August 28, 2023 Let’s say you are planning an event in a year’s time. Say it is a family reunion. A year from now will be toward the end of summer (if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, as I am not, as it happens). So you need to make…
Algorithms
A Case Study in the Cult of Prediction: China, 2023
August 24, 2023 All predictive systems involve a network of “if-then” statements, assumptions about the interrelationships between certain past or present, presumably knowable, realities, and the future outcomes that can safely be assumed once those inputs are entered into the model. The “model” can be a computer-based algorithm, or mathematical…
The Cult of Prediction
Why Does the Cult of Prediction Matter?
August 22, 2023 In my previous blog post, I explained what the Cult of Prediction is. But why am I so hard on it? I don’t question the sincerity or intelligence of those who have helped to make the C. of P. more and more popular. Nate Silver, Cass Sunstein,…
The Cult of Prediction
What Is the Cult of Prediction?
August 21, 2023 Imagine a two-by-two matrix containing all major issues regarding the future. (That’s what most people think we consultants do, anyway. Two-by-two matrices.) On the vertical axis, you have predictability, ranging from low to high as you move up the page. On the horizontal axis, you have the…
Forecasting
Fox vs. Hedgehog
August 16, 2023 Πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one great thing.” – Fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, c. 680-645 B.C.E. I am a hedgehog. And I’m supposed to be a fox. Nate Silver, in his book The Signal and the…
Artificial Intelligence
The Truly Strategic May Be the Intrinsically Human (AI vs. Rigorous Imagination)
[excerpt from Fatal Certainty] … Every algorithmic predictive system ultimately must be created out of whole cloth, its equations, variables, operands, etc. representing some reality completely outside of our computer systems, which we would like to predict. And every element of an algorithmic system represents an assumption about how something…
Algorithms
Pandemic: COVID-19
[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…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
The First and Last Carriages
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] In the latter half of the 17th century there was an Irishman named Brian Rua (“Red Brian”) U’Cearbhain. He was born in around 1648 in a (still) fairly remote part of northern County Mayo, in the extreme west-northwest of the country, and grew up during the turbulent years…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
A Premonition
[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…
Forecasting
Introduction: Fatal Certainty
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…