hasrussialaunchednukes.com used to be a website “to help [the author] and a few of [their] friends get notified when Russia launches any nukes towards Ukraine, which would be a sign for many of us to leave the big cities we live in, and chill in the countryside for a few weeks.” It used prediction markets for 2022, so it stopped working in 2023.
Some people asked me to make a version for 2023, so here it is at https://recursing.github.io/nukes.[1]
I manually curate the list of phone numbers, a bunch of which were sent to me by one of the people requesting this, you can ask for your number to be added using any of the links at the bottom of the website.
You can look at the incredibly hacky script I use to make phone calls here: it runs every 10 minutes on a Hetzner VPS I use for a bunch of things[2]
I don’t think this is extremely reliable, I give an ~80% chance that it will work, and I’ll do my best to prevent false alarms, but some people found it useful, and I was asked to share this here.
I would be curious to hear if you have any thoughts!
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Why do it in mid-september, given that the year is almost over? I actually implemented this in February, but procrastinated until today to write this post. But it will be trivial to update it for 2024, once the year is over.
- ^
I use vonage instead of twilio to handle phone calls because someone else was implementing a similar thing with twilio, and we wanted to have redundancy
What I want to be notified about is signs (e.g., satellite photos) that Russia or China is evacuating its cities.
Also, any threat by Russia or China to attack the US with nukes if Washington does not take specific action X before date Y.
Russia’s using a nuke in Ukraine wouldn’t increase my P(nuclear attack on the US) enough to cause me to relocate to a rural area, but those 2 other things would.
Do you think prediction markets wouldn’t respond appropriately to those things?
I think this issue could be fixed by lengthening the message of the phone calls (if it ever gets sent out) to also quote all the comments on the sentinel markets from the last ~week before the trigger time. The reason why is that I expect, if there were to ever be legitimate signs of a impending nuclear war, that people would leave plenty of comments on the relevant markets about these signs.
Thank you for building this! I have just signed up for it.
I’ve noticed that two of the three Manifold markets (Will a nuclear weapon detonate in New York City by end of 2023? and Will a nuclear weapon cause over 1,000 deaths in 2023?) could use a few thousand mana in subsidies to reduce the chance of a false alarm, even though both are moderately well-traded already. (I’ve just bet both of them down, but I personally don’t have enough mana to feel comfortable subsidizing both.)
I’ve placed some limit orders on both. It’s cheaper than subsidies and should work the same way (if there is no nuclear war)
Thank you for placing the limit orders! (You are “Martin Randall” if I understand correctly? I didn’t know you were a LessWronger!)
No I’m Lorenzo!
Thank you!
I went ahead and created the 2024 version of one of the questions. If you’re looking for high-liquidity questions to include, which seems like a good way to avoid false alarms / pranks, this one seems like a good inclusion.
There are a bunch of lower-liquidity questions; including a mix of those with some majority-rule type logic might or might not be worth it.