Meta: A persistent failed prediction

»The highly influential Essay on the Principle of Population, written by Englishman Robert Malthus in 1798, predicted that population would outrun food supply before the end of the nineteenth century. His basic view was that population, if unchecked, increases exponentially, at a geometric rate, whereas the food supply grows in a linear fashion, at an arithmetic rate.
(…)
Nevertheless, there have been other recent well-known works along similar lines to Malthus. These include The Limits of Growth, the world’s best-selling environmental book, published in 1972, which modelled the consequences of rapidly growing world population given finite resource supplies, and The Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time there was no shortage of criticism of the books, and both appeared on lists of the century’s worst books made at the turn of the millennium.«

(S. Brisoce & H. Aldersey-Williams: Panicology. Penguin Viking, 2008)

Meta: TV programme on forecasts (in German)

Just the link: Prognosen und Vorhersagen.

Meta: Dan Gilbert: How we are deceived by our own miscalculations of the future

Meta: 10 predictions/month

Two months after its start, this blog has scheduled 20 predictions for verification. The earliest will appear this summersoon. [looks like the future is more volatile than even my own short-term expectations]

Meta: Limits of statistics

[2nd-order-metadiscussion: To make this blog a little more interesting during prediction-poor times, I’ve  introduced the Meta category, which will carry out-of-band and metalevel posts. In other words, when we aren’t making or verifying predictions we’ll discuss about predictions as such.]

An essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Fourth Quadrant: a Map of the Limits of Statistics, is being quoted a lot these days. To make a long story short: there is a type of decisions that are hard to make and hard to base upon empirical data and sound statistics. He calls this type the fourth quadrant and decisions in this quadrant are complex and deal with extreme events. Obviously this has an impact on predictability and how to deal wisely with predictions. Go read the  essay if you haven’t done so yet.