For reference, the last three were monkeypox, COVID, and Ebola.
This is question #48 in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 Prediction Contest. The contest rules and full list of questions are available here. Market will resolve according to Scott Alexander’s judgment, as given through future posts on Astral Codex Ten.
1,000
3.00The base rate here is rather high, and worth noting the jump to 48% was in the previous day or so. YES would have come in for 2009 (Swine Flu), 2014 (Ebola), 2016 (Zika), 2019 (Kivu Ebola), 2020 (Covid) and 2022 (monkeypox). Note however that starting in 2014 is cherry picking, and Covid is an ongoing emergency so it is unlikely to count as a new one. The chances implied by two other longer term markets are 30% and 40%. Swine flu is now more likely than before, which does bump this up a bit, and you can get an ‘emergency’ there without triggering a bunch of the ‘will this kill X people’ markets. This is trading at 8% (I bought a little NO here), and before recent developments this would have been more like 2%, at most ~4%. So we can tack on another 5% or so to the base rate of 6 incidents in 15 years (counting 2008 for fairness) which would get us to 45%, discounted to 40% for it being mid-February. I bought 200 of NO bringing it to 42%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_emergency_of_international_concern Base rate is pretty high if this is what he means