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Comment by trishankkarthik | Hacker News Reader

This is the most dangerously stupid thing I've ever heard. Tetlock is a known academic charlatan pushing his absolutely useless "superforecasting" nonsense which @nntaleb keeps debunking on Twitter. If Tetlock and friends are so good about forecasting the future, why didn't they predict and warn us about COVID-19 BEFORE @nntaleb and friends (including myself) did?

P.S. I have been downvoted for saying this.

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You could be right, but I've people-watched on Twitter long enough to know that "person who insults those he disagrees with while name-dropping @nntaleb" is an entire PERSONALITY, one that I take approximately 0% seriously.

Not a criticism if the worst you can say about someone is that he is "mean," not that he is wrong.

Taleb has deep insights about some things, is laughably ignorant on other things, and doesn't seem to know which is which. His followers definitely don't.

> Taleb has deep insights about some things

I'll bite, what?

I know he's rich and successful, so he has deeper insights than most.

But it doesn't mean he teaches them, as far I can see he just uses them. For instance he's very good at doublespeak.

Thanks for the context. I was trying to figure what was noteworthy about an article saying we should think ahead which I kind of assumed we did anyway. Though I think "most dangerously stupid thing I've ever heard" is maybe an exaggeration. The US govt effectively banning coronavirus testing back in Feb kind of sticks out in my mind as outstanding on that front (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...)

Thanks, yes, I try to write in a way where even I don't fall asleep, unlike our "nirvana fallacy" friend below...

I think you’re partially right. However, it also depends on what you’re comparing to and what the baseline is. There are lots of projects that try to predict the future and using a framework to do so in a systematic way that can improve over time with feedback is really valuable. That part resonates with me.

I do agree that keeping this high level and abstract (scenario planning + probabilistic estimates) isn’t necessarily doing them any favours. Their book on the topic is better, and I do appreciate their argument that it’s not about being a perfect predictor of the future, but simply better than what we have today.

You cannot fundamentally predict the future, fuhgedaboutit, partly for the same reasons we cannot use Turing machines to solve the halting problem for Turing machines.

What you can do, however, is control your exposure to outcomes of unpredictable events. You don't know when a pandemic will hit, but you know it is is matter of time, just like getting hacked. So prepare and design accordingly. Simple. No need for this superforecasting nonsense which doesn't even work.

They would actually argue the same thing. Certain events are impossible to predict.

Other events are not.

That’s part of the beauty of the problem. You need to be able to pick the right events to predict and ensure the event is well-defined enough to actually test. Your own examples of why this wouldn’t work are exactly what they discuss as the problem... Eventually a lot of forecasts are correct; what governments, companies, and leaders need are forecasts that are time bound, as that’s how they plan.

Show me the money: did they warn about COVID-19 way BEFORE it be came a problem, or did they not? If not, why should we take them seriously? It is easy to prognosticate AFTER the fact.

not seeing one crisis doesn't mean they aren't better than chance. Also do you know that they didn't make some accurate prediction of XX% of a pandemic that was born out in this situation? No one is claiming to have a literal crystal ball.

This argument relies on the nirvana fallacy. "You are not perfectly clairvoyant, therefore prediction is worthless".

I recall, but cannot locate, that questions related to the outbreak of trans-species respiratory illnesses from China have been canvassed in the past. It does appear that the US intelligence community expected a pandemic to emerge: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/16/analysis-yes-people-d...

Taleb has anecdotes and insults.

Tetlock has data piled on data.

When did anyone predict COVID? You can just throw around assertions that someone predicted something like COVID without providing evidence and expect people to make judgements on it.

Predicted by experts:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-w...

If you're being downvoted it's probably for fulminating, which the site guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may not owe authors whom you feel are charlatans better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

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