Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

My all-time favorite quote of his:

"b285b048c5f1d12785b50c79e3ba30943f9a26f5968434ac65bd1a3e6fba77de255b5483b903253398f6f2775b34e1066bce13e17cba751b44e5f6ad02f30a04

This is an idiom to prove you had a particular text file at a particular timestamp. I am socially constrained from publishing this text file.

One month from today, one of two things will have happened:

1) I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems.

2) We need a data point to coun[t]er 'Nobody could possibly have seen this coming.'"

Source: https://xcancel.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624

In the fullness of time, his analysis and conclusions were proven to be clearly, obviously and completely wrong about the most consequential thing he had a view on in 15 years, an imminent Covid apocalypse in Japan.

As a result, I significantly degraded my estimate of his ability to think through complex problems.

The main issue I have with patio11 is that everything he posts reads like this. There’s just something really pretentious about it, almost everything he says could be worded in a less show-off-y way.

So wordy. What was his prediction? I still don't know what he's talking about.

He predicted a big Covid outbreak in Japan and it didn't happen.

Predicting the future is hard!

Wasn't there a COVID outbreak everywhere in the world around that time?

That's why reasonable, intelligent, well read people who have a strong understanding of complex systems have a healthy respect for how difficult it is to predict the future with accuracy measurably better than throwing darts.

So when Patrick is so confident in his own skills at interpreting and predicting complex systems that he stakes his reputation on getting the prediction right, that reputation should be diminished for his audience and for himself when it turns out he got it all exactly backward.

Instead, he now runs a popular podcast to tutor the rest of us who already know better than to make confident predictions about complex systems that we don't understand.

While it's not great, making accurate predictions isn't really why I like reading his articles, so I'm not going to stop reading due to one blown prediction.

You do need to discount for overconfidence a bit.

So wordy. I still don't know what it is he had a view on.

> Three days prior to that, on March 22nd, I was sufficiently convinced that there was an unacknowledged geographically distributed coronavirus outbreak to pre-register that conclusion.

Is.... is it possible he's being intentionally nebulous to distract from his failing? Or do I just lack the reading comprehension abilities?

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