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.)
My predictions to these topics: No experiment apart from OPERA will measure a neutrino speed >c with a significance of more than 3 sigma in 2012: 85%
Higgs boson will be seen with a local 5 sigma significance (ATLAS+CMS alone or in combination) near ~125 GeV in 2012: 90%
No other new particles will be seen with 5 sigma significance in 2012: 75%
The LHC will collide protons with lead at the end of 2012: 75%
Let's see.