Quotes About Prediction

?stikbale hükmetme?e kalkmayal?m. Yar?n madem ki do?mam??t?r, yoktur. Hiç üzerinde bütün tahminlerimizin k?ymeti de hiçtir.

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me. ~ Nostradamus

The Civil War ceased physically in 1865," noted Thomas Beer, a chronicler of the Mauve Decade, which closed out the century, "and its political end may be reasonably expected about the year 3000.

We are all forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a product, or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future will unfold.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias. Baruch Fischhoff was the first to document the phenomenon in a set of elegant experiments.

To illustrate, imagine

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias.

Need for cognition" is the psychological term for the tendency to engage in and enjoy hard mental slogs. [...] superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests.

So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with wellbeing but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?

Here's my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

effective learning from experience can't happen without clear feedback, and you can't have clear feedback unless your forecasts are unambiguous and scorable. Sound familiar? It should. Drezner cited an article about the IARPA tournament.

If we are serious about measuring and improving, this won't do. Forecasts must have clearly defined terms and timelines. They must use numbers. And one more thing is essential: we must have lots of forecasts.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

What make the difference is correctly identifying and responding to subtler information so you zero in on the eventual outcome faster than others.

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted.

Forget the old advice to think twice. Superforecasters often think thrice—and sometimes they are just warming up to do a deeper-dive analysis.

Forecasters who see illusory correlations and assume that moral and cognitive weakness run together will fail when we need them most.

produce forecast-wrecking

Machines may get better at "mimicking human meaning," and thereby better at predicting human behavior, but "there's a difference between mimicking and reflecting meaning and originating meaning," Ferrucci said. That's a space human judgment will always occupy.

was one of the worst—arguably the worst—intelligence failure in modern history.

Kudlow was optimistic. "There is no recession," he wrote. "In fact, we are about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the Bush boom.

Accurate forecasts may help do that sometimes, and when they do accuracy is welcome, but it is pushed aside if that's what the pursuit of power requires.

Unpredictability and predictability coexist uneasily in the intricately interlocking systems that make up our bodies, our societies, and the cosmos. How predictable something is depends on what we are trying to predict, how far into the future, and under what circumstances.