As someone working in sales and doing forecasting on a daily basis, this book caught my attention 🙂
Memorable quotes
I believe it is possible to see into the future, at least in some situations and to some extent, and that any intelligent, open-minded, and hardworking person can cultivate the requisite skills.
In one of history’s great ironies, scientists today know vastly more than their colleagues a century ago, and possess vastly more data-crunching power, but they are much less confident in the prospects for perfect predictability.
In a world where a butterfly in Brazil can make the difference between just another sunny day in Texas and a tornado tearing through a town, it’s misguided to think anyone can see very far into the future
Edward Lorenz shifted scientific opinion toward the view that there are hard limits on predictability, a deeply philosophical question.4 For centuries, scientists had supposed that growing knowledge must lead to greater predictability because reality was like a clock—an awesomely big and complicated clock but still a clock —and the more scientists learned about its innards, how the gears grind together, how the weights and springs function, the better they could capture its operations with deterministic equations and predict what it would do.
There are no certainties in life—not even death and taxes if we assign a nonzero probability to the invention of technologies that let us upload the contents of our brains into a cloud-computing network and the emergence of a future society so public-spirited and prosperous that the state can be funded with charitable donations.
Accuracy is seldom determined after the fact and is almost never done with sufficient regularity and rigor that conclusions can be drawn. The reason? Mostly it’s a demand-side problem: The consumers of forecasting—governments, business, and the public—don’t demand evidence of accuracy. So there is no measurement. Which means no revision. And without revision, there can be no improvement.
The consumers of forecasting—governments, business, and the public—don’t demand evidence of accuracy. So there is no measurement. Which means no revision. And without revision, there can be no improvement.
“I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” Bill Gates wrote. “You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal. … This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.” He is right about what it takes to drive progress, and it is surprising how rarely it’s done in forecasting.
Sometimes forecasts are used to advance political agendas and galvanize action—as activists hope to do when they warn of looming horrors unless we change our ways. There is also dress-to-impress forecasting—which is what banks deliver when they pay a famous pundit to tell wealthy clients about the global economy in 2050. And some forecasts are meant to comfort—by assuring the audience that their beliefs are correct and the future will unfold as expected.
This jumble of goals is seldom acknowledged, which makes it difficult to even start working toward measurement and progress. It’s a messy situation, which doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Sometimes forecasts are used to advance political agendas and galvanize action—as activists hope to do when they warn of looming horrors unless we change our ways. There is also dress-to-impress forecasting—which is what banks deliver when they pay a famous pundit to tell wealthy clients about the global economy in 2050. And some forecasts are meant to comfort—by assuring the audience that their beliefs are correct and the future will unfold as expected. Partisans are fond of these forecasts
Until quite recently in historical terms, it was not unusual for a sick person to be better off if there was no physician available because letting an illness take its natural course was less dangerous than what a physician would inflict.
Experiments are what people do when they aren’t sure what the truth is. And Galen was untroubled by doubt. Each outcome confirmed he was right, no matter how equivocal the evidence might look to someone less wise than the master. “All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die,” he wrote. “It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.”
As the surgeon and historian Ira Rutkow observed, physicians who furiously debated the merits of various treatments and theories were “like blind men arguing over the colors of the rainbow.”
Not until the twentieth century did the idea of randomized trial experiments, careful measurement, and statistical power take hold. “Is the application of the numerical method to the subject-matter of medicine a trivial and time-wasting ingenuity as some hold, or is it an important stage in the development of our art, as others proclaim it,” the Lancet asked in 1921.
What medicine lacked was doubt. “Doubt is not a fearful thing,” Feynman observed, “but a thing of very great value.” It’s what propels science forward.
The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.
Ferrucci sees light at the end of this long dark tunnel: “I think it’s going to get stranger and stranger” for people to listen to the advice of experts whose views are informed only by their subjective judgment. Human thought is beset by psychological pitfalls, a fact that has only become widely recognized in the last decade or two. “So what I want is that human expert paired with a computer to overcome the human cognitive limitations and biases.”