It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hopefully no major new crises started while we were . . . oh. Darn.

Mantic Monkey

Metaculus predicts 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it’s all about the distribution

90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases.

This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it’s true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I’m not sure. How would you test that?