4 ms·

> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the

> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster. I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these. I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.

xxr 2y ago
I would love to hear more of these from your doc
- haberman 2y ago
  I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few: 2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ 2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
  - meibo 2y ago
    You are seeing the first two as "concluded"? Apple is known for playing long games, especially now that they need to be careful due to threats of regulation, and studies about long COVID take a long time - we really don't have enough research yet to be sure and we're barely 2 years out of the pandemic. I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
    - haberman 2y ago
      For the first, the prediction was "in the next few years." If we take "a few" as three, that would bring us to 2024-10-02, which was earlier this month. It could still happen someday, but didn't in the time frame of this prediction. For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
      - rapjr9 2y ago
        This doesn't sound like a crisis? These are all recent: "How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light" https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covid-cost-society-new-data-shed-light-2024a1000j5j https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi... "Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(23)00268-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2... "The Long Covid Moonshot" https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-historic-moonshot-legislation-to-address-the-long-covid-crisis/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i... "Long Covid is a significant health crisis in China too" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(24)00217-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6... "Long Covid at 3 Years" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years "The future of excess mortality after COVID-19" https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/health-and-longevity/covid-19-pandemic-synonymous-excess-mortality.html https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d... "Covid Brain" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain "The Indomitable Covid Virus" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention. And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
javajosh 2y ago
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
godelski 2y ago
Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?
- ted_bunny 2y ago
  It'd be pretty hard to curate. What qualifies? How are they ranked? Is this just a prediction market of ideas?
- haberman 2y ago
  I consider https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ the public version of this. It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
- myroon5 2y ago
  Metaculus hosted similar: https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure But apparently removed it recently: https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095 https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095
SamPatt 2y ago
Have any of those timed predictions proven correct yet?
aspenmayer 2y ago
I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?
llm_trw 2y ago
>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027. We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
- ggm 2y ago
  I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables. I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in. Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares. We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
    - ggm 2y ago
      South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract. Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar. I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present. As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid? https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-framework/2024/quantifying-synthetic-inertia-from-gfm-bess.pdf?la=en https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr... https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%20Strength%20Economic%20Evaluation%20Report%20-%2018%20February%202018.PDF https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...
tomjen3 2y ago
If we do face a wave of disaster, it will be because the government has prevented sufficient building of powerplants.

xxr 2y ago

I would love to hear more of these from your doc

haberman 2y ago
I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few: 2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406 2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770 2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912 2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/ 2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
- meibo 2y ago
  You are seeing the first two as "concluded"? Apple is known for playing long games, especially now that they need to be careful due to threats of regulation, and studies about long COVID take a long time - we really don't have enough research yet to be sure and we're barely 2 years out of the pandemic. I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
  - haberman 2y ago
    For the first, the prediction was "in the next few years." If we take "a few" as three, that would bring us to 2024-10-02, which was earlier this month. It could still happen someday, but didn't in the time frame of this prediction. For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
    - rapjr9 2y ago
      This doesn't sound like a crisis? These are all recent: "How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light" https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covid-cost-society-new-data-shed-light-2024a1000j5j https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi... "Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(23)00268-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2... "The Long Covid Moonshot" https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-historic-moonshot-legislation-to-address-the-long-covid-crisis/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i... "Long Covid is a significant health crisis in China too" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(24)00217-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6... "Long Covid at 3 Years" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years "The future of excess mortality after COVID-19" https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/health-and-longevity/covid-19-pandemic-synonymous-excess-mortality.html https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d... "Covid Brain" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain "The Indomitable Covid Virus" https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention. And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.

javajosh 2y ago

Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.

godelski 2y ago

Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?

ted_bunny 2y ago
It'd be pretty hard to curate. What qualifies? How are they ranked? Is this just a prediction market of ideas?
haberman 2y ago
I consider https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ the public version of this. It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
myroon5 2y ago
Metaculus hosted similar: https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure But apparently removed it recently: https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095 https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095

SamPatt 2y ago

Have any of those timed predictions proven correct yet?

aspenmayer 2y ago

I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?

llm_trw 2y ago

>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027. We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.

ggm 2y ago
I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I've worked as a quant for a power company and had more data than god about what was happening in a continent wide grid. The instabilities in the grid are caused by renewables turning on and off at the drop of a hat the whole network over. That's on top of the complete lack of any stable base load at night that comes with renewables. I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in. Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares. We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
  - ggm 2y ago
    South Australia is going to find out. Synchronous condensers have been a thing since forever, batteries are moving into that space. Sure they started in FCAS but they now bid for some of the inertia stuff too. SA is of course connected to the Australian east coast grid and are securing supply from them, but they got islanded in a big storm, the gas fallback generators didn't work and they lost the grid. Now, they have built out for wind, solar and battery. They haven't had a significant fail yet. Those gas generators who failed, and who failed to do black start are in court over their contract. Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar. I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present. As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid? https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-framework/2024/quantifying-synthetic-inertia-from-gfm-bess.pdf?la=en https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr... https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%20Strength%20Economic%20Evaluation%20Report%20-%2018%20February%202018.PDF https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...

tomjen3 2y ago

If we do face a wave of disaster, it will be because the government has prevented sufficient building of powerplants.