For the past 101 days, since Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and was replaced by Kamala Harris, news outlets have been obsessing about “the polls.” For a while before that, there was a brief period in which slogans like “the stakes, not the horse race” were a…
Month: October 2024
Politics
2024 Presidential Election Scenario 2: Harris Victory
For the past three decades I have written scenarios of the future for a living. I aim to make them detailed and plausible. That is all I can promise, because the more detailed each scenario gets, the less likely that scenario is to “come true.” Still, detailed scenarios, despite being…
Politics
2024 Presidential Election Scenario 1: Trump Victory
For the past three decades I have written scenarios of the future for a living. I aim to make them detailed and plausible. That is all I can promise, because the more detailed each scenario gets, the less likely that scenario is to “come true.” Still, detailed scenarios, despite being…
SCA 8: Thanks to Dr. J. Bradford DeLong…
CROSSPOST: Patrick Marren on Nate Silver: One & a Half Cheers, Perhaps? Nate Silver’s poll-aggregation work remains very valuable, even though we are trapped by the cult of prediction: polls paralyzing politics by not predicting the future but simply chaining us to uncertainty… Yet one more intelligent word on Nate…
Forecasting
Presentation to the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, Pennsylvania State University
I gave this talk a few months ago, and it captures a lot of my shtick on “fatal certainty,” “the cult of prediction,” and the importance of rigorous imagination in strategic decision-making. Enjoy… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxzth2cJICQ