forecasting [Theme] Page 1

Regardless of whether they want it or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. This requires growing production of the country.
Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.

The leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan, which by the way Gazprom has done a great service, when given the advance for $ 1.3 billion, it is strongly recommended not to engage in independent action and not to hold a referendum on independence, because the referendum does not recognize anyone and they will make it worse. We are not listened to, and listened to the Americans who first podrachivala Kurds, and then they merged the Iraqi army. So who is to blame? Again, are we?
Syrian Kurds offered, and this is known to all participants of the Syrian conflict, the broadest possible autonomy in Syria, with huge political and economic rights and self-government. But some Kurdish organizations have decided that the us is better in the Bush than the bird in Syrian hands. Great, now let turn to for protection and support to those who they promised to create an army and some semblance of state. Address of the state Department may also suggest.

I learned to mentally count the seconds, to save power and acceleration. That's what makes a person fear!
I learned how to run within myself, monitoring and gauging output and speed. Fear does that.

I never belonged to those who follow the weather forecast. I don't know why, but it is. Representatives of another part of humanity for Outlook follow. They always know what the outside weather, as they watched TV and compared the actual weather with the promise. They say on TV they said; and is often added: that they've been wrong before, now another thing, now they have satellites.
Why would I watch the weather forecast? I always, and every time it comes up the queue, I switch the channel. Not because I have anything against it, but because I'm not interested. When the sun is shining, I'm happy. When the rain comes, it goes.

The person who causes damage to their predictions, either a fool or a liar. Some forecasters are more dangerous than any criminal. Figuratively speaking, let these gentlemen do not sit behind the wheel of a school bus blindfolded.

When choosing a strategy is extremely important extreme risk-limit - Yes, it is more important to know the worst than the overall forecast. And this is especially important if the worst case scenario is simply unacceptable.

The perversity of all state government plans are obvious: they can't create the possible margin of error (tolerance for error).

Like many biological variables, life expectancy - the value of Srednekanskaya, that is subject to the ordinary accidents. It is not scalable because the older we get, the less chance we have to move on. In a developed country tables insurance companies predict the newborn girl's death in 79 years. When it will celebrate the 79th birthday, the expected duration of her life in the typical case will be 10 years. At the age of 90 years, she can expect to 4.7 years.
In 100 years - 2.5 years. If she miraculously live to 119 years old, it will be about 9 months. As it crosses another threshold, the number of additional years decreases. This is an illustration of the main properties of random variables, described by a "Gaussian curve". The older a person is, the less additional years he has in reserve.
With human plans and projects, the situation is different. They are often scalable, as I said in Chapter 3. And in the case of scalable, i.e. crinastanciu, variables, you will get exactly the opposite effect. For example, it is assumed that the project will be completed in 79 days (take the same number as in the example with the age of the woman). If on the 79th day the project is not completed, you will need to take him for another 25 days. 90-day - about 58. 100-th - 89. On 119 -149. If the project is not completed on the day number 600, you will need 1590 days. As you can see, the longer you wait, the longer you have to wait.

The most interesting analysis of how academic methods work in real life, was carried out by Spyros Makridakis. He arranged the competition forecasters, using the so-called econometrics - the "scientific method" that connects economic theory with statistical measurements. Simply put, Makridakis people were made to predict in real life, and then evaluated the accuracy of their predictions. With Michelle Hibon he spent a few "M-events"; the third and last of them, M-3 - was completed in 1999. Makridakis and Hibon came to a sad conclusion: "the Newest and most complex statistical methods do not have achieved more accurate results than the simple".

Tetlock studied the problem of "experts" in politics and Economics. He asked experts from different fields to estimate the probability that during a given time period (about five years) there will be certain political, economic and military events. At the exit he was about twenty-seven thousand predictions of almost three hundred professionals. Economists accounted for about a quarter of the sample. The study found that the experts went far beyond the limits of their tolerances for error. It was discovered and the expert problem: between the results of the doctors and students there was no difference. Professors with extensive list of publications, coped no better than the journalists. The only pattern that is found Tetlock was the inverse dependence of the forecast from the reputation: the owners of the big names predicted worse than those who have not got.
But Tetlock set ourselves the task not so much to show what really are the experts (although he did a great job), but find out why before they did not realize that they do not do their job, in other words, how they manage to "RUB points".
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You say you played another game. Let's say you failed to predict the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union (didn't see this coming no sociologist). It is easy to say that you perfectly understood the essence of political processes in the Soviet Union, but the Russian, being overly Russian, artfully concealed significant economic components. If you possess these economic data, you would have certainly failed to predict the fall of the Soviet regime. We must not blame your qualifications. You can also do if you have predicted a decisive victory of al Gore over George W. Bush. You didn't know that the economy is in such dire Straits; indeed, this fact seems to have been a mystery to all. You're not an economist, but a struggle, it turns out, was economic the ring.
You just blame it on unforeseen circumstances. Happened something extraordinary, outside of your field of science. Since it was impossible to predict, you are not to blame. It was a Black Swan, and you are not required to predict Black swans.

Bull showed me an amazing research work, has just finished his trainee and already accepted for publication; it is considered in detail by two thousand predictions made by securities analysts. The work clearly showed that these broker-analysts did not predict anything: the naive forecast of a person, simply transferring the numbers from the past period to the next would be slightly worse. But analysts have information about orders, forthcoming contracts, and planned expenditures and due to this valuable knowledge seems to predict much better than our naive predictor that does not hold any information except past data. Worse, the gap between predicted and actual values was more substantial than between different predictions and, therefore, analysts led the herd instinct. Otherwise, the predictions have defended from each other as they are separated from reality.

Forecasters of the economy, as we will soon verify, much closer in their guesses to each other than to the actual result. No one wants to be the black sheep.

In areas where everything is mobile and therefore requires the awareness of professionals usually do not happen, whereas in stable areas some experts are. In other words, specialists virtually does not exist in the professions dealing with the future and building their calculations on the basis of studying non-repeating of the past (with the exception of meteorology and those businesses that are determined by short-term physical, not socio-economic processes).

Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky <...> made the experiment: the subjects (and these were people whose profession is associated with the preparation of the forecasts) were asked to rate the probability of two events:
a) in America will happen a huge flood, which will die more than a thousand people;
b) an earthquake in California will cause severe flooding, which will killed more than a thousand people.
According to the respondents, the first variant is less probable than the second: the earthquake in California is the reason that easy to make and that makes the flood situation more representable, thereby increasing its probability in our eyes.
Similarly, if I ask: "what do you think, how many of your fellow citizens sick with lung cancer?" - you call any number (let's say half a million). However, if I ask, how many people in your country did develop lung cancer as a result of Smoking, the number you called, will be much (perhaps, as in two or three times) more. If the cause of the phenomenon, this phenomenon seems much more plausible and much more likely. Cancer from Smoking is easier to believe than cancer without a cause (if the cause is unclear, it's like, what it is not).