Pseudorandomness contest: Prizes, results, and analysis

In December I ran a pseudorandomness contest. Here's how it worked: In Round 1, participants were invited to submit 150-bit strings of their own devising. They had 10 minutes to write down their string while using nothing but their own minds. I received 62 submissions.I then used a computer to generate 62 random 150-bit strings, …

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Grading my 2020 predictions

In December 2019, I made 132 probabilistic predictions for 2020. As promised, I've come back to evaluate them on three criteria: calibration, personal optimism/pessimism, and performance relative to PredictIt (and an anonymous friend who sent me their predictions for some of the events). I'll get to all of those, but first, here are my predictions, …

Overall numbers won’t show the English strain coming

Here is a plot of daily new positive COVID tests in the U.S. in the first half of March 2020. It's no surprise that by mid-March, most people were worried: the virus was here and was growing fast. This was evident by the time there were 1,000 new positive tests per day. The lockdown began …