ClaimsScott Alexander

“Since I made a lot of predictions about cryptocurrency and all of them were correlated, this went badly.”

Scott Alexander, blogger 22 January 2019 2018 Predictions: Calibration Results (Slate Star Codex) archived copy

Factual Their own work or organisation

Scott Alexander made many correlated cryptocurrency predictions for 2018, which therefore scored badly.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

What would count as true or false

Judged as of 2019-01-22. True: Scott's 2018 prediction list included several cryptocurrency predictions that depended on the same underlying trend (for example, prices staying high), and most of them resolved wrong in his scoring post. Mostly true: there were several such predictions, but they did somewhat better than 'badly' implies, or 'many' means only a few. Mixed: about half of the crypto predictions failed. Mostly false: there were few crypto predictions, or most of them came true. False: there were no crypto predictions, or all of them came true.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (4)

  1. E1 Predictions For 2018 Slate Star Codex (Scott Alexander) · 6 February 2018 Own record

    “17. Bitcoin is higher than $5,000 at end of year: 95%”

  2. E2 Predictions For 2018 Slate Star Codex (Scott Alexander) · 6 February 2018 Own record

    “18. Bitcoin is higher than $10,000 at end of year: 80%”

  3. E3 Predictions For 2018 Slate Star Codex (Scott Alexander) · 6 February 2018 Own record

    “Bitcoin prices are already too high (they were higher when I wrote these predictions a few days ago).”

  4. E4 2018 Crypto Year in Review | CoinCodex CoinCodex · 3 January 2019

    “BTC would eventually reach as low as $3,200 on December 15.”

Reasoning

Scott Alexander's 2018 list includes at least two linked Bitcoin predictions: 95% that Bitcoin ends the year above $5,000 (E1) and 80% that it ends above $10,000 (E2). An independent source reports Bitcoin fell as low as $3,200 on December 15, 2018 (E4). That source does not give the year-end price, and the scoring post is not in the evidence. The evidence therefore does not settle whether most crypto predictions resolved wrong, or whether there were 'many' of them.

Cite this claim

Scott Alexander, “Scott Alexander made many correlated cryptocurrency predictions for 2018, which therefore scored badly.” (said 22 January 2019). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_dd27ea9d38fa, method 0.1.0+8bea457b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_dd27ea9d38fa

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

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  2. Resolved true Factual 5 October 2026
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  3. Resolved true Factual 10 December 2024
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  4. Resolved true Factual 20 February 2023
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  5. Resolved true Factual 14 March 2022
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All of them

Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.