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…
Category: Intersubjective Realities
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…
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…
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…
Intersubjective Realities
Red vs. Blue vs…. Green?
September 11, 2023 It’s football season again, and many of us (not me) are participating in fantasy football betting groups. In its own little way, this is a symptom of what I like to call “the Cult of Prediction.” It used to be that only “nerds” participated in “rotisserie leagues”…
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…