Let’s look at how accurately Zach predicted 2019. As usual (2017 results, 2018 results), the predictions are broken down by region.

Canada

1. Liberals win the next Canadian election – 60%
2. Majority government in the next Canadian election – 60% 
3. NDP loses seats in the next Canadian election – 80%
4. Conservatives gain seats in the next Canadian election – 70%
5. Jagmeet Singh is not in parliament at the end of 2019 – 51%
6. No court finds the assisted dying bill isn’t in line with Carter v Canada in 2019 – 80% 
7. No court rules on carbon tax constitutionality in 2019 – 90%
8. No terrorist attack in Canada that kills > 10 Canadians in 2019 – 90%
9. Opioid poisoning deaths decline from 2018 levels in Canada – 80%
10. Construction on the Trans Mountain pipeline does not begin again in 2019 – 90%
11. Canadian unemployment rate at or below 6% at the end of 2019 – 60%
12. Health Canada still doesn’t allow Soylent to enter the country by the end of 2019 – 70%

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Here are my 95 predictions about the next year. If you’d like to make your own predictions, you can download my blank template. Like previous years (2017, 2017 results, 2018, 2018 results), I’ve broken them down by region.

Canada

1. Liberals win the next Canadian election – 60%
2. Majority government in the next Canadian election – 60%
3. NDP loses seats in the next Canadian election – 80%
4. Conservatives gain seats in the next Canadian election – 70%
5. Jagmeet Singh is not in parliament at the end of 2019 – 51%
6. No court finds the assisted dying bill isn't in line with Carter v Canada in 2019 – 80%
7. No court rules on carbon tax constitutionality in 2019 – 90%
8. No terrorist attack in Canada that kills > 10 Canadians in 2019 – 90%
9. Opioid poisoning deaths decline from 2018 levels in Canada – 80%
10. Construction on the Trans Mountain pipeline does not begin again in 2019 – 90%
11. Canadian unemployment rate at or below 6% at the end of 2019 – 60%
12. Health Canada still doesn't allow Soylent to enter the country by the end of 2019 – 70%

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In what is becoming a New Year’s tradition, let’s look at how accurately I predicted the future a year ago.

Canada

1. Liberals remain ahead in the CBC Poll Tracker seat projection – 70%
2. Trudeau has a higher net favorability rating than Andrew Scheer according to the CBC Leader Meter on January 1, 2019 – 80%
3. Marijuana is legalized in time for Canada Day – 60%
4. Marijuana is legalized in 2018 – 90%
5. At least one court finds the assisted dying bill isn't in line with Carter v Canada – 70%
6. Ontario PC party wins the election – 60%
7. The Ontario election results in a minority government – 80%
8. The Quebec election results in a minority government – 80%
9. No BC snap election in 2018 – 90%
10. No terrorist attack in Canada that kills > 10 Canadians in 2018 – 90%
11. More Canadian opioid poisoning deaths in 2018 than in 2017 – 60%
12. Canada does better at the 2018 Winter Olympics (in both gold medals and total medals) than in 2014 – 90%
13. Canada does not win a gold medal in men's hockey at the 2018 Olympics – 70%
14. Canada does win a gold medal in women's hockey at the 2018 Olympics – 51%

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One of the best things about taking physics classes is that the equations you learn are directly applicable to the real world. Every so often, while reading a book or watching a movie, I’m seized by the sudden urge to check it for plausibility. A few scratches on a piece of paper later and I will generally know one way or the other.

One of the most amusing things I’ve found doing this is that the people who come up with the statistics for Pokémon definitely don’t have any sort of education in physics.

Takes Onix. Onix is a rock/ground Pokémon renowned for its large size and sturdiness. Its physical statistics reflect this. It’s 8.8 metres (28’) long and 210kg (463lbs).

Surely such a large and tough Pokémon should be very, very dense, right? Density is such an important tactile cue for us. Don’t believe me? Pick up a large piece of solid medal. Its surprising weight will make you take it seriously.

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The Economist wonders why wage growth isn’t increasing, even as unemployment falls. A naïve reading of supply and demand suggests that it should, so this has become a relatively common talking point in the news, with people of all persuasions scratching their heads. The Economist does it better than most. They at least talk about slowing productivity growth and rising oil prices, instead of blaming everything on workers (for failing to negotiate) or employers (for not suddenly raising wages).

But after reading monetary policy blogs, the current lack of wage growth feels much less confusing to me. Based on this, I’d like to offer one explanation for why wages haven’t been growing. While I may not be an economist, I’ll be doing my best to pass along verbatim the views of serious economic thinkers.

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When dealing with questions of inequality, I often get boggled by the sheer size of the numbers. People aren’t very good at intuitively parsing the difference between a million and a billion. Our brains round both to “very large”. I’m actually in a position where I get reminded of this fairly often, as the difference can become stark when programming. Running a program on a million points of data takes scant seconds. Running the same set of operations on a billion data points can take more than an hour. A million seconds is eleven and a half days. A billion seconds 31 years.

Here I would like to try to give a sense of the relative scale of various concepts in inequality. Just how much wealth do the wealthiest people in the world possess compared to the rest? How much of the world’s middle class is concentrated in just a...

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The Cambridge Analytica scandal has put tech companies front and centre. If the thinkpieces along the lines of “are the big tech companies good or bad for society” were coming out any faster, I might have to doubt even Google’s ability to make sense of them all.

This isn’t another one of those thinkpieces. Instead it’s an attempt at an analysis. I want to understand in monetary terms how much one tech company – Google – puts into or takes out of everyone’s pockets. This analysis is going to act as a template for some of the more detailed analyses of inequality I’d like to do later, so if you have a comment about methodology, I’m eager to hear it.

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Under the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), all nuclear tests except for those underground are banned. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), only the permanent members of the UN Security Council are legally allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Given the public outcry over fallout that led to the PTBT and the worries over widespread nuclear proliferation that led to the NPT, it’s clear that we require something beyond pinky promises to verify that countries are meeting the terms of these treaties.

But how do we do so? How can you tell when a country tests an atomic bomb? How can you tell who did it? And how can one differentiate a bomb on the surface from a bomb in the atmosphere from a bomb in space from a bomb underwater from a bomb underground?

I’m going to focus on two efforts to monitor nuclear weapons: the national security apparatus...

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Since the minimum wage increase took effect on January 1^st, Tim Hortons has been in the news. Many local franchisees have been clawing back benefits, removing paid breaks, or otherwise taking measures to reduce the costs associated with an increased minimum wage.

TVO just put out a piece about this ongoing saga by the Christian socialist Michael Coren. It loudly declares that “Tim Hortons doesn’t deserve your sympathy”. Unfortunately, Mr. Coren is incorrect. Everyone involved here (Tim Hortons the corporation, Tim Hortons franchisees, and Tim Hortons workers) is caught between a rock and a hard place. They all deserve your sympathy.

It is a truism that a minimum wage increase must result in either declining profits, cuts to...

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Inspired by Slate Star Codex, this is my second year of making predictions (see also: my previous predictions, their scores, and my recent LessWrong post about these predictions).

Before I jump into the predictions, I want to mention that I’ve created templates so that anyone who wants to can also take a stab at it; the templates focus on international events and come in two versions:

• Long (which assumes you read global news a lot)
• Short (which is less demanding)

With both these sheets, the idea is to pick a limited number of probabilities (I recommend 51%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90%) and assign one to each item that you have an opinion on. At the end of the year, you count the number of correct items in each probability bin and use that to see how close you were to ideal. This gives you an answer to the important question: “when I say something is 80% likely to happen, how likely, really, is it to happen?”

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Now is the big reveal. Just how did I do in 2017?

Canada

1. Trudeau ends the year with a lower approval rating than he started – 60%
2. No bill introduced that changes the electoral system away from first past the post in 2019 – 50%
3. No referendum scheduled on changing the electoral system away from first past the post before 2019 – 70%
4. A bill legalizing marijuana is passed by the House of Commons – 90%
5. The senate doesn’t block attempts to legalize marijuana – 80%
6. At least one court finds the assisted dying bill isn’t in line with Carter v Canada – 60%
7. Ontario Liberal Approval rating remains below 30% – 80%
8. Patrick Brown “unsure” rating remains above 40% – 70%
9. Kellie Leitch is not the next CPC leader – 80%
10. Michael Chong is not the next CPC leader – 70%
11. Maxine Bernier is not the next CPC leader – 90%
12. No terrorist attack that kills >10 Canadians – 70%
13. No terrorist attack that kills >100 Canadians – 90%
14. At least one large technology company (valuation >$10 billion and >1,000 employees) will open a Waterloo office in 2017 – 80%

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I predict that within five years of the implementation of the new $15/hour  Ontario minimum wage, we’ll see an increase in the labour participation rates of women and a decrease in the labour participation rates of people with disabilities or developmental delays.

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A friend asked me what I thought about the candidates in the leadership race for the Conservative Party of Canada. I found I had more to say than was strictly reasonable to post in a Facebook comment. I posted it anyway – because I’m sometimes unreasonable – but I found I also wanted to record my thoughts in a more organized manner that’s easier to link to.

Right now, I think there are a few meaningful ways to split up the candidates. You can split them up based on what block of the party they represent.

The way I see it, you have:

• Michael Chong representing the wonkish Progressive Conservatives
• Maxine Bernier and Rick Peterson representing the wonkish libertarians
• Steven Blaney and Dr. Kellie Leitch with a more nativist message
• Lisa Raitt, Andrew Scheer, and Erin O'Toole running as unobjectionable compromise candidates
• Andrew Saxton and Chris Alexander running as clones of Steven Harper
• Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost running as social conservatives
• Deepak Obhrai running against xenophobia

It might be possible to collapse these categories a bit; unobjectionable compromise candidates and Harper clones don’t have that much difference between them, for example. But I think I’m clustering based on salient differences in what the candidates are choosing to highlight, even when their policy positions or voting records are very similar.

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Back in February, I predicted that the slew of scandals Trudeau was facing wouldn’t decrease his approval ratings. To put numbers on this, I gave my confidence intervals for Trudeau’s approval ratings in April.

Thanks to the “Leader Meter”, it’s easy for me to check up on how Trudeau is doing. As of right now, the most recent poll has him at 48% approval (this is conveniently the first poll since April 1st, making it useful for the purposes of checking my prediction), while Éric Grenier’s model has him at 50.6% approval.

Both of these are within all three probability intervals I offered. In addition, Trudeau was polling higher in March than he was in February, further evidence that the scandals in February (and the abandonment of electoral reform) haven’t hurt his popularity.

I continue to believe that the erosion of political norms around scandals during Steven Harper’s time in office has played a large role in Trudeau’s enduring popularity.

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I just finished Pump Six, a collection of short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi. A few weeks prior to this, I read Ted Chiang’s short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others and I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast between them. Ted Chiang writes stories about different ways the world could work. Paolo Bacigalupi writes stories about different ways the future could happen.

These are two very different sorts of speculation. The first requires extreme attention to detail in order to make the setting plausible, but once you clear that bar, you can get away with anything. Ted Chiang is clearly a master at this. I couldn’t find any inconsistencies to pick at in any of his stories.

When you try to predict the future – especially the near future – you don’t need to make up a world out of whole cloth. Here...

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Nuclear weapons represent an existential risk. I’ll let 80,000 Hours speak for me for a minute:

A survey of academics at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference by Oxford University estimated a 1% chance of human extinction from nuclear wars over the 21st Century. … Luke Oman estimates the probability “for the global human population of zero resulting from the 150 Tg of black carbon scenario in our 2007 paper [delving into the effects of a single nuclear exchange] would be in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000.” This being said, we think this estimate is too low, as it doesn’t account for the potential for weaknesses in their model or the risk of a societal collapse causing a permanent reduction in humanity’s ability to reach its potential (which is nonetheless an existential risk even if people remain).

If you’re interested in reducing the existential risk...

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Having covered the practicalities of nuclear physics, nuclear weapon design, and nuclear weapon effects, we may now turn our attention to the strategies that have grown out of these physical realities.

7.1 Tactical and Strategic Weapons

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of nuclear weapons – tactical and strategic. This post has been focused primarily on strategic nuclear weapons, high yield weapons capable of destroying cities and hardened targets. Tactical nuclear weapons have smaller yields, allowing them to be hypothetically used on a battlefield that contains friendlies.

The line between the two gets somewhat blurred with the highest yield tactical weapons. Is a 5kt bomb tactical or strategic? No one really has a clear answer. These already crystal clear waters get muddied further when you add in “dial-a-yield” weapons, which can yield anywhere from <1kt to ~100kt. On the low end, they’re definitely tactical. But at the high end,...

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All the nukes in the world are useless unless you have a way to get them to their targets. Aside from outlandish and potentially suicidal methods like suitcase nukes or nuclear artillery, there are three main ways of doing this: bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

6.1 Bombers

The only nuclear weapons ever used in anger were delivered by B-29 bombers, the Enola Gay and the Bockscar. Because the Allies had attained near total air-superiority over Japan at the time of the bombings, it was possible for these bombers to go in without any real escort. They were accompanied only by weather reconnaissance and observation planes.

In a modern nuclear exchange, total air superiority would probably be required for a country to be able to openly deliver a bomb. If a nuclear bombing is attempted with anything less than total superiority, the attacker can...

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To understand the effects of nuclear weapons, you first need to understand how those effects scale with weapon yield.

5.1 Scaling

Modern bombs are much smaller than the Tsar Bomba. The standard US nuclear warhead, the W88, is a “mere” 475kt, a yield that is 100x less than that of the Tsar Bomba. On the other hand, the W88 weighs in at 360kg, 75x lighter.

This may seem like a poor trade, but it’s actually a very good one, due to the fundamental properties of explosive scaling. Scaling factors are very important to weapons. They determine the stable equilibriums that designs fall into. For example: we have tanks instead of mechs because strength scaling and mass scaling together make tall vehicles very vulnerable to weapons.

Scaling factors for all nuclear weapon effects (the fireball, the shock wave, and electromagnetic radiation) are different, but we can use the scaling factor...

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The last section required that you take it on faith that nuclear weapons are hard to design. Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details of weapon design and understand why that is.

Nuclear explosions require a critical mass of the right unstable isotope. But there’s no safe way to store an assembled critical mass. As soon as you get to the critical mass, the chain reaction starts and an explosion will occur without drastic countermeasures.

All nuclear weapon design ultimately starts with this problem of assembling a critical mass in situ (and only ever in situ).

The first atomic bombs used one of two methods: gun assembly or implosion. These methods are still used to this day in fission weapons or in the fission first stage of multiple stage weapons.

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There are currently nine countries with acknowledged or suspected nuclear arsenals. Five of them are signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the main international treaty aimed at minimizing the number of nuclear armed states. Ideally, no country or group would have nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world; the NPT is maybe the next best thing.

The NPT acknowledges the right of the permeant UN Security Council members (UK, USA, France, China, and Russia) to possess nuclear weapons even as it bans anyone else from getting (or trying to get) them. The remainder of the nuclear armed states (Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea) haven’t signed on to NPT or signed and later withdrew from it. South Sudan also isn’t a signatory of the NPT – I think they just haven’t gotten around to it – but no one is particularly worried about that (for reasons that...

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For this to all make sense, we should start with a brief review of atomic theory.

All matter is made up of atoms. Atoms have an outer shell of negatively charged electrons (more accurate descriptions exist, but I’m not going to delve into them; throughout this section I’m going to use simplified models wherever they’ll do the topic justice) and an inner core containing uncharged neutrons and positively charged protons.

The number of protons in an atom determines which element the atom is. All atoms with two protons are helium, all atoms with six protons are carbon, and so on. Much of the time, elements will have the same number of electrons as they have protons, so that the charges cancel each other out. Forms of elements with differing numbers of electrons are called ions. Ionization is a very common phenomenon. You observe it whenever you see lightning or dissolve...

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With President Trump in possession of the nuclear launch codes, I have a feeling that many people who’ve neglected nuclear weapons as an important cause area may begin to sit up and take notice. This is a good thing. There currently exist basically no checks and balances on a US President’s ability to go to nuclear war. Harold Hering was cashiered from the Air Force in 1973 after asking (on the subject of nuclear weapons launch) “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”. Nothing has changed since then.

This post series is meant as a non-exhaustive primer on the (declassified) physical and strategic realities of nuclear weapons. It’s supposed to get you up to the point where you can begin asking the right questions in a relatively short time period. If you want more information, I’ve included relevant...

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In the vein of Slate Star Codex, I’d like to publicly post my predictions for 2017. I’ve tried to tie these predictions to empirically verifiable outcomes as much as possible, so that there’s no room for interpretation or wiggling. I’ve also included my confidence in my predictions (all predictions are formulated so confidence is at least 50%) so that I can check my calibration as well as my accuracy. If you can think of a better formulation of any of these that maintains the meaning, please let me know before January 7th. I will not edit this post at all after then, even to correct typos.

Canada

1. Trudeau ends the year with a lower approval rating than he started - 60%
2. No bill introduced that changes the electoral system away from first past the post in 2019 - 50%
3. No referendum scheduled on changing the electoral system away from first past the post before 2019 - 70%
4. A bill legalizing marijuana is passed by the House of Commons - 90%
5. The senate doesn't block attempts to legalize marijuana - 80%
6. At least one court finds the assisted dying bill isn't in line with Carter v Canada - 60%
7. Ontario Liberal Approval rating remains below 30% - 80%
8. Patrick Brown "unsure" rating remains above 40% - 70%
9. Kellie Leitch is not the next CPC leader - 80%
10. Michael Chong is not the next CPC leader - 70%
11. Maxine Bernier is not the next CPC leader - 90%
12. No terrorist attack that kills >10 Canadians - 70%
13. No terrorist attack that kills >100 Canadians - 90%
14. At least one large technology company (valuation >$10 billion and >1,000 employees) will open a Waterloo office in 2017 - 80%

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Note: A previous version of this post referred to Kellie Leitch as “Ms. Leitch” instead of “Dr. Leitch”. I don’t know how I forgot she was a doctor, but I’m deeply sorry that I did. 

Kellie Leitch recently put out a survey that asked potential Conservative voters “should the Canadian Government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening process for refugees and landed immigrants.” This has proved controversial, to say the least. It’s been described as a dog-whistle and has prompted other candidates to ask her to leave the race.

Dr. Leitch later clarified that she meant immigrants should be screened for: “intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms”.

I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this. First, I’ve heard Canadian progressives wish...

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There are a lot of living things that are quite good at killing humans. Tigers, anthrax, lions, cows, bears, and other people do away with thousands of us each year.

There are a few non-living things that are also quite good at offing us. Good old water manages to take quite a few. In good years, we don’t lose anyone to the nerve gasses sarin or VX (Unfortunately, the last few years haven’t been good ones in that regard).

What about those liminal critters though? Viruses and prions aren’t really alive in the traditional sense. They can replicate, they can even evolve, but they lack the hallmarks of life, foremost among them the ability to reproduce. Both of them find ways to hijack the machinery of living organisms and use them for their own ends.

These self-replicating patterns and their potential to wipe us out are the subject of this...

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This post is a response to a recent Slate article.

A quick summary: the coup attempt in Turkey, terrorist attacks in France, Brexit in the UK, and rise of Trump in the US are all connected and can be viewed as the four horsemen of the end of liberal democracy. As the last defenders of liberal democracy struggle with the spectre of illiberal democracy (the will of the people unadulterated by any pesky rights for minorities) they throw up roadblocks in the form of undemocratic liberalism (rights for minorities without any of that pesky voting). Defenders of liberalism need to restore the core promise of democracy – that it will lead to ever increasing wealth if we’re to keep the “fact” that no wealthy, consolidated democracy has ever fallen true.

I didn’t buy the theory. I think some of this came from me having factual disagreements with it – Chile...

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