Many thanks to Dr. Liam Fahey for the recent opportunity to present some of my ideas to his topflight group of strategy and intelligence executives in the Intelligence Leadership Forum. The Cult of Prediction has some fairly ancient roots, and rigorous imagination requires the abandonment of some familiar and profitable…
Month: November 2023
Forecasting
The Economist Succumbs to the Cult of Prediction…Again
The Economist’s annual preview of the coming year once again includes predictions. And that is a problem. To show you why it was a problem for 2023, let me share some slides I presented recently to the Intelligence Leadership Forum. The tl;dr version: Things that can be predicted with certainty are almost never strategic;…
Forecasting
Even Some “Scientific” Stuff Requires Alternative Scenarios: El Niño Edition
Every day brings more proof that the range of strategically critical phenomena that are utterly unable to be predicted is almost as vast as it was in the day of Brian Rua U’Cearbhain or the Oracle of Delphi. Today, the Washington Post shows us that even when the vast majority…
Forecasting
Horserace Episode 3.5: Pundit Whiplash/Pigheadedness Edition
November 9, 2023Yesterday, Democrats nearly swept the table in an off-year election, easily passing a referendum in red-state Ohio enshrining the right to abortion, easily re-electing a Democratic governor in Kentucky, and sweeping into the majority in both houses of the Virginia legislature. None of these things were predictable; all…
Forecasting
Horserace Episode 3: Forecasting Follies
November 7, 2023 Nate Silver, the other day, tweeted (or “Xed?”) that the Democratic Party should be very very worried. “You have the whole electorate basically screaming ‘BIDEN’S TOO OLD.’ There’s a year’s worth of campaign to go, very likely some reversion to the fundamentals, Trump’s legal issues probably a larger liability…
Economics
Artisanal Dark Ages
November 2, 2023 In 1908, John Laing Leal, a physician, was working for the Jersey City, NJ water supply. His father had suffered from amoebic dysentery as a result of service in the Civil War and consumption of infected water. Leal had previously held various posts in public health, and…