Quotes About Prediction

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on

We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After

Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones.

It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

The fact that you got heads or tails on the previous flip does not change the odds of your getting heads or tails on the next one.

Forecasting (in words) bears no relation to speculation (in deeds).

In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California).

The antifragile gains from prediction errors, in the long run. If you follow this idea to its conclusion, then many things that gain from randomness should be dominating the world today—and things that are hurt by it should be gone. Well, this turns out to be the case.

Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event.

Furthermore, people who make forecasts professionally are often more affected by such impediments than those who don't.

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.

in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy.

Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After

When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline

that even a broken clock is right twice a day.