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…
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
Forecasting
SCA 7: A Steelman Defense of Nate Silver
A lot of what I have said in the past few weeks may give you the idea that I think Nate Silver is a fraud, or at best a non-serious person. Neither of those things is true. I recently have had, let us say, some of my fellow-traveling partisans tell…
Forecasting
SCA 6: Review of Nate Silver’s On the Edge on the Futures Strategy Group Blog
For a more general treatment of On the Edge, go here: https://www.futuresstrategygroup.com/nate-silver-on-the-edge/
Algorithms
SCA 5: The Wrecks of the Bayesian
A couple of weeks ago, in a terrible accident, the Bayesian, an imposing 184-foot-long sailing yacht topped by a 237-foot mast (one of the tallest in the world), sank, as the result of a sudden and violent storm off the coast of Sicily. The Bayesian was owned by “the Bill…
Algorithms
SCA 4: An Alternative Metaphor
Nate Silver, in his new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, creates a geographical metaphor to describe two different types of people with two different modes of thinking. Nate lays out a geography of “The River”[1] as follows: He finishes with: “The people in the River are my…
Algorithms
SCA 3: “The Bold” vs. Wayne Newton Fans
I begin today expanding upon my previous analysis of Nate Silver’s distinction between “Riverians” and “Village People.” Silver says that River People possess the following two “clusters of attributes”[1]: COGNITIVE CLUSTER PERSONALITY CLUSTER Analytical Competitive Abstract Critical Decoupling Independent-minded (contrarian) Risk-tolerant “Analytical” – Nate says this is “to resolve something complex…