Quotes About Prediction

The very first day, we said, 'There's going to come a time when we're going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It's going to blow up. We just don't know how or when.

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it:

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system… Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made

On the Psychology of Prediction

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome.

If the player had broken his neck the night before the NBA draft, for instance, it would be nice to know. But if you had asked Daryl Morey in 2006 to choose between his model and a roomful of basketball scouts, he'd have taken his model.

that'll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.

Meehl's book, called Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, had shown that psychoanalysts who tried to predict what would become of their neurotic patients fared poorly compared to simple algorithms.

improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the one-day-out forecast had been in 2005. In just the last few years, for the first time in history, a meteorologist's forecast of how hot it will be nine days from now is better than just guessing.

We know what the virus will do," she liked to say. "We don't know what the humans will do.

Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep. Until you could replace a theory with a better theory—a theory that better predicted what actually happened—you didn't chuck a theory out. Theories ordered knowledge, and allowed for better prediction.

Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.

Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

The options market also tended to presuppose that the distant future would look more like the present than it usually did.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

We sat there wrapping our heads around what we'd done." Six years after the storm, Uccellini described the advances in weather prediction from about the end of World War II as "one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century.

A lot of what people did and said when they predicted things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, It's impossible to know for sure.

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?' he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.

And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you're trying to predict the right thing.