The Economist’s annual preview of the coming year once again includes predictions. And that is a problem. To show you why it was a problem for 2023, let me share some slides I presented recently to the Intelligence Leadership Forum. The tl;dr version: Things that can be predicted with certainty are almost never strategic;…
Category: Prophecy
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…
Fatal Certainty - Excerpts
The First and Last Carriages
[excerpted from Fatal Certainty] In the latter half of the 17th century there was an Irishman named Brian Rua (“Red Brian”) U’Cearbhain. He was born in around 1648 in a (still) fairly remote part of northern County Mayo, in the extreme west-northwest of the country, and grew up during the turbulent years…