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…
Category: Forecasting
Forecasting
Predict the Predictable, Anticipate the Unpredictable
September 6, 2023 Much of what I write here may seem to disparage all prediction. If that is the case, I need to clarify a few points. Prediction is a very useful and necessary endeavor – when it is applied to predictable things. Indeed, the scientific revolution, ever since the…
Forecasting
The Horserace, Episode 2: Our Inadequate Media and Election 2024
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
How Will the War in Ukraine Turn Out?
No One Knows, So We’d Better Start Imagining July 26, 2023 Some 2500 years ago, a ruler of a great kingdom, Croesus of Lydia, saw a threat to his regime arising on his border. A new leader, Cyrus, had already created an empire that dwarfed Lydia, the Achaemenid Persian empire. Croesus,…
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…