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: Forecasting
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…
Forecasting
Letter to the Columnist: Effective Altruism
The New York Times’ Peter Coy is “a veteran business and economics columnist.” Today he sent a newsletter out that was headlined “Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative?” I have thoughts. Coy writes, Of course, if you’ve read anything I’ve written here, you may sense that “rigorous academic…
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…
Forecasting
Thinking, Fast, Slow… and Other
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman died March 27. He was one of the few thinkers who managed to influence thought in multiple fields, most notably psychology and economics, but also in international relations and many other spheres dependent on decision-making. In 2011, Kahneman published his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, to universal…
Economics
Everything Is Predictable? More Blunt Observations
May 22, 2024 I suspect we all doubt ourselves from time to time. Unless we are sociopaths, we have to believe, at certain points, that maybe we’ve gotten something big wrong. I also suspect that’s how we have evolved to learn and therefore survive. But if we are lucky, sometimes…