[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…
Category: Algorithms
Algorithms
Hate to Say We Told You So…
[Reposted with permission from the Futures Strategy Group website… a blog column that contains the germ of Fatal Certainty. https://www.futuresstrategygroup.com/strategy/scenarios/ ] November 16, 2016 A week ago, something happened that no one was prepared for – and I mean NO ONE. Donald Trump was elected president. When I say “no one,” I include…
Algorithms
The Horserace Begins: Episode 1
The polling follies that will halt serious thought about the 2024 election have already begun August 2, 2023 In 2016, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the pernicious impact of polling on the functioning of American democracy. One (“Hate to Say We Told You So…”) is re-posted on this…
Algorithms
The Economics Profession: Still Mostly in Thrall to the Cult of Prediction (with honorable exceptions)
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…
Algorithms
“The Data Delusion” vs. Rigorous Imagination
July 20, 2023 Jill LePore is a Harvard historian whose wide-ranging scholarship has embraced the broad sweep of American history (These Truths), Native American-colonial conflict (The Name of War), superheroes (The Secret History of Wonder Woman), and even the Beatles (introduction to Paul McCartney’s 1964: Eyes of the Storm). In her…