, a 20% chance of 2, and so on. Of course, I could make multiple predictions, but this is tedious. It'd be really nice to be able to assign probabilities to a full range of quantities on one question. (And I expect it would make my predictions more accurate, too.) Each individual probability assignment would have to be judged "correct" or "incorrect" independently.
Going through expiring predictions reminded me. Just as we did for 2010 and 2011, it's time for LessWrong to make its beliefs pay rent and give hostages to fortune in making predictions for events in 2012 and beyond.
Suggested topics include: Methods of Rationality updates (eg. "will there be any?"), economic benchmarks (price of gold has been an educational one for me this past year), medical advances (but be careful not to be too optimistic!), personal precommitments (signing up for cryonics?), being curmudgeonly about self-improvement, making daring predictions about the future of AGI, and so on.
As before, please be fairly specific. I intend to put most predictions on PredictionBook.com and it'd be nice if they weren't too hard to judge in the future.
(If you want advice on making good predictions, I've tried to write up a few useful heuristics I've learned. So far in the judging process, I've done pretty well this year, although I'm a little annoyed I got a Yemen prediction right but for the wrong reasons.)