September 29, 2023 I have a surefire method of determining when I have a great idea. It’s when I find it shedding light on all sorts of unexpected phenomena. Today the phenomenon in question is conspiracy theories, and why they are (almost) always wrong. (I add the parenthesis merely to…
Month: September 2023
Politics
Polling and Prediction in 2023
September 25, 2023 Political polls are often presented to the public as omens about what will happen in future elections. But polls do not work the way they used to. In the past, a high approval rating – say, Bill Clinton’s, which exceeded 60% after the end of his impeachment…
Algorithms
Fatal Certainty: The Premise
September 20, 2023 Someone just asked me what the premise of my book was, what readers would take away from it. So I typed this up. My premise is that a cult of prediction has turned the 21st century into a series of avoidable shocks – 9/11, the failure of…
Algorithms
Rigorous Imagination, Scenario 1: AI and 2024
September 18, 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the most discussed issues of the calendar year. As it happens, it’s a nearly perfect test case for the approach outlined in my forthcoming book, Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century an Era of Strategic Shock…
Algorithms
Games Beyond Edges?
September 15, 2023 Bruce Schoenfeld’s Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports traces the impact of numerical analysis on sports, from the Moneyball days of the 1990s Oakland Athletics; through the 2000s curse-breaking Boston Red Sox; to Liverpool Football Club’s use of predictive analysis; to the NBA Golden…
Intersubjective Realities
Red vs. Blue vs…. Green?
September 11, 2023 It’s football season again, and many of us (not me) are participating in fantasy football betting groups. In its own little way, this is a symptom of what I like to call “the Cult of Prediction.” It used to be that only “nerds” participated in “rotisserie leagues”…
Forecasting
Predict the Predictable, Anticipate the Unpredictable
September 6, 2023 Much of what I write here may seem to disparage all prediction. If that is the case, I need to clarify a few points. Prediction is a very useful and necessary endeavor – when it is applied to predictable things. Indeed, the scientific revolution, ever since the…