Sublime

prediction is that about 90 percent of you would push the button. And thank goodness for that, because that rather than SBF-style rationality is what creates nuclear deterrence.

Across a number of disciplines, from macroeconomic forecasting to political polling, simply taking an average of everyone’s forecast rather than relying on just one has been found to reduce forecast error,14 often by about 15 or 20 percent. But before you start averaging everything together, you should understand three things. First, while the aggr

A forecaster should almost never ignore data, especially when she is studying rare events like recessions or presidential elections, about which there isn’t very much data to begin with. Ignoring data is often a tip-off that the forecaster is overconfident, or is overfitting her model—that she is interested in showing off rather than trying to be a

In many walks of life, expressions of uncertainty are mistaken for admissions of weakness. When you first start to make these probability estimates, they may be quite poor. But there are two pieces of favorable news. First, these estimates are just a starting point: Bayes’s theorem will have you revise and improve them as you encounter new informat

“Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we’re saying,” Mann told me. “It would be irresponsible for us as a community to not be speaking out. There are others who are happy to fill the void. And they’re going to

The last two major flu scares in the United States proved not to live up to the hype. In 1976, there was literally no outbreak of H1N1 beyond the cases at Fort Dix; Ford’s mass vaccination program had been a gross overreaction. In 2009, the swine flu infected quite a number of people but killed very few of them. In both instances, government predic

This is perhaps the easiest Bayesian principle to apply: make a lot of forecasts. You may not want to stake your company or your livelihood on them, especially at first.* But it’s the only way to get better.