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📖 The ACX 2025 Prediction Contest Is Open!

The Astral Codex Ten Prediction Contest is back with an expanded $10,000 prize pool! Test your forecasting skills across geopolitics, technology, economics, and more with questions curated by Scott Alexander. Make your predictions by January 31 to compete.

🔭 The Bridgewater x Metaculus Forecasting Contest Goes Global — Feb 3

For the second year, Metaculus is teaming up with Bridgewater Associates to host a competition featuring $25k in prizes and potential opportunities with the asset management firm — and this year, forecasters from around the globe can compete.

Start here to register for the February 3rd competition, warm up on practice questions, and learn about the separate Open and Undergraduate leaderboards.

Question Series

Autocrat Public Figures Series

Start DateDec 31, 2021
End DateDec 30, 9999
Questions22

The crisis in Ukraine is the latest grim data point in a years-long global trend toward greater authoritarianism. The information landscape is one of the fronts of the current conflict, with significant attention paid to Russia’s propaganda apparatus. Just days before the invasion and a day after ordering troops to eastern Ukraine, President Putin stated that

We predicted speculation that Russia plans to restore [its] empire within imperial border[s] [...] This absolutely does not correspond with reality.

Disinformation campaigns, false claims, and outlandish forecasts have long been used by autocratic regimes, from Hitler’s proclamation of a Thousand Year Reich, to Mao’s 1957 declaration that rapid industrialization would allow China to economically overtake Great Britain within 15 years.

To create an accountable public record of statements made by anti-democratic regimes around the world, we've assembled Public Figure prediction pages for various autocratic leaders:

Included here are claims and predictions made not just by the figures themselves, but also by their larger state apparatuses. (Goals set in North Korea's five-year economic plan are included, for example.)

How to contribute to this series

The launch of this experimental series is also an invitation for feedback and collaboration. Share your ideas on how to best create accountable records for statements made by world leaders who have little accountability to an opposition party or to public opinion.

Upvote and comment on the individual Public Figure prediction tiles that you would most like to see linked to new Metaculus questions:

Series Contents