Sublime

poker is an incredibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.

The intimate connection between probability, prediction, and scientific progress was thus well understood by Bayes and Laplace in the eighteenth century—the period when human societies were beginning to take the explosion of information that had become available with the invention of the printing press several centuries earlier, and finally transla

The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systemic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risky they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that thes

There is reasonably strong evidence for what Thaler calls No Free Lunch—it is difficult (although not literally impossible) for any investor to beat the market over the long-term. Theoretically appealing opportunities may be challenging to exploit in practice because of transaction costs, risks, and other constraints on trading. Statistical pattern

very voter had been predictively targeted as persuadable.

In each of these cases, the companies not only know the generalized probability of some behavior, they can make incredibly accurate predictions about how individual customers are going to behave.

But although SBF might or might not have underestimated how bad a crash would look, he probably did underestimate how likely one was.

What’s more, the Gutenberg–Richter law generally holds across regions of the globe as well as over the whole planet.

Even though foxes, myself included, aren’t really a conformist lot, we get worried anytime our forecasts differ radically from those being produced by our competitors. Quite a lot of evidence suggests that aggregate or group forecasts are more accurate than individual ones, often somewhere between 15 and 20 percent more accurate depending on the di