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
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] Consider the following passage, in light of the SARS Coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) pandemic of late 2019-present: …[A] variant of the supposedly beaten SARS corona virus made its way into the United States… At first the new virus was downplayed by public officials. When voters started dying in western…
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…
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] …A number of isolated people within the various bureaucracies (CDC, White House, Sandia Labs), more than a decade before COVID, found one another, and began to use computer modeling to imagine the spread of a pandemic flu, and to investigate what policies might be most effective in…