https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9613/explainable-ai-and-trust-issues/ AI researchers exploring ways to increase trust in AI recognize that one barrier to trust, often, is a lack of explanation. This recognition has led to the development of the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In their paper Formalizing Trust in Artificial Intelligence, Jacovi et al. classify an AI system as trustworthy to a contract if it is capable of maintaining this contract: A recommender algorithm might be trusted to make good recommendations, and a classification algorithm might be trusted to classify things appropriately. When a classification algorithm makes grossly inappropriate classifications, we feel betrayed, and the algorithm loses our trust. (Of course, a system may be untrustworthy even as we continue to place trust in it.) This essay explores current legal implementations of XAI as they relate to explanation, trust, and human data subjects (e.g. users of Google or Facebook)—while forecasting outcomes relevant to XAI.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8701/the-path-to-controlling-cancer/ Treating cancer is a battle against exponential growth of mutating cells, so even breakthrough drugs may offer only incremental increases in survival time before residual tumors rebound. But as we learn more about the fundamental mechanisms of cancer, we can target those processes more directly. When will people diagnosed with the most lethal cancers more often than not survive for years? I will examine progress in cancer treatment and speculate on the path toward managing intractable cancer types. Cancer’s complexity Why are several-year survival rates the currency of progress in fighting cancer? It is easy to wonder, especially if you have a personal connection to cancer, why we keep seeing breakthroughs that result in a small bump in survival times rather than cures. In short, cancer cells are human cells and they evolve. It is easy to kill cancer cells, but difficult to kill them without destroying the patient’s body. And it is extremely difficult to kill every one of them before they evolve again. Most mutations either have no effect or they kill the cell and therefore self-correct. Even when mutations self-perpetuate against all odds, the body has many defenses against them. The chances of a combination of mutations evading all this is vanishingly small, but there are trillions of opportunities for it to happen in the body. By the time it is diagnosed, a tumor has already bested a solid wall of defenses. That means there is no easy fix for cancer, and a variety of treatments are used—primarily different types of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. The relative importance of each of these will continue to evolve. Predicting survival rates

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8702/the-promise-and-impact-of-the-next-generation-of-weight-loss-drugs/ Obesity is a burden on individuals and on society, but it has historically been hard to treat. Until recently, weight loss approaches based on diet/lifestyle and drugs struggled to produce safe and sustainable weight loss of greater than 5% of body weight on average. That is changing with the development of highly effective, and apparently safe, new weight loss drugs. Which drugs will make it to patients, when will they arrive, who will have access to them, and how will they impact public health? Obesity is common and has historically been hard to treat Forty-three percent of US adults have obesity, and this number has continued to increase over the last four decades, despite the fact that two-thirds of this group attempts weight loss each year. Although US obesity rates are higher than most other countries, obesity is common in the majority of wealthy countries and its prevalence is increasing nearly everywhere.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9191/methods-for-solving-protein-structures/ Proteins are complex molecules that comprise the bulk of functional parts of living things. They are encoded in DNA and RNA as genes. By sequencing DNA, or sometimes even the proteins themselves, we can learn the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein. But the way chemical strands fold into the correct 3D shape to form a functional protein is hard to predict. And it’s also often difficult to observe the structure of a protein directly, as they are small enough that the important details involve the positions of individual atoms. Nevertheless, there has been much effort to understand the structures of proteins in humans and other organisms. The structures can explain why a gene and the protein it encodes is essential, why a particular mutation causes cancer, or which drug molecules can fit in a protein pocket to alter the protein’s activity. In short, we can learn how living things work (or don't work) and how we can intervene. There has been an impressive diversity of approaches for predicting protein structures. For example, over the last decade I’ve been intrigued by Foldit, a computer game used to crowdsource human problem solving to find protein structures that best satisfy realistic chemical constraints. Of course, many techniques beyond human intuition are used for prediction too.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8739/population-crashes-the-deadliest-events-in-history/ Throughout history, for most of the time, world population has been growing, with the rate of that growth also increasing along with the transitions between the foraging era, the farming era, and the industrial era. While declines in the population of specific regions or countries have been more commonplace, declines in the overall world population have been quite rare and haven't lasted very long. The two main causes of such occasional reversals in the overall trend of growth have been pandemics and wars, in that order. While both the data about historical world population and the death tolls of various pandemics and wars are uncertain, what we do know is sufficient to at least give us a sense of the order of magnitude of the worst population crashes in history. Shifting focus from the past to the future, many of the concerns about existential risk have a natural weaker counterpart in the form of concerns about population crashes which are not large enough to tip the species over the precipice of extinction. Since humans have never actually gone extinct or come anywhere close to it during or after the agricultural era, the only base rate information we have comes from the history of global population declines. It's therefore worth looking over the biggest cases to understand their causes along with their magnitudes.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8807/reducing-nuclear-risk-through-improved-us-china-relations/ Heightened geopolitical tensions can increase the risk of war, and when tensions between nuclear powers deteriorate the risk of nuclear war can increase. One such relationship facing heightened tensions is between the United States and China. This is particularly concerning as China has recently increased its nuclear stockpile and shown increased aggression toward neighboring states. This essay examines the risk of nuclear war between the US and China and offers possible means of lowering that risk. Background China's nuclear stockpile growth has been notable, increasing by 60 warheads from 2019 to 2020, the largest recent increase of any nuclear capable state (see the figure below from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), US and Russia not shown).

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10685/malaria-and-the-historic-rtss-vaccine/ The following essay was contributed by public health researcher Jon Servello.   This essay makes extensive use of abbreviations. The list can be found here. Malaria caused 627,000 deaths in 2020, largely among children under five years of age in sub-Saharan Africa. Interventions aimed at preventative treatment could save a considerable number of lives, bring about long-term economic benefits to countries with endemic malaria, and yield substantial benefits to humanity as a whole.  After decades of varied success in vaccine development, a four-dose regimen of RTS,S/AS01 (brand name Mosquirix) showed promising initial results in preventing clinical disease from Plasmodium falciparum at 11 trial sites across west and central Africa, though this quickly declined to an average of 25.9% efficacy in the 6 to 12 week old age range, and 36.3% in the 5 to 17 month range. The European Medicines Agency licensed the vaccine in 2015, and RTS,S/AS01 is being rolled out via the Malaria Vaccine Implementation Program (MVIP) by the World Health Organization in Ghana, Malawi, and Kenya.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8938/solar-power-current-challenges-encouraging-progress/ The world is hugely reliant on fossil fuels. Despite impressive progress in the development of renewable energy, still about 85% of the world’s energy comes from oil, gas, and coal. The progress in recent years has meant that the worst-case climate outcomes are now unlikely. But we are still on course for around 3°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, according to climate models, unless our direction changes further. Climate policy has a huge part to play in improving that situation, and agreements made at COP26 and other international forums can alter our course. But much of the most important change has been down to improvements in technology.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9247/polygenic-selection-of-embryos/ In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a fertilization procedure in which ova are removed from a woman and combined with sperm in a laboratory culture, with the resulting embryo then implanted in the woman’s or a surrogate mother's uterus. This assistive reproductive technology has been used successfully since 1978, and its use has increased over time, owing in part to women choosing to bear children later in their lives.  Often, combining sperm with extracted ova results in multiple viable embryos. For many years, doctors have been able to perform diagnostic screening tests to check the embryos for chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome and gene defects like Tay-Sachs, allowing them to select and implant the healthiest embryo.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10188/biosecurity-vulnerabilities-of-american-food-supply/ In the early summer of 1968, farmers in Louisiana noticed small, elongated brown lesions running down green leaves of corn. These plants quickly died or experienced extensive rot that rendered the vegetable inedible. By 1970, these symptoms could be seen on acre after acre of corn from Florida to North Dakota. The disease soon had a name: southern corn leaf blight (SCLB). The fungal pathogen that caused SCLB, although virulent, could only infect a specific hybrid of corn. This hybrid, which was bred to develop a more efficient ear, was one of the most planted seeds in the country at the time. Once the cause of the vulnerability was discovered, seed companies simply switched hybrids. By 1972, the American corn market rebounded—although not before suffering major economic losses. The world is now more cognizant of catastrophic biological risk. However, the focus is mainly on direct impacts to human health. The 1970 SCLB epidemic (technically termed epiphytotic) is a prime example of a fast moving plant disease that can inflict sudden and outsized damage to the agricultural industry. Is there significant biorisk to America’s food production and supply? In light of increasing food demand for a growing population and the easy conveyance of biological threats via global trade/travel, let’s explore potential biosecurity vulnerabilities in America’s agricultural industry and discuss possible solutions to mitigate these vulnerabilities.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/11200/war-of-attrition-updated-endgame-forecasts-for-the-ukraine-russia-conflict/ Robert de Neufville is a superforecaster and former Director of Communications of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He writes and forecasts at Telling the Future. Russia appears to have counted on a quick, decisive victory in Ukraine. Its goal was to quickly take Kyiv and other key targets, kill or capture Zelensky, and install a new regime friendly to Russia. If Russia could achieve its objectives within the first few days of the war—so that the conflict was resolved almost as soon as it began—the US and Europe would be unable to unify behind severe sanctions.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9527/will-the-great-resignation-spread/ In 2021 there were many stories about workers quitting jobs. Pundits dubbed this phenomenon the Great Resignation. Statistically, the best measure of quits in the United States comes from the government's Job Openings and Labor Market Survey, or JOLTS. As of this writing, the latest release from the Department of Labor covered November activity. It reported that “the quits rate increased to 3.0 percent, matching a series high last seen in September.” So we are seeing the Great Resignation in the data. As background, the Labor Department reports three major monthly national surveys. Two of these, the Household Survey and the Establishment Survey, have been used for many decades. The JOLTS survey is more recent, with no data prior to the 21st century. The Household Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau but reported by the Labor Department, contacts a sample of 60,000 households in order to find the employment status of the adults. This survey is used to calculate the unemployment rate.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8339/life-on-the-icy-moons-and-ocean-worlds-of-the-outer-solar-system/ The following essay was contributed by space systems engineer Kostas Konstantinidis The search for life elsewhere in the universe is one of the driving forces behind space exploration. Its discovery would be one of the great scientific discoveries of the 21st century.  Some of the strongest candidates for hosting life in the present day that are closest to us are the so-called icy moons (also known as the “ocean worlds”) orbiting around the gas giant planets in the outer solar system. By closely investigating these moons we could discover a second genesis of life, or at least constrain the conditions under which life could emerge and thrive.  This essay is grounded by the following forecast questions asking:

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9826/renewables-forecasting/ Published by RyanBeck on Feb 14, 2022. In a recent article about solar power, Tom Chivers described how growth in solar power has outpaced many forecasts, as well as the challenges involved in accurately forecasting trends in solar power. Making accurate forecasts about the future of solar is important for understanding what future CO₂ emissions may look like and what our chances of mitigating the effects of climate change are. In this essay I attempt to estimate the bounds of solar and wind growth. Pieces of the puzzle The first stage of putting together an energy forecast is to understand the relevant background information. What the different units mean, how different energy types can be compared directly, and what the previous trends look like are all essential if we want to understand the future of electricity generation. Power and energy When electricity generation is talked about it can be easy to confuse power and energy. Power is a measure of the rate at which work is being done. Power is commonly measured in watts when discussing electricity generation. Energy is how much work has been done, or the amount of power exerted over time. It is commonly measured in watt-hours, as it is the amount of power (watts) multiplied by the amount of time that power was exerted (hours). We can imagine power as the rate of water flowing out of a hose, while energy is the amount of water in the bucket that the hose is filling after a given period of time. These are important concepts when talking about electricity generation. When a new power plant is installed it’s usually described in terms of either its power or its capacity. But discussions about what a power plant produces are in terms of energy–such as descriptions of how much energy the plant generated in a given year.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9885/action-ontologies-computer-ontologies/ The following essay is by Jacob Falkovich who writes at Putanumonit.com The mystery of perception Out in the universe, there are merely atoms¹ and the void. On the table in front of you, there’s a ripe tomato. Inside your skull is a brain, a collection of neurons that have no direct access to either atoms or tomatoes — only the electrochemical state of some other neurons. And yet your brain is able to perceive a tomato and various qualities of it: red, round, three-dimensional, real. On the common how-it-seems view of perception, there is no particular mystery to this. In this view, light from the tomato hits your eyes and is decoded “bottom-up” in your brain into simple features such as color, shape, and size, which are then combined into complex perceptions such as “tomato.” This view is intuitively appealing: Whenever we perceive a tomato we find the actual tomato there; thus we believe the tomato to be the sole and sufficient cause of the perception. A closer look begins to challenge this intuition. You may see a tomato up close or far away, at different angles, partially obscured, in dim light, etc. The perception of it as being red, round, and a few inches across doesn’t change even though the light hitting your retina is completely different in each case: different angles of your visual field, different wavelengths, etc.  Take color for example. Naively, the perception of color is the detection of wavelengths of light, and yet you perceive the same color from green light (530 nm) as you do from a mix of blue (470 nm) and yellow (570 nm). A white piece of paper will appear white in your perception even though it actually reflects the wavelengths of the light around it: blue under a clear sky, green if held close to grass, orange by candle light. The strawberries in the image below appear red even though there isn’t a single red-hued pixel in it. Wherever the perception of color is coming from, it is certainly not the mere bottom-up decoding of light wavelengths.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9828/competing-institutional-solutions-to-housing-supply-restrictions/   n the last few years, increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum and across the developed world have begun to recognize the effects of restrictive housing rules on high housing prices in many global cities. In these cities, the physical cost of producing an additional unit of housing is lower than the value at which one could sell it for, but people do not produce more because of regulations. And importantly, the implications of restricted housing development don’t end with elevated prices, as those prices create economic and social ripples.

Robert de Neufville is a superforecaster and former Director of Communications of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He writes a Substack on forecasting called Telling the Future.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10164/monetary-policy-in-2050/ There is a broad consensus that monetary policies set by central banks like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank are critical to avoiding depressions like the global Great Recession, and for ensuring that real economic shocks like COVID-19 do not have unnecessarily harmful economic consequences. These central bank monetary policies have evolved significantly in the 15 years since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10025/space-debris-and-the-kessler-syndrome/ The following essay was contributed by space systems engineer Kostas Konstantinidis

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10439/russia-ukraine-conflict-forecasting-nuclear-risk-in-2022/