Scott Alexander gave a 90% probability that Reddit would not ban r/the_donald by the end of 2018.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Prediction: Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?
What would count as true or false
Judged at 31 December 2018. True: r/the_donald was not banned (removed from Reddit) at any point in 2018. Quarantine, restrictions, or the removal of moderators do not count as a ban. False: Reddit banned the subreddit in 2018. A ban after 2018 does not make the claim false. Mostly true and mixed are not expected for this single-outcome claim.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 R/The Donald Wikipedia
“When asked why the r/The_Donald community was not banned from the website, Huffman replied that "Banning them probably won't accomplish what you want. However, letting them fall apart from their own dysfunction probably will."”
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E2 R/The Donald Wikipedia
“On June 29, 2020, Reddit banned the subreddit for "frequent rule-breaking, antagonizing the company and other communities, and failing to meet our most basic expectations."”
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E3 Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald Trujillo and Cresci, IIT-CNR (arXiv; ACM Proc. Hum.-Comput. Interact., CSCW2) · November 2022
“It was quarantined in June 2019, restricted in February 2020, and finally banned in June 2020”
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E4 RT and R/The_Donald DFRLab (Atlantic Council) · 6 November 2018
“The_Donald subreddit, a highly engaged bastion of alt-right conversation in the United States, has a penchant for Kremlin-controlled RT’s news stories on a number of subjects”
Reasoning
E3, a peer-reviewed paper, describes the order of Reddit's actions against r/The_Donald: it was quarantined in June 2019, restricted in February 2020 and banned in June 2020. E2 also dates the ban to June 29, 2020. E4, a DFRLab analysis from November 2018, discusses the subreddit as an active community late in 2018. Since the ban came after 2018, the subreddit was not banned during 2018, so the prediction resolves true.
Cite this claim
Scott Alexander, “Scott Alexander gave a 90% probability that Reddit would not ban r/the_donald by the end of 2018.” (said January 2018). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_b103e5fb2e74, method 0.1.0+8bea457b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_b103e5fb2e74
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More prediction claims by Scott Alexander
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Resolved false
“Falcon Heavy first launch not successful: 70%”
Scott Alexander gave a 70% probability that the first Falcon Heavy launch would not be successful.
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Mostly true
“Our scenario focuses on coding in particular because we think coding is what starts the intelligence explosion.”
The authors of the scenario think coding is what will start the intelligence explosion.
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Mostly true
“We expect that as the AI labs become more capable, they tell the government about this because they want government contracts, they want government support.”
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Mostly true
“In our scenario, that starts with cyber warfare, the government sees that these AIs are now as capable as the best human hackers, but can be deployed at humongous scale.”
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Resolved true
“So they become extremely interested and they discuss nationalizing the AI companies.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.