Thursday, July 25, 2013

Nassim Taleb quotes (prediction)

I had this quote saved to post later, but it seemed to go well with the Tetlock article, so here it is now. THIS paper written by Taleb and Tetlock may also be worth reading (or re-reading)

"I insist on the via negativa method of prophecy as being the only valid one: there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today. Now, I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge—something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability—with all due respect to your imagination.
...
An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event. On the other hand, typical predictions (not involving the currently fragile) degrade with time; in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy. Your error rate for a ten-year forecast of, say, the sales of a computer plant or the profits of a commodity vendor can be a thousand times that of a one-year projection."

-Nassim Taleb, Antifragile