The Wisdom of Crowds and The Expert Squeeze
As networks harness the wisdom of crowds, the ability of experts to add value in their predictions is steadily declining. This is the expert squeeze. *** In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of …
Predictions
Daniel Kahneman’s Favorite Approach For Making Better Decisions
Bob Sutton’s book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, contains an interesting section towards the end on looking back from the future, which talks about “a …
Nate Silver: Confidence Kills Predictions
Best known for accurate election predictions, statistician Nate Silver is also the author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t. Heather Bell, Managing Editor of …
What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process?
We all make decisions. Some of them are large and many of them are small. Few of us understand that the process we use to make those decisions is more important than the analysis we put into the …
How Good Gamblers Think
From The Signal And The Noise: Successful gamblers – and successful forecasters of any kind – do not think of the future in terms of no-lose best, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely …
The Future Is Not Like The Past
From Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us: The ubiquity of complex systems in the social world is important because it severely restricts the kinds of predictions we can make. In simple …
What makes predictions succeed or fail?
That’s the ambitious question that Nate Silver tries to answer in The Signal and the Noise. The book appeals to me because it “takes a comprehensive look at prediction across 13 fields, …
“the truth is that prediction is hard, often impossible.”
Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment, co-authors an interesting article in foreign policy. Academic research suggests that predicting events five years into the future is so difficult …
Nassim Taleb: The Winner-Take-All Effect In Longevity
Nassim Taleb elaborates on the Copernican Principle, a concept first introduced on Farnam Street in How To Predict Everything. For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a …
The Copernican Principle: How To Predict Everything
An old (1999) New Yorker article introduces us to J. Richard Gott III, a Princeton astrophysicist and some of his ideas on prediction. The core idea is that — despite what we’d like — we are not …
Daniel Kahneman on the Definition of Rationality and the Difference Between Information and Insight
Lance Workman interviews Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, co-creator of behavioral economics, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Among other things Kahneman discusses the definition of …
Predicting the Improbable
One natural human bias is that we tend to draw strong conclusions based on few observations. This bias, misconceptions of chance, shows itself in many ways including the gambler and hot hand …