Quotes About Forecasting

We spent a lot of time trend forecasting and collaborating on ways to design a fresh line of fashion-forward, affordable luxury.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.

MODERATOR: Tonight, our guest: Thomas Sargent, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the most-cited economists in the world. Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years? SARGENT: No.

After recent events, one might wonder if the macroeconomy is the domain of any economist.

But as we've seen lately, such predictions are generally worthless.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, "When the 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."49

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the nature of forecasting, he said, "When the 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.

True enough, the Fed needs radical reforms. In particular, it needs to replace its failed forecasting models and be rid of the academics who overwhelm the Fed system.

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future.

In India, one has to plan according to the monsoons.

TAKE THE OUTSIDE VIEW

WATCH YOUR DOWNSIDE It's often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That's false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that. For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers.

When delivery fails, efforts to figure out why tend to focus exclusively on delivery. That's understandable, but it's a mistake, because the root cause of why delivery fails often lies outside delivery, in forecasting, years before delivery was even begun.

But when things go wrong and people get desperate, the obvious is often overlooked, and it's assumed that if delivery fails, the problem must lie with delivery, when in fact it lies with forecasting.

As with reference-class forecasting, the big hurdle to black swan management is overcoming uniqueness bias. If you imagine that your project is so different from other projects that you have nothing to learn from them, you will overlook risks that you would catch and mitigate if you instead switched to the outside view.

A light winter means a hard summer.

I heartily recommend Alan Watts' little book Instant Weather Forecasting, which taught me how to predict weather changes in minutes.

No weather forecaster can tell you for sure when to wear a rain slicker, stock up on canned goods, or evacuate a city that's in a cyclone's path. All forecasters can offer is their best guess at the atmosphere of the future, whispered by the simulated blue marble and wrapped up in uncertainty.

H]e was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren't very good at it.

Economists, market advisers, political oracles, and clairvoyants all know this basic rule by heart: if you can't forecast right, forecast often.