Paul Saffo Six Rules for Effective Forecasting Full...

Six Rules for Effective Forecasting People at cocktail parties are always asking me for stock tips, and then they want to know how my predictions have turned out. Their requests reveal the common but fundamentally erroneous perception that forecasters make predictions. We don’t, of course: Prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of action in the present can influence future outcomes. That world is the stuff of myth and superstition. The one we inhabit is quite different—little is certain, nothing is preordained, and what we do in the present affects how events unfold, often in significant, unexpected ways. The role of the forecaster in the real world is quite different from that of the†¦show more content†¦Nobody knows if we will ever receive a message (radio astronomers have been listening since the late 1950s), but if we did, it would send a vast and unpredictable tremor through the zeitgeist. One-third of the world’s population would probably worship the remote intelligences, one-third would want to conquer them, and the final third (the readers of this magazine) would want to do some extraterrestrial market research and sell them something. The tricky part about wild cards is that it is difficult to acknowledge sufficiently outlandish possibilities without losing your audience. The problem—and the essence of what makes forecasting hard—is that human nature is hardwired to abhor uncertainty. We are fascinated by change, but in our effort to avoid uncertainty we either dismiss outliers entirely or attempt to turn them into certainties that they are not. This is what happened with the Y2K problem in the final years before January 1, 2000. Opinions clustered at the extremes, with one group dismissing the predictions of calamity and another stocking up on survival supplies. The correct posture toward Y2K was that it was a wild card—an event with high potential impact but very low likelihood of occurrence, thanks to years of hard work by legions of programmers fixing old code. The result of the Y2K nonevent was that many people concluded they had been the victims of someone crying Y2K wolf, and they