This is going to be a long one, even by my standards. (I started it last year and finished it this year.) It’s focused on the relentless advances of the Cult of Prediction on every front. Even when it “loses,” it swallows more media time and attention and eyeballs and…
Category: Politics
Politics
2024 Presidential Election Scenario 2: Harris Victory
For the past three decades I have written scenarios of the future for a living. I aim to make them detailed and plausible. That is all I can promise, because the more detailed each scenario gets, the less likely that scenario is to “come true.” Still, detailed scenarios, despite being…
Politics
2024 Presidential Election Scenario 1: Trump Victory
For the past three decades I have written scenarios of the future for a living. I aim to make them detailed and plausible. That is all I can promise, because the more detailed each scenario gets, the less likely that scenario is to “come true.” Still, detailed scenarios, despite being…
SCA 8: Thanks to Dr. J. Bradford DeLong…
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…
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…
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…
Artificial Intelligence
The Horserace Part 4: “The ‘Paul’s Dead’ Election”
I have frequently here decried the quality of our national political media outlets, writing that they focus on the horserace, not the impacts electing one or another candidate might bring to all of us. Many people have jumped (surely unknowingly) on my bandwagon, saying they want “less about the horserace,…
Economics
Robert Rubin’s Russian Roulette: “The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World”
February 5, 2024 The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly…
Forecasting
Horserace Episode 3.5: Pundit Whiplash/Pigheadedness Edition
November 9, 2023Yesterday, Democrats nearly swept the table in an off-year election, easily passing a referendum in red-state Ohio enshrining the right to abortion, easily re-electing a Democratic governor in Kentucky, and sweeping into the majority in both houses of the Virginia legislature. None of these things were predictable; all…