We might notice how similar this claim is to the one that Bayes made in “Divine Benevolence,” in which he argued that we should not confuse our own fallibility for the failures of God. Admitting to our own imperfections is a necessary step on the way to redemption. However, there is nothing intrinsically religious about Bayes’s philosophy.27 Instea

A good model can be useful even when it fails. “It should be a given that whatever forecast we make on average will be wrong,” Ozonoff told me. “So usually it’s about understanding how it’s wrong, and what to do when it’s wrong, and minimizing the cost to us when it’s wrong.” The key is in remembering that a model is a tool to help us understand th

There is little consensus about the ways that climate change might manifest itself other than through temperature increases and probably rising sea levels.

Be wary, however, when you come across phrases like “the computer thinks the Yankees will win the World Series.” If these are used as shorthand for a more precise phrase (“the output of the computer program is that the Yankees will win the World Series”), they may be totally benign. With all the information in the world today, it’s certainly helpfu

In the most competitive industries, like sports, the best forecasters must constantly innovate. It’s easy to adopt a goal of “exploit market inefficiencies.” But that doesn’t really give you a plan for how to find them and then determine whether they represent fresh dawns or false leads. It’s hard to have an idea that nobody else has thought of. It

But it’s only because I’ve done the work to gain experience and to study the game that my “gut instinct” is fairly good and I can more easily detect when something feels off.

If the risk in Russia has been reduced, however, the threat posed by Pakistan has increased—perhaps markedly. “If you map weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, all the roads intersect in Pakistan,” Allison told me.

“Investors need to learn how to do exactly the reverse of what their fight-or-flight mechanism is telling them to do,” Blodget told me. “When the market crashes, that is the time to get excited and put your money into it. It’s not the time to get scared and pull money out. What you see instead is the more the market drops, the more money comes out

These things aren’t exactly easy—many people get them wrong. But they aren’t hard either, and by doing them you may be able to make predictions 80 percent as reliable as those of the world’s foremost expert. Sometimes, however, it is not so much how good your predictions are in an absolute sense that matters but how good they are relative to the co