I'd like to start giving people the option of commenting on shorter Cold Takes pieces (which I don't cross-post here or provide audio for). I'm going to use this post for that: I will generally leave a comment for each piece, and people can leave their comments as replies to that.
[Holden won the bet](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/66658630/i-lose-a-bet). In retrospect, I think I was justified in having high confidence and right that Zvi's bet was foreseeably bad. If anything, when I lowered my forecast from 95% to 68% for a couple weeks in April I was meta-updating too much on the community median and assigning too much weight to the possibility of an extremely large "cases to true infections" adjustment.
Note that I disagree with what Zvi wrote yesterday: "In hindsight, the question of ‘what counts as Omicron’ does have a strong bearing on who had the right side of this wager, and also is a key insight into the mistake that I made here."
I disagree that that was his mistake. Even if subvariants counted as different variants that would only increase the chance that the bet resolves ambiguously. There was (IMO) never a >70% chance (or even >50%) chance that Zvi would win (conditional on someone winning), even if the language of the bet considered subvariants to be different variant.