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.)
I quite like prediction that Sean Carrol made on his blog. So much so, I will adopt them in full. They are, after all, based on Science!
Freely-falling objects will accelerate toward the ground at an approximately constant rate, up to corrections due to air resistance.
Of all the Radium-226 nuclei on the Earth today, 0.04% will decay by the end of the year.
A line drawn between any planet (or even dwarf planet) and the Sun will sweep out equal areas in equal times.
Hurricanes in the Northern hemisphere will rotate counterclockwise as seen from above.
The pressure of a gas squeezed in a piston will rise inversely with the change in volume.
Electric charges in motion will give rise to magnetic fields.
The energy of an object at rest whose mass decreases will also decrease, by the change in mass times the speed of light squared.
The content of the world’s genomes will gradually evolve in ways determined by fitness in a given environment, sexual selection, and random chance.
The entropy of closed systems will increase.
People will do many stupid things, and some surprisingly smart ones.
All of these are contingent on the degree of certainty the available evidence allows us to have in the theories that predict these results. I don't think there's any degree of evidence that would make a 100% prediction rational. (To illustrate, consider independently the probabilities that all physicists are part of a conspiracy, supernatural entities exist and/or we live in a simulation.)
I realise this was probably meant flippantly, but there is a serious point to be made about confusing 'the best estimates based on our currently available knowledge and theory' and 'immutable laws of the universe.'