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: The Cult of Prediction
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
Presentation to the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, Pennsylvania State University
I gave this talk a few months ago, and it captures a lot of my shtick on “fatal certainty,” “the cult of prediction,” and the importance of rigorous imagination in strategic decision-making. Enjoy… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxzth2cJICQ
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 5: The Wrecks of the Bayesian
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…
Algorithms
SCA 4: An Alternative Metaphor
Nate Silver, in his new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, creates a geographical metaphor to describe two different types of people with two different modes of thinking. Nate lays out a geography of “The River”[1] as follows: He finishes with: “The people in the River are my…
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…
Rigorous Imagination
Summa Contra Argentum: Pars Secunda
My second objection to Nate’s book is his central dichotomy of “The River” and “The Village.” Nate defines “The River” thusly in the glossary at the end of the work: “A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people…
Popular Culture
Summa Contra Argentum: Pars Prima
My first objection to Nate Silver’s book is the title, or to be perfectly accurate, the subtitle: The Art of Risking Everything. I can only assume that some publisher or agent demanded this subtitle, because it seems to go against a fair amount of what is actually in the book. Risking everything is…
The Cult of Prediction
Summa Contra Argentum: Praefatio
Ancient (and less ancient) writers used to publish works entitled (in Latin) “Summa [fill in the blank].” A direct translation would be “All [fill in the blank].” This was meant to convey that the author was trying to cover all the major issues in whatever topic he (usually he) was…