Essentially, the frequentist approach toward statistics seeks to wash its hands of the reason that predictions most often go wrong: human error.
Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.
If you correctly detect an opponent’s bluff, but he gets a lucky card and wins the hand anyway, you should be pleased rather than angry, because you played the hand as well as you could. The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.
The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
The panel may as well have been flipping coins. I determined 338 of their predictions to be either mostly or completely false. The exact same number – 338 – were either mostly or completely true.
An economic model conditioned on the notion that nothing major will change is a useless one.
If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal concern for the generations before us.
Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another. All languages contain words that have no direct cognate in other languages, even though they are both trying to explain the same universe.
An admonition like “The more complex you make the model, the worse the forecast gets.” is equivalent to saying “Never add too much salt to the recipe.” How much complexity-how much salt-did you begin with? If you want to get good at forecasting, you’ll need to immerse yourself in the craft and trust your own taste buds.
The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.
We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.
The blind spots in our thinking are usually of our own making and they can grow worse as we age.
We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it.
There is a “water level” established by the competition and your profit will be like the tip of an iceberg: a small sliver of competitive advantage floating just above the surface, but concealing a vast bulwark of effort that went in to support it.
On the other hand there was its culture. New Orleans does many things well, but there are two things that it proudly refuses to do. New Orleans does not move quickly, and New Orleans does not place much faith in authority. If it did those things, New Orleans would not really be New Orleans. It would also have been much better prepared to deal with Katrina, since those are the exact two things you need to do when a hurricane threatens to strike.
When you draw up a player, scouts have a feel for what they want to see,” Sanders told me. “Prototypical standards. Dustin went against the grain in some of those areas, starting with his size.” When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg – when.
Never before in human history have so many predictions been made so quickly and for such high stakes.
I was losing – a lot: about $75,000 during the last few months of 2006, most of it in one horrible evening. I played through the first several months of 2007 and continued to lose – another $60,000 or so. At that point, no longer confident that I could beat the games, I cashed out the rest of my money and quit.
Nobody saw it coming. When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.
Poker is so volatile that it’s possible for a theoretically winning player to have a losing streak that persists for months, or even for a full year. The flip side of this is that it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realizes that he isn’t much good.