A new book is out by the journalist Tom Chivers, author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers. The Wall Street Journal likes it. Kirkus Reviews calls it “An ingenious introduction to the mathematics of rational thinking.” Oliver Burkeman wrote, “Life is shot through with uncertainty, but in this fascinating,…
Category: The Cult of Prediction
Dead Certain: Presentation to the Intelligence Leadership Forum
Many thanks to Dr. Liam Fahey for the recent opportunity to present some of my ideas to his topflight group of strategy and intelligence executives in the Intelligence Leadership Forum. The Cult of Prediction has some fairly ancient roots, and rigorous imagination requires the abandonment of some familiar and profitable…
The Economist Succumbs to the Cult of Prediction…Again
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;…
Even Some “Scientific” Stuff Requires Alternative Scenarios: El Niño Edition
Every day brings more proof that the range of strategically critical phenomena that are utterly unable to be predicted is almost as vast as it was in the day of Brian Rua U’Cearbhain or the Oracle of Delphi. Today, the Washington Post shows us that even when the vast majority…
Horserace Episode 3: Forecasting Follies
November 7, 2023 Nate Silver, the other day, tweeted (or “Xed?”) that the Democratic Party should be very very worried. “You have the whole electorate basically screaming ‘BIDEN’S TOO OLD.’ There’s a year’s worth of campaign to go, very likely some reversion to the fundamentals, Trump’s legal issues probably a larger liability…
Believe It…or Not?
October 22, 2023 The Washington Post has an article today about Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is now awaiting trial on charges of fraud. It starts with the following paragraph: ‘As Sam Bankman-Fried (popularly known as SBF) gets ready to take the stand in his own trial, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. Did…
The (Self-Inflicted) Twilight of the Experts
October 5, 2023 To me, a great general idea is one that can be approached from many different directions, and it will still explain important phenomena. One where, after hearing about it, for some period of time afterwards, everywhere you look, you seem to see an example of it in…
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…
Games Beyond Edges?
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…
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”…