@BTE Infections are not cases, so an official here or there can admit to high infection rates but that not be reflected in any official case numbers, in particular, those based on OWiD which is what determines the resolution of this question.

Do you know where OWiD gets its case numbers for China? As far as I can tell, they come from the Johns Hopkins covid tracker via api calls or somesuch. And where does Johns Hopkins get its case data? This purports to explain:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
However, two of the Chinese sources are struck out and the other (based on a translation of the text that comes up) is defunct as well; see here:

https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm#/
It's turtles all the way down.

So there is maybe a specific spreadsheet somewhere (hard to say!) where a Chinese bureaucrat has to type in a number and that gets posted somewhere, scraped by JHU, then grabbed by OWiD and then we have a case for the purposes of the question.

Let's assume some lackey is typing a number into a spreadsheet--this number needs to average 68,500 per day over all of 2023 for the question to resolve as YES. How many times has this happened so far? Once, on November 29th (during a time when infections were easily 1-10M per day!).

Other countries like Japan are mulling categorizing covid as something like a flu. There is diminished drive to bugger around with cases and spreadsheets. This resolves as NO!

@AlQuinn Good luck. 11.5 more months though before it can resolve NO. It can resolve YES any time between now and then. I feel really good about YES.

@BTE By that logic, you should bet on a YES position for any question that can resolve as YES for a singular reason. In this case (pun intended!) I don't see any motivation for the CCP to officially report cases when their reporting apparatus historically was based on a covid-zero policy with abundant testing. And if they do, why not dump the cases into Dec 2022 so that 2023 looks great? In any case, the focus now is on economic recovery, which entails whistling and looking the other way on all matters covid.

Maybe the more dovish foreign policy position they have taken might obliquely encourage a reporting dump. For instance, China is trying to cleave Europe from the relatively hard-line US anti-China stance, and if anyone loves bureaucratic spreadsheets, it's Europe! However, I assign a low probability to this being a route towards the sort of data reconciliation that would be relevant for this question's specific criterion.

@BTE Since this is part of Scott Alexander's annual set of predictions, I wouldn't expect resolution until his end-of-year lookback in early 2024 where he grades his previous predictions and makes a set of new predictions.

@whenhaveiever I mean it can meet the YES criteria anytime because obviously there have been way more than enough cases already. It’s just a matter of making them “official”.

@NuñoSempere Don't tell them this - you make it harder to load up on lots of cheap no

@PeterWildeford Ehh, I find the social aspect fun:
- I prefer collaborative truth seeking to individualist
- There is a chance that I am wrong, and we could fight it out
- Will BTE update? Or will he throw good money after bad?
- Being known to be transparent makes it easier to unload my shares sooner
- ...

@NuñoSempere (Sorry - I'm just teasing I think it's totally fine and fun for you to tell people this)

@NuñoSempere I think it’s wrong to think that the Chinese can fudge numbers forever. I also think 100,000 cases is nothing to them so even if they do continue to suppress true totals, reporting just 1 percent of cases will resolve this YES. Additionally, when the CCP stopped reporting daily cases they stated they would shift reporting to a different dept (just like the US did at the same stage realizing we didn’t have the right infrastructure in place) and will resume public reporting for research purposes. What exactly is your reasoning for why Xi will decide to not report any cases at any point, even a fraction of cases? They have already updated official death count to just under 60,000. How exactly is Xi going to save face if he just pretends nothing happened?? If he does that he is as good as done as president. He needs to save face by touting his accomplishments relative to other world leaders limiting deaths relative to cases. We should expect them to report at least 100x as many cases as they report deaths, don’t you think? Pretty sure they aren’t pleased with their official death rate and the best way to improve that is to report millions of cases. How does Xi strengthen his position as the People’s Leader by not reporting any new cases while he is reporting new deaths???

@NuñoSempere Haha, got confused which market we were on. 25 million still ain’t nothing. The leading epidemiologists in China are estimating 900mm and like I said the CCP has said they will release new numbers for researchers, specifically these guys predicting 900mm SO FAR. Before Chinese New Years and the largest migration on Earth even starts…

@NuñoSempere Like, unless there are hundreds of millions of cases how does Xi defend 3 years of Covid Zero? What was the purpose? This is one situation where transparency actually works to the CCPs interests and censorship is an impossibility without losing face. Kind of a big deal there, no??

It seems to me that the bigger “technicality” here is that I find it hard to believe Scott would choose a 25M target figure if he weren’t already thinking of the conventional understanding of COVID cases - # of infections.

And so while I fully understand that the OWID data isn’t that, at the moment, I can easily envision them amending their data (and preserving a separate, related data set for the current data) as soon as a reputable Chinese data source emerges. And/or, even if OWID does not, enough people might prevail on Scott to stick to the spirit of the question if there’s sufficiently reputable infection count data out of China available.

@MattCWilson In other words, a NO position seems entirely contingent on an extremely literal interpretation of the question-as-written.

@MattCWilson Individual provincial authorities have already reported many more than 25mm cases. They have done so publicly. Eventually all these provinces get added up and reported to OWID.

@MattCWilson Notably, the central government hasn’t censored those provincial reports. That says a lot IMO.

@NuñoSempere They DID NOT report additional .06M cases, they reported .06M DEATHS. HUGE DIFFERENCE.

The way they report this means 60,000 HEALTHY people died of Covid. They do not count any deaths that have other potential causes. For example, if a diabetic dies with Covid they won't count it because of the comorbidity. They only count deaths where Covid is the only possible cause. That makes 60,000 STAGGERINGLY HUGE.

China had also reported hospitalizations going back to the beginning of December. 2.86mm were recorded on 12/23 alone. There were 1.2mm still hospitalized as of 1/12.

@belikewater We could ask @ScottAlexander for clarification.But maybe not until after Full Mode completes, since the Blind Mode folks would not have been able to benefit?

I completely agree that this question is largely about data reporting.

I don't think the question is ambiguous. The resolution criteria are clear.

Sorry, I meant that it's unambiguous that it's about reported case counts by a specific data source. There is ambiguity about when to check the data source, which could be important, but I don't think it's likely to matter that much.

@jack @MattCWilson I agree that the question isn't ambiguous, beyond when the data source will be accessed for question resolution. My question is rhetorical. Why bother asking whether China will report some arbitrarily low number of cases when hundreds of millions have actually had Covid recently? I'm just commenting that to me, there are more meaningful questions to ask. This question has a straightforward data source for resolution, but it would be worth it to look for a less readily available source to ask what seem to me to be more important questions, including what percentage of China will have had Covid by the end of 2023, and how many will have died?

@belikewater I would confirm with Scott, but my guess is that we got here because he took his Predictions for 2022, kept any that were worth keeping, and then adjusted them to new targets while keeping resolution criteria the same. So, since question 32 was looking for 100K cases by the official count from the Chinese government, so is this question, with a (at the time) more plausible sounding target.

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/predictions-for-2022-contest

Obviously this got blown out of the water nearly immediately by all reasonable outside estimation. And yet, here we are.

@jack I disagree. It says it will resolve according to Scott Alexander’s best judgement and nobody could credibly say there haven’t been 25 million cases in China confirmed by at least some government agency.

@belikewater I completely agree. This question has zero predictive value. Who cares how many cases the government acknowledges?!? Stupid question.

@BTE but without an official "good" count, it's either resolving with the official "bad" count, or resolving N/A, no?

amognus

This question has literally nothing to do with Covid. It’s a question about censorship masked as a question about Covid. What if Xi gives a speech acknowledging ‘hundreds of millions of cases’ at some point?? How would that impact the resolution?

@BTE I think the key here is the word "confirmed", that only allows to resolve with an official count IMO

@egroj That’s fine. It should use a different official count then. It could be a leaked internal CCP document. That is probably the most accurate info possible in China.

@egroj I would like your definition of “an office good count” vs “official bad count”.

@BTE I would also like a definition, but I think it would be subjective. Official for me would be whatever China reports to WHO. If they report a couple of thousand cases only while there are (unofficial) reports of hospitals collapsing and thousands dying I would say it's a bad count, but someone else could not believe the reports and think otherwise

I disagree. It says it will resolve according to Scott Alexander’s best judgement and nobody could credibly say there haven’t been 25 million cases in China confirmed by at least some government agency.

@BTE , I see how you could think that. However, in <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSengVfY43SZHUD1jue24yKRyqOM4MawwYVUqhHukxtnKXKADA/viewform>

14. Will there be more than 25 million confirmed COVID cases in China?

Based on https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

In light of this, you may want to unwind your position while you still can. FWIW, 15% seems like a fair price to me.

@ahalekelly It's the new negative Covid variant taking over.

@ShakedKoplewitz It doesn't really matter if the central government lies because they still make up more than enough cases in just a few large cities to resolve this market YES before Chinese New Year. And more importantly, you are misreading the actions taken by the Chinese government this week regarding reporting of cases and deaths. The are basically doing the same thing we did in the West and reorganizing the reporting structure once their realized their legacy protocols weren't up to he scale and speed of the virus.

@BTE so far ourworldindata is still going by CCP figures though - if they change their data collection methods provincial announcements will matter, but they aren't so far. And the CCP is still claiming to have single digit daily case numbers per million - this is outside the range of "bad testing protocols unsuited for the current level of spread" being a plausible explanation, they're just flat out lying, and I don't see why they'd stop.

@ShakedKoplewitz You think the CCP doesn't realize that it undermines their credibility both at home and abroad to not fix their reporting issues? How does Xi Jinping justify two plus years of Covid Zero if he ends the policy and then pretends nobody got Covid?? If they do what you suggest they will do it will be the end of the CCP.

@BTE I don't think the CCP believe that being dishonest undermines them (at least, I don't believe it with probability>80%).

@ShakedKoplewitz I think your assertion has limits. Most of the time the truth is what they say it is, but when you can't censor information because it spreads like a literal virus lying becomes unworkable if you hope to retain credibility. Zero Covid was the information control mechanism and that is gone now.

@ShakedKoplewitz https://wangxiangwei.substack.com/p/chinas-reopening-chaos-what-has-happened

@JamieCrom Do you mind explaining?

@JamieCrom Feel free to provide evidence for your assertion.

@JamieCrom so, I understand why you'd think that, it seems possible to me that he secretly has that intention, but my sense is that he's a classical liberal who has been convinced by closeted fascists to support some of their key talking points loudly, and does not himself endorse their implications with those talking points; the damage he's done that way seems to me to come primarily from propagating the agency of fascists, a common problem with the way the classical liberal perspective allows agency laundering by nature of liberal-in-the-middle patterns that hide the agency of an activist authoritarian. but scott also isn't stupid, and for the most part it doesn't seem like he's gone off the deep end; he still, as far as I can tell, thinks all humans including people of color should in fact flourish, he's not, as far as I can tell, the "yell all lives matter" type; he has principles, those principles are just not sufficient to defend against authoritarianism, and he gets into eugenics discussions without sufficient care to downvote the bad. But, as I hope is clear from this message, I mean neither to defend him nor lampoon him. people with principles like his can be convinced to do terrible things, as long as an authoritarian can convince them that the prejudice against a weaker group is truly justified by circumstance. So, again, you might be right, and I wouldn't put it off the table entirely, but I think 1 in 20 chance that he is in fact activist fash seems about right to me. that's approximately my prior in the general population right now, after all.

@JamieCrom your comments are by far the most divisive of anyone I have seen on this site so far.

@IsaacKing im thinking about ways to assert. im musing about ways to assert. among most people i know its pretty common knowledge though.

@JamieCrom so like yeah same but also please read my comments in the other thread, if he's agentically white supremacist then that is a lot worse than I've heard, and I really want to be warned if so, but also if we can discuss how to describe this to him my suspicion is he could be convinced to ponder what his take on it is enough that he comes out with some thing that clearly (to his audience, though probably not to me or you) denounces the things about white supremacy he thinks are bad; my sense is that, as what appears to me to be classical liberal views, he would prooobably exclude capitalism and imperialism, but that if he were to feel confident he could say what he feels and not be attacked for it (hopefully clear by now that "cancelling" is usually just people making posts online!) then maybe he'd come out visibly against some major components of racism by nature of, idk, proposing prosocial transhumanism.

if we can build advanced ai that can solve ~all problems, then we can nearly end much of competition - and so preserving all beings is quite plausible. that ought to be able to end capitalism and imperialism, but a lot of people think that we need those to get the rest of the way there; imo there's a shared inter-agent-safety structure between all of [capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, interpersonal-violence, rogue-ai, disease] and at such time as we identify the reward function that identifies the fix for all of these, it ought to be enough to convince a biodeterminist classical liberal that their white supremacist friends no longer need to stay correct-by-default, and that we can fix any scale of issue with the ai by repair.

but if he's secretly actually agentically white supremacist, in that he will try to make the world more white supremacist of his own accord if given the chance, then that would invalidate my expectations I have right now.

again, most things he could post wouldn't convince me, because a common problem in the world right now is a few activist white supremacists in a community convincing their classical liberal (or even libertarian!) friends to echo what are effectively arguments for authoritarianism and hyper-racism, but out of context, the classical liberal wouldn't feel they're endorsing those things, and so wouldn't normally think to explain to the authoritarian-sympathetic people in the classical liberal writer's audience what's wrong with the authoritarian racist approach. the classical liberal feels they're not at fault for their friends' assholery; the problem for the rest of the world is that the classical liberal doesn't do enough third-party-tit-for-tat in solidarity with the victims of the racist, not that the classical liberal is themselves agentically hyper-racist. usually, anyway. problem is, of course, activist racists often claim to be classical liberals, so despite the lower number of highly activist racists, you can only be sure by watching behavior. and that's what your commentary could help with.

@L also, to be clear: classical liberals echoing their white supremacist friends without realizing does not give the classical liberals a pass for it, but it does mean that our response to our anger at their supporting threats by philosophically-considered obliviousness-to-harm should be very evenhanded and coordinated and fair - in our firmness, we should be confident in our solidarity, and thereby know we should not escalate beyond what asserting our collective boundaries can permit, so as to allow being able to use our bargaining power only by actions that are honorable in the shared values of liberation; I do think that there's a good thread to liberalism that constructive, domination-free third-party-generous-but-reliable-tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness anarchists should take with them when building prosocial bargaining argumentation and the solidarity to back it. he hasn't hurt anyone physically, to my knowledge, and as far as I know, he does make a lot of reasonably high quality posts, which are useful contributions; as is common among a certain type of creator, even if he's one of the ones that has active malice, he's still producing useful work, and I think we should verbally take him to task while also being clear that we will not escalate into unfair action.

of course, I also can only argue for what I believe; you cannot be controlled by my writing, and I hope that I have written honorably if confusingly 😅

I'll just note that this discussion might be better had on the Scott Alexander market, since I'm guessing people here on a market about China don't want to get notifications for this.

People who find @IsaacKing 's resolution criterion objectionable may want to bet in this market:

@BTE says "confirmed" and is based on our world in data which has China at just over 1 million. So confirmed by the ccp is about what they decide to claim, not actual cases

@LachlanMunro This was confirmed by internal CCP government documents.

@BTE yeah, internal is not what they report externally though right? I mean, 25 million has already happened. Everyone knows that

The question now is what the CCP officially and publicly puts in the data ourworldindata is using.

@LachlanMunro At least one province has publicly reported 500k cases per day. I don't see any reason to think the CCP won't eventually brag about how they managed a wave of a billion cases over 2-3 months or whatever. They incessantly bragged about the success of Zero Covid, it is foolish to think they won't do the same now.

@BTE fair point. Bought in my yes at like 20% and then got unsure thinking the criteria through so took my profits.

@LachlanMunro Did the same myself earlier tonight.