Looking back at 2023, what will I judge to have been the most important thing to have taken place? It can be social, technological, political or from any other area; an event or a development; the only requirement is that 2023 must have been an important year for it. Feel welcome to provide arguments (or counter-arguments) in the comments.
Usually, I try to make the resolution criteria for my markets as objective and well-defined as possible. Not this one, though; I'll resolve it 10 days into the new year according to my own judgment (although the state of the market will be one factor in my decision). I might split the answer according to the probabilities I see, although I'll probably try to stick to a few answers which convince me the most.
UPD. If you want to influence my thinking (and thus the resolution), please do explain your proposal/vote in the comments.
UPD2. Since a couple of people misread the title: Even though it hasn't closed yet, this market is about 2023, not 2024.
1,000
1.00I think this is a market where an explanation of the resolution is appropriate.
First, thanks to everybody who explained their thinking in the comments - I learned about a lot of topics, some of which I didn't have on my radar at all, some I just knew little about. The main goal of posing this question was to broaden my horizon; it certainly did that.
Second, I realize many people might be dissatisfied with me not picking specific options. I hope I made the subjectivity of the market clear enough in the description.
Third, I would appreciate any feedback on what I could have handled better, and whether you think another such market for 2024 made sense.
Now, for the resolution. I tried to describe my current thinking whenever people asked, and there were a lot of discussions in the comments. Here's a brief summary of my thinking:
I wanted to pick the topics which I assume to seem to have been most important in 2023, looking back years from now. This means that there should have been significant developments in 2023 which have global and long-term consequences.
I think this is the case with AI. Though we didn't have the same huge splash as with ChatGPT in 2022, I think AI went quite some way from "novelty toy" to "tool". Perhaps as importantly, it did make a really big leap into public debate, both in terms of short-term and long-term consequences, within the year.
I think this is also the case with weight-loss drugs. They promise to significantly reduce obesity, which would have huge benefits for people’s health in the long term – first in the rich countries, of course, and then worldwide. While Wegovy went on sale in 2022, and retatrutide is still in trials, the use of Wegovy skyrocketed in 2023, and trials came out during the year suggesting impressive health benefits.
While I think climate change is certainly a very significant topic, I was not convinced that 2023 being the warmest year was that important. 2016 was the previous record year, and I don’t think it was one of the most important things about it. A possible acceleration of the warming or the COP28 results may turn out to have been quite significant, but I was less certain about them.
The two other topics argued for in the comments were the stock market performance and the public debates about aliens. In the end, I wasn’t convinced that those will turn out to be as important.
Once again, thanks to everyone for participating!
@PS Honestly, this roughly matches my thinking (I wouldn’t have split 50-50, but higher onnAI), I just wish you had clarified that “more than one” was an option, because I would’ve prioritized betting on the underdog option as opposed to the one I thought was the most likely single answer.
@SantiagoRomeroBrufau The description did say "I might split the answer according to the probabilities I see, although I'll probably try to stick to a few answers which convince me the most."
@PS yeah i missed that clarification as well. I assumed it was a single winner market and was voting accordingly.
@PS I liked this. I found it 8 hours before close, so there was a quick turnaround time. It was clearly stated that the resolution was subjective, so I don't think anyone can object to you resolving it in the way that made sense to you. That actually allowed for a broader discussion than if you had tried for a more constrained and specific set of resolution criteria.
Fun fact I didn't realize going in: betting on "other" in a subsidized market can be quite profitable even if the "other" options people later come up with are unlikely to win. I bet M10 on other, got 546 shares. Then someone created an option I didn't like, I got 546 shares of that option automatically at no charge, while retaining my 546 shares of "other". Sold the shares of the unlikely option for M15.
As for whether it's worth it, I expect there may be diminishing marginal returns, but probably yes? Also I kinda hope fewer potentially-important things happen in 2024, 2023 was kind of a lot to take in.
@PS When deciding the most important thing, it might help to understand their respective scope of impact.
AI has undoubtedly had a significant impact this year. Still, its benefits are only accessible to a segment of people with the necessary tech skills and platforms where it can have a meaningful impact. While AI has proven advantageous for particular industries and white-collar workers in developed countries, it is unimportant to those lacking digital infrastructure and without meaningful ways of applying this new tech. This limits the global impact of AI, making it less important than it might seem to the average Manifold user.
The advancements made in weight loss drugs are significant, particularly in societies where obesity is a major health concern. These drugs represent a breakthrough for individuals with access to advanced healthcare systems who can afford such treatments. However, it does not have much impact in areas where basic healthcare needs are unmet or where obesity isn't prevalent due to different lifestyles and dietary patterns.
On the other hand, the record-high temperature in 2023 was a more significant event due to its widespread global impact. The United States alone experienced unprecedented weather and climate disasters this year, such as severe storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves. These disasters collectively resulted in a record $93 billion in damages. And you will find similar stories from all over the world.
While the science-fiction razzle dazzle of AI and weight loss drugs are truly impressive and mind-boggling, I hold that unprecedented levels of climate change-related destruction, while being the more boring option, still dwarfs the two others. That 2024 promises to be even hotter, with even more damages and casualties, adds to its importance.
Examples:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-saw-record-billion-dollar-climate-disasters-high-temps-2023-2024-01-09/
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/12/27/italy-and-spain-experienced-some-of-the-worlds-most-costly-climate-disasters-in-2023
@GazDownright I like the analysis here. And I've placed some M on climate change. But also, consider that perhaps importance should be increased based on how unexpected an event is. Like, in one sense, the fact that around 8 billion people had access to adequate food and sufficient water and lack of local homicide to not die is the most important thing that happened - but it's baked in to our expectations. There are hundreds of other quite important things that went right on a very large scale, as expected, in 2023. When we reflect back on 2023 and ask what thing was the most important, this is typically asking what salient thing made the biggest change to our future, relative to expectations, rather than "did we successfully make another trip around the sun as expected?" and other similar questions. And, well, although 2023 was a hot year, and climate change is important and global-scale, I wasn't shocked. Like, we expect each year to typically be hotter than the previous as long as the CO2 concentration keeps going up, we expect a big spike when El Nino is active, El Nino was active this year, so, I expected a big temperature spike, which happened. It was a bit hotter than climate scientists expected, but they haven't come out and said anything like "this is a datum that our models say shouldn't happen, we don't know what's going on", to my knowledge. If they had, or if the hotness of 2023 had shocked most people and led to massive climate action, you'd have a strong case. But in this case, I'd call the level of heating un*precedented*, but not as un*expected* as some other developments this year.
For me personally, in 2023 I had an opportunity to speak to some fairly influential people about AI, and in the beginning of the year I felt like speaking about existential risks would have gotten me labeled nuts... but by the end of the year, I can point to various broadly endorsed open letters and statements, and feel that the conversation has moved to a point where I can express my views without bearing a social cost. I didn't expect that, at the beginning of the year it felt like there was a good chance we'd create a superintelligence and get killed by it without even having broad public awareness that that was a possibility, whereas now there's an active conversation happening around AI risks, in public. So from an unexpectedness standpoint, AI stands out as a candidate, as does aliens, because the conversation has moved, and if it has done so for good reasons which we find out in 2024 or beyond, 2023 will be seen in retrospect as pivotal.
On the weight loss drugs, I haven't been following them so closely, so I'm more like "that was unexpected, but what are the long term side effects if people are on this for years? Will this in fact be a cure for obesity, or something people take for a while but do not take long term, and it's a step along the path to curing obesity or maybe even a red herring?" Seems unclear. Also seems like it will be patent protected and expensive for several decades, so while the long term effects may be large, the effects in 10 years are going to be limited.
But I'm not the decider on this one, so I've spread my bets around to all 4, plus "other", in case there's something in the mind of the market creator that isn't covered in the stated options.
@GazDownright attributing all natural disasters to climate change doesn't seem fair. Obviously you would need to do a statistical analysis controlling for various other factors over a longer timespan to estimate the increase in risk and associated expected cost. Also, these sorts of narratives never try to account for benefits to warming which can have all sorts of downstream effects (e.g. warm European winters surely helped Europeans wean themselves off of Russian gas as they built out LNG import infrastructure).
My impression has been the median IPCC scenario is one where climate change will have a growing drag on economic output but that many effects can be meaningfully mitigated, at some cost. It's the tail scenarios of climate change that actually feel scarier to me than the many other risks facing humanity, but currently those don't appear very likely.
@equinoxhq I appreciate taking the time to answer indepthly. This market was perhaps more about deciding what "most important thing" meant, than finding out which one it was.
@AlQuinn While we cannot say that these weather-related events would not have occurred 20 years ago, we know that the frequency and severity of weather-related disasters have increased due to rising temperatures, as verified by scientific studies. Therefore, providing examples of record losses caused by climate-related disasters in the US and a summary of climate disasters worldwide should be considered relevant references without further qualification than what I just added.
I agree that the positive effects of climate change are rarely discussed, and I wouldn't mind them being reported more. However, I don't believe that lower energy prices in Europe, for example, outweigh the loss of life and livelihoods. We have it too good in Europe; we deserve a couple on the nose to balance the global karma bill.
@GazDownright I'm not arguing for zeroing out the imputed cost of CC because we can't assign any single weather event to it--just that we can't assign CC as the cause to 100% of the annual weather disaster losses. Additionally, some quoted increases in disasters don't take inflation into account (quoting nominal dollar losses over time), while most also don't control for population growth, particularly in areas prone to disasters (development with forests leading to fire losses, development on low-lying coasts or river valleys leading to storm/flood losses).
Regarding the "Europe has it too easy"/karma sentiment, I'm going to strongly disagree with that. Go tell a pensioner in northern England that they had it too easy and that this is now all karmic justice as they shiver in their row-house. I think this is an anti-humanistic sentiment that implicitly holds that apparent human progress is in fact zero-sum with respect to some secular Gaian pseudo-diety. One of the more compelling counterargument I've read against those sorts of views is David Deutsch's in Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend if you haven't checked it out.
I wasn't shocked. Like, we expect each year to typically be hotter than the previous as long as the CO2 concentration keeps going up, we expect a big spike when El Nino is active, El Nino was active this year, so, I expected a big temperature spike, which happened. It was a bit hotter than climate scientists expected, but they haven't come out and said anything like "this is a datum that our models say shouldn't happen, we don't know what's going on", to my knowledge. If they had...
@GazDownright Well dang, looks like I was wrong... says a blog post published today.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/2023s-unexpected-and-unexplained
Summary: Normally El Nino effects are significant in the year after the one where it starts, but not so much in the starter year. For 2023, scientists were expecting the La Nina in the first half of the year and the El Nino in the second half to about cancel out. But they did not, so predictions for 2024 should be treated as less certain.
@GazDownright Well, if I had to pick a third issue, I think it'd be "climate change". However, my reading is that the climate scientists' reaction is mostly not "The temperatures are rising much faster than we expected", but rather "The temperature was higher than expected this year, and we don't really understand why." So it might turn out to have been a pivotal year, or an outlier - we just don't know yet...
