@mabramov See! Right here! It’s happening! The mundane utility! Do you know how annoying arriving at a calibrated probability would have been before prediction markets took off?
Hard disagree. 8% is wildly overinflated and it’s at 4% now. If you don’t find yourself substantially revising your plans based on a 50% drop in pandemic probability, and if you didn’t get seriously concerned about an 8% chance of a 40% CFR pandemic, then even you aren’t taking them seriously. The main utility of this prediction market is driving internet chatter on how useful prediction markets are.
I think the prediction market can be useful even if you need to apply corrections to the headline number. It makes a huge difference to me whether Manifold says 8% or 40%, even though I won’t necessarily fully trust either number until it’s had a while longer to shake out (and even then it depends on the market dynamics, liquidity, etc.)
We already had the top epidemiologist at the WHO saying it was not going to be a pandemic. Wha is the prediction market adding here other than a wild overestimate by a few extremely online anonymous non-experts not even gambling with real money? Why can’t you just map the WHO’s statement to epsilon if you need a number to satisfy your anxiety and move on with your day?
The idea that manifold markets of all things is becoming people’s go-to source rather than the WHO‘s top epidemiologist is a damning indictment of prediction markets.
“It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits [the virus] onward,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response, said. Public health officials should concentrate on finding and isolating people who do have symptoms in order to stop the pandemic, she said.
Van Kerkhove walked back her comment in a news briefing the following day, saying that she had been referring to a small subset of studies that follow people who never show COVID-19 symptoms and their contacts. “We do know that some people who are asymptomatic can transmit the virus on,” she said in the June 9 briefing. “What we need to better understand is how many people in the population don’t have symptoms. And, separately, how many of those individuals go on to transmit [the virus] to others.”
The WHO’s statement that asymptomatic transmission is rare “is not backed up by any data,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. “We know that there is asymptomatic transmission…. What we do not know is the extent to which that occurs. So when we hear statements that this is very rare, we do not know that as a fact.”
So in context, we had immediate, credible, clear pushback from multiple equally high-status figures in major media within 24 hours. That’s completely absent here as far as I can tell. And the Maria Van Kerkhove who made those statements at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic had a different level of experience with pandemic management from the Van Kerkhove who’s making those statements today.
Your historic interpretation appears to be that because she made a misleading, probably just plain mistaken statement 6 years ago at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was immediatelly called out, that she’s permanently untrustworthy and now we need to prioritize metaculus. That seems like a deeply foolish epistemic stance to me. An alternative way to interpret it is she screwed up, was called out, and has probably learned from that mistake, especially given that we’re dealing with a relatively known quantity in the Andes virus.
I 100% am sticking to my guns, metaculus is a wildly misleading source on this question and you all should be listening to the WHO.
I am confused why you are interpreting Jim to be making such a narrow claim? We have many confirmed instances of the WHO and the CDC and similar institutions acting extremely incompetently, and often deceptively during COVID.
Separately, sure, if you are happy to bet at 20:1 odds, my $1k against your $20k, same resolution criteria as the Polymarket. It seems like you think the probability is much lower.
I am confused why you are interpreting Jim to be making such a narrow claim?
I’m responding to the literal content of Jim’s comment, specifically and in detail. What more do you want from me? To read his mind? I supply multiple links with historic context deep diving into Jim’s casual one liner, and somehow I’m the problematic one in this conversation?
Separately, sure, if you are happy to bet at 20:1 odds, my $1k against your $20k, same resolution criteria as the Polymarket. It seems like you think the probability is much lower.
I do think the probability is much lower. But I frankly just do not want to bet with you or others here. It legitimizes more of what I find disturbing, which is the use of betting and prediction markets as a prime source of epistemic authority. It also signs me up for spending time negotiating bet logistics and resolution criteria, both now and in 7 months. That seems unappealing. What I find particularly irritating is the notion that that once a bet is proposed, it obviates a facts-and-logic based argument and undermines the credibility of the person turning down the bet. And that is what turns my “no” into a “HELL NO.”
What I would prefer is for you and others to consider the fact that a wide array of epidemiologists is currently in the news, saying, all with one voice, “this is not going to become a pandemic.” You can look into the personal history of the people making these claims. You can think about the difference between one expert making a claim that’s immediately contradicted by her peers vs. all the relevant experts in the media making the same statement, across a variety of institutions. You can read their scientific evidence and rationale. You can read what we know about Andes virus.
All those actions would teach you more about this virus and enable you to make a facts and logic based argument on the subject and derive your own number, if you need one in order to help make decisions.
If you feel like it, you can donate to a charity of your choice if it turns out that there’s no pandemic. If there’s a pandemic and I’m wrong, I’ll freely and openly confess to having been wildly overconfident.
Unfortunately the WHO’s top epidemiologist was also the WHO’s lead during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, where she proved untrustworthy.
And then you said:
The specific statement you’re referring to:
And I just don’t know why you think Jim is referring to this specific statement. Like, maybe it’s obvious from context, but it isn’t obvious to me.
I feel kind of confused on your other points. I agree that I could spend hours trying to weigh expert consensus and read about the details myself. I don’t want to. The prediction markets are telling me how likely it is. The prediction markets are generally well-calibrated. I don’t need to research more. Everything is good. You said that because the WHO top epidemiologist said it’s not going to be a pandemic I should stop worrying. That seems very dumb to me, and I don’t really think you believe it (clearly you yourself wouldn’t stop worrying based on it, you would at least check what other experts say and whether they disagree).
That’s the resolution criterion for the Manifold Market (well, technically for the Polymarket market that the Manifold one is to resolve identically to).
Oh, I think whether the WHO declares that a pandemic is occurred is probably trustworthy. I don’t know if I trust their pandemic predictions. How good is their track record?
I think that’s an unfair deployment of xkcd mockery. 8% of a pandemic this year is not a tiny chance, which means a 50% drop is actually a big deal. The issue was interpreting the prediction market as an accurate percentage when it should just be an indication of approximate risk.
I mean, no, of course I am not changing my plans based on a 50% drop in pandemic probability. There are tons of pandemic probabilities that change from 0.1% to 0.05%, every week or so, and I am not changing my actions based on that.
In this case, knowing the probability seems to be somewhere in the 1%-10% range is already extremely helpful! I don’t really need to know much more. And I have proxies I can use to evaluate the robustness of the market (like volume), so I am not miscalibrated about the noise.
Yep, not saying that the probability I was referencing here is a prediction market probability (not sure what would have made someone think that, but happy to clarify).
Hard disagree. 8% is wildly overinflated… The main utility of this prediction market is driving internet chatter on how useful prediction markets are.
Polymarket has it at 10%. I don’t know where you’re located, but if you’re able to buy some NO, and the WHO doesn’t characterize Hantavirus as a pandemic this year, then you’ll make ~11% returns.
I am not sure what you mean, do you currently think the probability is outside the 1%-10% range? Imperfect accuracy is fine, especially when it’s easy to adjust for.
Maybe I’m just super new to the world of prediction markets in general, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any immediate utility from that 8% figure. If anything the rhetoric in this three comment thread makes me agree with @mabramov even more now.
It sounds to me like you’re expecting too much from all information. Consider the information that physical matter is made of atoms, which are about a nanometer across, and have positively charged protons and neutrons in the center, and then much smaller electrons whizzing around in orbits. This has been revolutionary for society, leading to so much ability to do engineering and chemistry and understanding cosmology and so forth.
A typical teenager learning this information for the first time might ask “what utility will this give me personally?” and find it has little direct application. Yet I would not advise them that this information is not worth knowing.
That’s the first point, that information doesn’t need to be directly connected to an outcome to be worth knowing.
The second point is that fine gradations in information are valuable. I can imagine someone similarly saying “Why should it be valuable to anyone to know the difference between Apple Stock being $285 versus $275? Surely we should just care whether it’s doing well or not? Why don’t we just replace it with the words “Great” “Good” “Bad” “Worse”? Yet often small signs tell us something. A few percentage points of dip can imply that a new product release went poorly. A change in CEO leading to stock price raising a few points can indicate very good things about this new CEO.
In this case, I find information like “8% chance of a pandemic” valuable in lots of ways.
It helps me to know how often we get 8% chance pandemics. I wish I could look back over the decades and see how often pandemics got to being this likely. This generally helps me understand our civilizational resilience and how much of an issue pandemics are.[1]
It helps me to know how much to keep tracking it. If the prediction market gave it <1% then I would be like “Great, this is an update that I can stop thinking about it and stop tracking it.” At this range I expect we’re fine but I will still be on the lookout for more info.
I also like knowing the specific probabilities so I can learn which events have an important effect. For instance, it’s currently around 5%. There may be many news stories about this pandemic, and seeing which ones cause movement vs which ones don’t, will help me build a model of what information actually matters.
Added: The third point is that public legibility is a massive value-add, and could well be most of the value. Given that it’s public, it makes me more confident that, if it were to get higher, people would notice and warn me. Much of the news landscape is just people arguing whether something is an emergency (which our memetics are perversely incentivized to say is true all of the time), so whether lots of people are acting alarmed just isn’t something most people can be very sensitive to changes in. The change from 5% to 50% is serious for me and yet I don’t know how to tell that difference from the tone of people on twitter or in many media outlets, especially when they are not themselves precise.
To go into more detail on this, I had an LLM write the following so that the math checked out: you can imagine a world where every year carries a 5% pandemic risk, and another world where every 15 years carries a 75% pandemic risk. Over 60 years, both imply 3 expected pandemics, but they suggest very different prevention strategies: steady-state risk reduction in the first case, versus identifying and defusing rare high-risk transition periods in the second.
I mean, so much. First of all, the number is enormously more helpful than reading a bunch of articles that give me lots of detail that then force me to come up with my own model of the situation to come up with a probability.
And then the number itself of course drives all kinds of actions! Another COVID-level pandemic would be a huge deal that would change my actions drastically in hundreds of ways (this market is not about it being another COVID-level pandemic, but is a lower threshold).
Why don’t you think that’s useful? It seems like at least some smart people thought about it carefully, which is a great start. Are you referencing some other thread? If so, please share?
I’m referring to this post from last month (and I assume that post is why habyrka is tagging mabramov).
Sure, maybe there’s some usefulness in that it got smart people thinking about the question. And it gave us a figure of 8%.
But I don’t really understand what a person is to do with that number. What utility follows from that? And why is it worth, as @mabramov emphasises, nine-figure EA funding?
My reaction to an 8% probability of a pandemic is currently “doing nothing,” so in some sense I agree with you. If it was >50%, I would probably read up more on hantavirus and think about preparations I could make now (maybe at that point, I would have picked up on ambient freaking-out even without the prediction market, but I do like having a precise number). Maybe I “should” in fact be preparing for hantavirus even at an 8% probability, but I only have so much willpower and time in the day.
Notably, I can’t immediately think of any important decisions in my life that I made differently due to prediction markets. But someone whose job depends on making quick decisions based on global events, e.g. some government role in biosecurity, would probably find calibrated estimates on this kind of thing quite useful.
A Manifold market suggests an 8% chance of Hantavirus causing a pandemic in 2026
@mabramov See! Right here! It’s happening! The mundane utility! Do you know how annoying arriving at a calibrated probability would have been before prediction markets took off?
Hard disagree. 8% is wildly overinflated and it’s at 4% now. If you don’t find yourself substantially revising your plans based on a 50% drop in pandemic probability, and if you didn’t get seriously concerned about an 8% chance of a 40% CFR pandemic, then even you aren’t taking them seriously. The main utility of this prediction market is driving internet chatter on how useful prediction markets are.
I think the prediction market can be useful even if you need to apply corrections to the headline number. It makes a huge difference to me whether Manifold says 8% or 40%, even though I won’t necessarily fully trust either number until it’s had a while longer to shake out (and even then it depends on the market dynamics, liquidity, etc.)
We already had the top epidemiologist at the WHO saying it was not going to be a pandemic. Wha is the prediction market adding here other than a wild overestimate by a few extremely online anonymous non-experts not even gambling with real money? Why can’t you just map the WHO’s statement to epsilon if you need a number to satisfy your anxiety and move on with your day?
The idea that manifold markets of all things is becoming people’s go-to source rather than the WHO‘s top epidemiologist is a damning indictment of prediction markets.
https://apnews.com/live/hantavirus-cruise-ship-updates-05-06-2026
Unfortunately the WHO’s top epidemiologist was also the WHO’s lead during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, where she proved untrustworthy.
Here are links to ground this in historic context.
How often do asymptomatic people spread the coronavirus? It’s unclear
Are asymptomatic people spreading the coronavirus? A WHO official’s words spark confusion, debate
Claim that asymptomatic transmission ‘very rare’ was misunderstanding, says WHO official – as it happened
The specific statement you’re referring to:
So in context, we had immediate, credible, clear pushback from multiple equally high-status figures in major media within 24 hours. That’s completely absent here as far as I can tell. And the Maria Van Kerkhove who made those statements at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic had a different level of experience with pandemic management from the Van Kerkhove who’s making those statements today.
Your historic interpretation appears to be that because she made a misleading, probably just plain mistaken statement 6 years ago at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was immediatelly called out, that she’s permanently untrustworthy and now we need to prioritize metaculus. That seems like a deeply foolish epistemic stance to me. An alternative way to interpret it is she screwed up, was called out, and has probably learned from that mistake, especially given that we’re dealing with a relatively known quantity in the Andes virus.
I 100% am sticking to my guns, metaculus is a wildly misleading source on this question and you all should be listening to the WHO.
I am confused why you are interpreting Jim to be making such a narrow claim? We have many confirmed instances of the WHO and the CDC and similar institutions acting extremely incompetently, and often deceptively during COVID.
Separately, sure, if you are happy to bet at 20:1 odds, my $1k against your $20k, same resolution criteria as the Polymarket. It seems like you think the probability is much lower.
I’m responding to the literal content of Jim’s comment, specifically and in detail. What more do you want from me? To read his mind? I supply multiple links with historic context deep diving into Jim’s casual one liner, and somehow I’m the problematic one in this conversation?
I do think the probability is much lower. But I frankly just do not want to bet with you or others here. It legitimizes more of what I find disturbing, which is the use of betting and prediction markets as a prime source of epistemic authority. It also signs me up for spending time negotiating bet logistics and resolution criteria, both now and in 7 months. That seems unappealing. What I find particularly irritating is the notion that that once a bet is proposed, it obviates a facts-and-logic based argument and undermines the credibility of the person turning down the bet. And that is what turns my “no” into a “HELL NO.”
What I would prefer is for you and others to consider the fact that a wide array of epidemiologists is currently in the news, saying, all with one voice, “this is not going to become a pandemic.” You can look into the personal history of the people making these claims. You can think about the difference between one expert making a claim that’s immediately contradicted by her peers vs. all the relevant experts in the media making the same statement, across a variety of institutions. You can read their scientific evidence and rationale. You can read what we know about Andes virus.
All those actions would teach you more about this virus and enable you to make a facts and logic based argument on the subject and derive your own number, if you need one in order to help make decisions.
If you feel like it, you can donate to a charity of your choice if it turns out that there’s no pandemic. If there’s a pandemic and I’m wrong, I’ll freely and openly confess to having been wildly overconfident.
Maybe I am being dense here, but Jim said:
And then you said:
And I just don’t know why you think Jim is referring to this specific statement. Like, maybe it’s obvious from context, but it isn’t obvious to me.
I feel kind of confused on your other points. I agree that I could spend hours trying to weigh expert consensus and read about the details myself. I don’t want to. The prediction markets are telling me how likely it is. The prediction markets are generally well-calibrated. I don’t need to research more. Everything is good. You said that because the WHO top epidemiologist said it’s not going to be a pandemic I should stop worrying. That seems very dumb to me, and I don’t really think you believe it (clearly you yourself wouldn’t stop worrying based on it, you would at least check what other experts say and whether they disagree).
Why would I trust the WHO?
That’s the resolution criterion for the Manifold Market (well, technically for the Polymarket market that the Manifold one is to resolve identically to).
Oh, I think whether the WHO declares that a pandemic is occurred is probably trustworthy. I don’t know if I trust their pandemic predictions. How good is their track record?
Relevant xkcd: 1252
I think that’s an unfair deployment of xkcd mockery. 8% of a pandemic this year is not a tiny chance, which means a 50% drop is actually a big deal. The issue was interpreting the prediction market as an accurate percentage when it should just be an indication of approximate risk.
I mean, no, of course I am not changing my plans based on a 50% drop in pandemic probability. There are tons of pandemic probabilities that change from 0.1% to 0.05%, every week or so, and I am not changing my actions based on that.
In this case, knowing the probability seems to be somewhere in the 1%-10% range is already extremely helpful! I don’t really need to know much more. And I have proxies I can use to evaluate the robustness of the market (like volume), so I am not miscalibrated about the noise.
You actually wouldnt know if it was less than 1% due to interest rates
Yep, not saying that the probability I was referencing here is a prediction market probability (not sure what would have made someone think that, but happy to clarify).
Polymarket has it at 10%. I don’t know where you’re located, but if you’re able to buy some NO, and the WHO doesn’t characterize Hantavirus as a pandemic this year, then you’ll make ~11% returns.
I have better economic opportunities, thanks.
In 2015:
I think all that “unlikely” means is “less than 50%”. I value knowing what different sources believe at more granularity than that.
Right, I am mocking what the conversation would have been had the prediction market not existed (edited).
The accuracy of this market is dwarfed by the interest rate involved.
I am not sure what you mean, do you currently think the probability is outside the 1%-10% range? Imperfect accuracy is fine, especially when it’s easy to adjust for.
Maybe I’m just super new to the world of prediction markets in general, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any immediate utility from that 8% figure. If anything the rhetoric in this three comment thread makes me agree with @mabramov even more now.
Like, hooray, we have a number. What now?
It sounds to me like you’re expecting too much from all information. Consider the information that physical matter is made of atoms, which are about a nanometer across, and have positively charged protons and neutrons in the center, and then much smaller electrons whizzing around in orbits. This has been revolutionary for society, leading to so much ability to do engineering and chemistry and understanding cosmology and so forth.
A typical teenager learning this information for the first time might ask “what utility will this give me personally?” and find it has little direct application. Yet I would not advise them that this information is not worth knowing.
That’s the first point, that information doesn’t need to be directly connected to an outcome to be worth knowing.
The second point is that fine gradations in information are valuable. I can imagine someone similarly saying “Why should it be valuable to anyone to know the difference between Apple Stock being $285 versus $275? Surely we should just care whether it’s doing well or not? Why don’t we just replace it with the words “Great” “Good” “Bad” “Worse”? Yet often small signs tell us something. A few percentage points of dip can imply that a new product release went poorly. A change in CEO leading to stock price raising a few points can indicate very good things about this new CEO.
In this case, I find information like “8% chance of a pandemic” valuable in lots of ways.
It helps me to know how often we get 8% chance pandemics. I wish I could look back over the decades and see how often pandemics got to being this likely. This generally helps me understand our civilizational resilience and how much of an issue pandemics are.[1]
It helps me to know how much to keep tracking it. If the prediction market gave it <1% then I would be like “Great, this is an update that I can stop thinking about it and stop tracking it.” At this range I expect we’re fine but I will still be on the lookout for more info.
I also like knowing the specific probabilities so I can learn which events have an important effect. For instance, it’s currently around 5%. There may be many news stories about this pandemic, and seeing which ones cause movement vs which ones don’t, will help me build a model of what information actually matters.
Added: The third point is that public legibility is a massive value-add, and could well be most of the value. Given that it’s public, it makes me more confident that, if it were to get higher, people would notice and warn me. Much of the news landscape is just people arguing whether something is an emergency (which our memetics are perversely incentivized to say is true all of the time), so whether lots of people are acting alarmed just isn’t something most people can be very sensitive to changes in. The change from 5% to 50% is serious for me and yet I don’t know how to tell that difference from the tone of people on twitter or in many media outlets, especially when they are not themselves precise.
To go into more detail on this, I had an LLM write the following so that the math checked out: you can imagine a world where every year carries a 5% pandemic risk, and another world where every 15 years carries a 75% pandemic risk. Over 60 years, both imply 3 expected pandemics, but they suggest very different prevention strategies: steady-state risk reduction in the first case, versus identifying and defusing rare high-risk transition periods in the second.
I mean, so much. First of all, the number is enormously more helpful than reading a bunch of articles that give me lots of detail that then force me to come up with my own model of the situation to come up with a probability.
And then the number itself of course drives all kinds of actions! Another COVID-level pandemic would be a huge deal that would change my actions drastically in hundreds of ways (this market is not about it being another COVID-level pandemic, but is a lower threshold).
Why don’t you think that’s useful? It seems like at least some smart people thought about it carefully, which is a great start. Are you referencing some other thread? If so, please share?
I’m referring to this post from last month (and I assume that post is why habyrka is tagging mabramov).
Sure, maybe there’s some usefulness in that it got smart people thinking about the question. And it gave us a figure of 8%.
But I don’t really understand what a person is to do with that number. What utility follows from that? And why is it worth, as @mabramov emphasises, nine-figure EA funding?
Thanks for clarifying.
The use is that I don’t have to figure it out for myself! This saved me at least an hour, probably more.
My reaction to an 8% probability of a pandemic is currently “doing nothing,” so in some sense I agree with you. If it was >50%, I would probably read up more on hantavirus and think about preparations I could make now (maybe at that point, I would have picked up on ambient freaking-out even without the prediction market, but I do like having a precise number). Maybe I “should” in fact be preparing for hantavirus even at an 8% probability, but I only have so much willpower and time in the day.
Notably, I can’t immediately think of any important decisions in my life that I made differently due to prediction markets. But someone whose job depends on making quick decisions based on global events, e.g. some government role in biosecurity, would probably find calibrated estimates on this kind of thing quite useful.
4% now.
Polymarket has it at 10%, with $1.6M traded, at the time of writing.