Fatal Certainty: The Cult of Prediction and the Need for a New Way to Deal with Fundamental Future Uncertainty Since ancient times, human beings have craved certainty. Two and a half millennia ago, rulers facing life-and-death decisions sought guidance from prophets and oracles; closer to our own time, astrologers such…
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…
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;…