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
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;…
July 25, 2023 A week or so ago, the economist Paul Krugman put out a subscribers-only opinion piece entitled “Camps of economists fought grand theoretical battles, and all lost.” To his credit, he numbers himself among those who “lost” in these battles, which were over the likelihood of serious inflation…
[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…