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…
Category: Algorithms
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…
ISBM article on my ideas about the “Cult of Prediction”
It was a great honor to share the central themes of my book Fatal Certainty with such an accomplished group of practitioners and academics, exactly the sort of people who can help to change the mindset driving quantitative (and even older-style non-quantitative) single-point forecasting, and it’s even a greater honor…
Algorithms
The Uses of Sortilege
October 2, 2023 Another avenue into the big truth expressed by Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century an Era of Strategic Shock – and How Rigorous Imagination Could Bring Us Back comes from ancient approaches to dealing with fundamental, irreducible uncertainty. Decisions need to be made. This…
Algorithms
Fatal Certainty: The Premise
September 20, 2023 Someone just asked me what the premise of my book was, what readers would take away from it. So I typed this up. My premise is that a cult of prediction has turned the 21st century into a series of avoidable shocks – 9/11, the failure of…
Algorithms
Rigorous Imagination, Scenario 1: AI and 2024
September 18, 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the most discussed issues of the calendar year. As it happens, it’s a nearly perfect test case for the approach outlined in my forthcoming book, Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century an Era of Strategic Shock…
Algorithms
Games Beyond Edges?
September 15, 2023 Bruce Schoenfeld’s Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports traces the impact of numerical analysis on sports, from the Moneyball days of the 1990s Oakland Athletics; through the 2000s curse-breaking Boston Red Sox; to Liverpool Football Club’s use of predictive analysis; to the NBA Golden…
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…