Quotes About Prediction

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the "well-published" (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.

We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before.

Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or a lier. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals.

For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test.

People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as limits of prediction. They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.

What do they seem to have in common?

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.*

Black Swan is a sucker's problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like.

the second lesson is more aggressive: you can actually take advantage of the problem of prediction and epistemic arrogance!

If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence.

law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If

On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.