Reddit mentions: The best business planning & forecasting books

>such as you ultimately study things to help yourself, but really you're helping someone else who will pay you so you can help yourself

I love to learn about about laminar flow, the Germans who got lost in Death Valley (seriously read this, and his post on the hunt for downed airplanes), how ISIS formed, and an understanding of how people interpret data not because it will pay me, but because it makes me a smarter person. Your own intellect is not most beneficial to you because of what words you can make come out of your mouth, but by letting you decipher the words that come out of other people's mouths. The best thing about knowledge is that it gives you perspective.

>The real question, however, is will that make you attractive to us ladies? That's still the big question. Getting in shape will. Playing board games "for the challenge" with nerdy dudes who talk about pseudo philosophical BS they read on the internet? Not so much.

There in lies your problem. You're wanting to form yourself to make yourself attractive, where as long as you're a top 10 then you can do whatever you want. You honestly think a guy who is in great shape, well read, and works hard but happens to like board games or D&D can't get a girl?. Sure, if that's your only hobby it will be harder, but everyone should have multiple hobbies that they're passionate about. Women love confidence and passion. Confidence is just a different word for truly loving and believing in yourself regardless of what other people think. Passion is just another word for what you really really like.

If you don't love yourself, why would anyone else?

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If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s books those are good; he reads his own audiobooks and I like his speaking style. He also has a podcast called revisionist history that I really like.

Tetlock’s superforecasting is a bit long-winded but good; it’s a lay-person’s book on his research for IARPA (intelligence research) to improve intelligence assessments. His intro mentions Kahneman and Duckworth’s grit. I haven’t read it yet, but Nate Silver’s signal and the noise is in a similar vein to Tetlock’s book and is also recommended by IARPA.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was really eye-opening to me to understand the differences in the way that liberals and conservatives (both in the political and cultural sense) view the world around them and how that affects social cohesion. He has a few TED talks if you’d like to get an idea of his research. Related, if you’re interested in an application of Kahneman’s research in politics, the Rationalizing Voter was a good book.

As a “be a better person” book, I really liked 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey (recommend it on audiobook). Particularly, unlike other business-style self-help about positive thinking and manipulating people—this book really makes you examine your core values, what’s truly important to you and gives you some tools to help refocus your efforts in those directions. Though, as I’m typing this I’m thinking about the time I’m spending on reddit and not reading the book I’ve been meaning to all night =p

Look at George Friedman's The Next 100 Years.

This is a good starting point on how one should be predicting which countries might become great powers and which will decline. His actual predictions don't really matter here, however; the takeaway is that long-term analysis of geopolitics relies a holistic and multidisciplinary approach and situational awareness of world events rather than simple linear extrapolations. Projections of population and GDP and other metrics are not going to give you anything close to the complete picture, even though they deceptively lead you to believe they do.

Anyway, predictions:

• India is not going to be a leading power for quite some time. I have been there - there are so many social and environmental issues that I don't even know where to begin. It is extremely overcrowded and polluted, whatever infrastructure it has is under immense strain from overuse, and its technological base is impressive but thinly spread out over a large country with over 1.3 billion people. It has a lot of talent, resources, and potential, but even in the best case scenario, most of that is going to be focused inward on solving those problems rather than projecting power and influence outward.
  
• China is already one, but it has many of the same issues that India has, and whether it is going to overtake the US as the leading hegemon is a question that is completely up in the air. The US' current stance is one of containment - control of the island chains surrounding its major trade lines is a central component of that. Provided that internal economic and demographic issues do not catch up, China will largely be focused on dislodging the US from its littoral either through diplomatic or military means.
  
• Russia is a power in terminal decline.
  
• Japan is in managed decline.
  
• Korea has potential, should it be unified.
  
• Southeast Asia will be contested ground between Pacific powers.
  
• Europe is in slow decline, and strictly speaking is not a proper power in its own right. The main power centers of Europe are Germany and France. In the absence of any significant shifts in foreign policy, their international stature is not likely to change significantly but perhaps decline over time. Poland is interestingly resurgent and will likely become a bigger player as time goes on.
  
• The Middle East is the region most likely to change over the next thirty years. The only countries truly capable of becoming major power centers there are Turkey and Iran, but only one of them, and the former is currently dealt the better hand. Saudi Arabia is an honorable mention.
  
• Sub-Saharan Africa will continue to see Chinese investment but remain largely peripheral to world affairs. However, countries there will become much more capable of confronting internal and regional issues.
  
• Australia will assert an increasingly independent foreign policy.
  
• The US will still be powerful but is likely to remain in (relative) decline. Internal political/economic issues will probably start mounting as the boomers die off. Mexico will be in much better shape on the other hand. This combined with the large Mexican-American population may become a genuine source of tension at some point - perhaps much sooner than Friedman expected, if Trump's presidential campaign was any indication.
  
• Brazil will remain, as always, the country of the future.

I pretty much only read non-fiction, so I'm all about books that are educational but also interesting :) I'm not sure what your educational background is, so depending on how interested you are in particular subjects, I have many recommendations.

Naked Statistics and Nate Silver's Book are both good!

Feeling Good is THE book on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is good, as is Eating Animals (granted, Eating Animals is aimed at a particular type of eating)

Guns, Germs and Steel is very good.

I also very much enjoyed The Immortal Live of Henrietta Lacks, as well as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman :)

edit to add: Chris Hadfield's Book which I haven't received yet but it's going to be amazing.

You need to know some programming to develop a model, if you learn web scraping that will be enough to gather data for a model. You should be able to learn how to do this online.

For books, I'd highly recommend reading these:

Fortune's Forumula - A great book about the Kelly Criterion but touches on a whole range of subjects, a fantastic read.

The Signal and the Noise - Very famous book about prediction in general.

Conquering Risk - Very good book about sports betting (relatively unknown)

Calculated Bets - About creating a model and automated betting system for a relatively unknown sport.

Who's #1? - A book about rankings systems, aimed at ranking sports teams but the authors previously wrote a book on ranking websites (like google search algorithm type stuff). The basis for my dota model came from this book.


I'd recommend everyone to read Fortune's Formula and The Signal and the Noise, even people not interested in modelling. They're both awesome reads.

Calculated bets is a pretty cool read if you're interested in modelling, the author has a really quirky writing style that's entertaining.

Conquering risk is basically about exploiting bookmakers, picking off mistakes. Not really about modelling but still pretty cool.

Who's #1 is a really good intro to making a model for predicting sports imo, there's some very simple ones that will get you started.

I used to love all those new age books! Why not head down to the used bookstore and pick up half a dozen books that look fun out of that section? There's always something entertaining there. If she's a true believer, avoid anything that suggests people can survive by eating nothing but air.

Or, if she's not a true believer but just interested in the subject, have you considered getting her some non-fiction books that delve into the psychology behind ghost sightings and such? Like Investigating the Paranormal (less skeptical) or Demon-Haunted World (much more skeptical)?

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches was a fascinating read and IIRC largely historical. She might also enjoy branching out into a book like The Predictioneer's Game, which is about game theory and how to use it effectively in modern life.

If she likes mysteries at all, I suggest Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. It's about a police officer who is laid up in hospital and decides to use the time to solve a famous historical mystery. You could also consider biographies of strong and active women who inspire -- Princess Diana, maybe, or Martha Stewart?

(Edited to add links)

Not entirely, one method I've read about is to wait until right before the first game (or if I really have to, wait until the Wed. night before, just to make sure I have time to get my brackets in properly). Anyway, what you're supposed to do is look at the percentages ESPN puts out of how often the teams get picked to advance to each round, and use that as your guideline.

Sure it'll be skewed a bit (perhaps QUITE a bit - we'll see after I try this), by 1) people who don't know anything about basketball and are just picking randomly, of which there are obviously numerous amounts, plus the fact that it's telling you what all the people who used ESPN did, not specifically the people I'm playing in my pool did. Nevertheless, it's still a PRETTY good way to judge IMHO. Then, you go and see what teams were projected to go to each round (via sites like fivethirtyeight.com or whomever else) and you choose your upsets out of the teams that are being "under-bet" on (in other words, if fivethirtyeight.com says - let's say Marshall, has a 30% chance of making the round of 32, but only 15% of people are picking them to do so, that's a good value upset to pick. Likewise, if people are picking Virginia to repeat as champions 24% of the time, but fivethirtyeight says they only have a 14% chance of doing so, they're being over-bet and aren't a good team to choose.

But then again, I also read that you NEVER want to pick a "front-runner" as your champion, because that means you're going up against a bunch of other people who also choose that top team, making your pick for champion essentially a "moot point" and then all your earlier picks play a much bigger part in whether or not you win, especially those early round picks, because there are so many of them (which I also read you shouldn't pick too many early round upsets, because each of them is only worth 1 point, and thus almost meaningless, whereas a mid-round upset is more risky, but wields much bigger rewards).

I'm only telling you all this because there's like a 99.9% likelihood that you aren't one of the people I compete against in the pool and thus you knowing all this can't directly hurt me and can only help you. Here's another piece of help you might want to invest ($10) in:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Your-NCAA-Tournament-Pool/dp/0998442305

Sure no problem. I went thought the first few chapters in this book by Tsay:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Analysis-Financial-Time-Ruey-Tsay/dp/0470414359

 

Then I downloaded free finance data online where I could find it and also from this site called Quandl:

 

https://www.quandl.com/

 

I then loaded the data into a database and wrote a small application (using python, R, and java) to pull the time series data from the database and implement the calculations that I understood in that book.

 

I talked about this project in my cover letter for any job I applied to. It was definitely helpful in job interviews to be able to discuss what I had done. I also learned a lot because when I started I didn't have very much experience with programming so it was definitely a good learning experience.

If you want help getting started, let me know what questions you have and i'll send you some notes.

 

Edit: The book below (by Makridakis/Hyndman) is much simpler book and is a better introduction to time series than the book in the first link above. I read this first got a basic understanding of time series and forecasting. After getting through a few chapters in Hyndman, the Tsay book is much easier to understand. But in either case building small application that implement these methods in either of these books is a great exercise.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Forecasting-principles-practice-Rob-Hyndman/dp/0987507109/

 

You can also get the contents of that book for free at this link:

 

https://www.otexts.org/fpp

Quote from Superforecasting about a superforecaster named Doug:

>Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives.

Someone emailed Doug to see if he'd be willing to make his software public. If I recall correctly, Doug said that his software was a pile of kludges and would need to be redone if it was going to be used by anyone else.

However, I don't think the program described would be difficult for you to independently replicate at all. Even better, make it in to a discussion website. Something like reddit, but without any upvoting or downvoting, just links that are a representative sample of perspectives from all across the political spectrum.

Reddit is basically a confirmation bias nightmare, with view-specific subreddits where one point of view gets upvotes and opposing points of view get downvotes. Similar "filter bubble" issues exist on other social websites. Creating an online community version of Doug's program could be an ideal way to build a platform where people of different political views engaged each other without any single perspective coming to rule the entire community.

Another idea: I've heard that Tumblr is full of bugs. Since it's owned by Yahoo, it probably won't get much better. But it's heavily used in the rationality community. What if you created a competitor for Tumblr, but targeted at the community, with fewer bugs, and with better conversational dynamics? I honestly wonder whether Tumblr's lousy conversational dynamics are an existential threat to Effective Altruism and the rationality movement. (Note: I think theunitofcaring was involved in a project like this at one point, but it got abandoned? I suggest talking to her and trying to get her to advise you.)

First of all, it's a great question. I've been wrestling with it for quite a while now.

Might I suggest a few things...

Read Philip Tetlock's book, "Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Predicting".

This is real-world stuff that has Bayesian thinking at it's heart.

If you are intrigued, consider getting involved with Tetlock's Good Judgment project to get some actual hands-on experience with it and to start developing a network of peers.

You can read about it here. I recently took the one-day workshop when I was in Washington DC, but that's not really necessary to get started.

You can also participate in Good Judgment Open, and try your hand at actual forecasting using Bayesian methods.

Another book I would highly recommend is Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts". She actually references Tetlock a lot.

I will caution you that the first time I read "Thinking in Bets" I thought it was lame, and put it down before I finished. But then I heard her on a podcast and realized she's top-notch. Not only did I go back and read the book in full, but I read it twice (with extensive marking).

If you like Annie Duke, consider signing up for her weekly newsletter.

Finally, the first step -- in my opinion -- in internalizing Bayesian thinking and such is to know, internalize, and practice Cromwell's Rule.

I don't recall either Philip Tetlock or Annie Duke referring to it explicitly, but it is the foundation upon which all they discuss is built.

Good luck!

Sure, although it really depends on which geopolitical facets you enjoy the most.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard. Heavily influences US foreign policy. http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategic-Imperatives/dp/0465027261/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462464442&sr=1-1&keywords=zbigniew+brzezinski

George Friedman's The Next 100 Years. This is the guy that started Stratfor and this book is a large part of why they started getting so much attention. I really like Friedman but I do find his actual prose can be pretty droll. http://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462464571&sr=1-3&keywords=george+friedman

Charles Lister's The Syrian Jihad. Good read. http://www.amazon.com/Syrian-Jihad-Al-Qaeda-Evolution-Insurgency/dp/0190462477?ie=UTF8&keywords=charles%20lister&qid=1462464907&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1


Any of Kissinger's books would probably be worth reading. Even if you don't like the guy, he's not dumb by any stretch, and he's still pretty influential.

If I think of more I'll post 'em.

The machine learning model. Remember that Cognicism, the actual authors claims are not shown to users. The ML outputs an aggregate view of a collective of people trying to find a common truth together. The idea of "centralized arbiters of truth" really doesn't have much legs in my mind.

There are many attempts at making a "scoring algorithm" for truth. We talk about most of them in the manifesto.

Truthcoin (now hivemind) is basically just a crypto based on prediction markets. Simpler but I think it can be corrupted. [Metaculus] (http://www.metaculus.com/help/scoring/) also focuses on prediction and they concede that there are infinite scoring functions.

----------

From my perspective, the key is ML model, and FourThought API which is a constraint on how truths are evaluated. You don't just rate true or false, you rate on a spectrum of 0% likely to be true to 100% likely.

The ML model is using the raw text of the thoughts as well as the collective score. It's always trying to predict itself what accounts are making the predictions (or statements) that end up being logged to the chain.

The models seem to favor accounts that fall into the basic constraints laid out in this book They use Brier scores for evaluation like Prediction Book. In their case they find that scorers that make more nuanced predictions, and update their scores more often are more accurate. The ML models are meant to learn similar patterns in accounts.

The models are constantly learning, and becoming more rich with knowledge over time, and resistant to corruption by trolls.

Early models with not a lot of training time and pretty dumb and susceptible.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." - George Box

From my experience, it generally appears to be that it's always possible to have more information from which to source; however, barriers such as cost and time often prohibit you from being able to do so.

I think there will always be a better statistical model out there; I don't see anything wrong with updating your model over time as you come across more information or more effective techniques to do the analysis you would want.

I think these two sources should interest you. (1) (2)

Also Nate Silver's Signal and the Noise might be worth a read. It's not a technical manual, but it will give you some things to think about regarding the use of models in a wide variety of fields.

Hope that helps!

>Which reforms?

This one, essentially expanding capital of IMF and increase quote of emerging markets, including China, to align more closely to current GDP shares rather current US and European centric quotas. Similarly WTO Doha round has being stuck for so long, that people have forgotten that it even exists.

> Even when China is found to be in violation of said rules, no sanctions follow.

Not so, all WTO decision carry penalties against companies and industries. The most famous one recently is 78% tariff levied on Chinese solar panels. You can read details here

>Who was hoping for this?

Plenty of people in 90s and into the early 2000s, the idea that the "freer", wealthier and more capitalistic Southern and Coastal China will break away from it conservative, poor and conservative North unless China transition into a democracy and adopt a federal-state government. And it is the most frequent western view I have encountered when I was in China though underground pamphlets and article distributed by pro-democracy activists as well as in Chinese language Voice of America broadcasts. I not sure how widespread this view is actually in the western think tanks at the time, but it is accurately described in senario #3 in this article. However, by the time I really get into this . Hence the use of "in the past" in my previous post. The most recent use this view I know of is Stratfor's George Friedman in his book, The Next 100 Years. While such an event will certainly cause instability around the world, it will however, take care of The Chinese Question once and for all.

>Nixon's opening of China was the first step, and as the US pushed for greater economic liberalization and opened its markets to China, China grew exponentially.

Perhaps you should read Chinese, American history more carefully before entering into this discussion. (Harry Harding's China's Second Revolution and A Fragile Relationship are excelent starts depsite it's age) Not sure where you get this idea from, at the time with US foreign policy under Kissinger and Brzezinski, US-China relationship centered primarily on security and the American establishment was actually surprised at the Rapid demise of Chairman Hua, the scale of Chinese economic reform and the rise of Deng.

>non-existent labour laws

Oh, they exist even in the 1990s see here and here. They are quite generous too, for example 98 days of mandatory Maternity leave, retirement at 60 for males and 50 for females, and no fault termination (layoffs) must carry severance payment of at least 3 month of salary etc. However, not well followed outside of SOEs with foreign contractors often being the biggest violators due to price pressure. If you want to be educated about this issue, read this

>Could you explain this, please?

Well, next year we'll have either Trump, Hillary or Bernie as president. And their all take a much more hawkish stance towards China (in addition to many other things, this election cycle is truly wild). The same year, all member of the Chinese Politburo except Xi and Li will retire, and leadership transition will finally complete. If Hu-Wen to Xi-Li transition is any indication; China will shift more hawkish as well.



Well, this took me two hours to write, and I have a day job. So I guess I'll end it here.

In Poker, each player at the table is playing against all the other players, rather than against the dealer. The house takes a cut of each pot instead of fielding a hand. Players in Poker aren't subject to the standardized behavior rules that a dealer in Blackjack is, and each player has significantly more hidden information in Poker than in Blackjack which means significantly more possibilities to account for in each hand for a "skilled" player.

It also means that more of Poker is built around reading other players, trying to divine what hand they might have based on their betting behavior—and based on their prior performance, whether or not they're deliberately trying to throw people by betting like they have a better or worse hand than they actually have.

Also, decks in Poker are shuffled after each hand, which makes Blackjack-style counting impossible.

There ARE people who make a living playing Poker, but it's not easy. Nate Silver talks about his experience as a professional Poker player in his book, The Signal and the Noise. One of the big takeaways is that the long run is even longer in Poker than it is in Blackjack—even a talented pro who consistently plays well and ultimately has a profitable career can have years where they lose tens of thousands of dollars.

I wouldn't call it fluff. If read it all, it's pretty informative. He looked at Suzuki's comparables among players who produced close to his place. He separated his analysis in various groups to draw many comparisons:

• Players who scored 1.5 PPQ by their third year in the CHL versus those who didn't. Suzuki belongs in the first group, and that's quite a star-studded line up.
  
  
• The five players who scored a similar pace than Suzuki in the CHL and player four years there. The list include a few second line players (e.g., Danault and Kadri) but all players played some time in the NHL.
  
  
• The players who scored at a similar pace than Suzuki, but played only three years in the CHL (e.g., Draisaitl, Couturier, Meier). The list is of a different level, which makes sense since all of them were rushed to the NHL, but all of them tracked Suzuki eerily closely during these three years.
  
  
• The players who played either three or four years in the CHL while tracking closely Suzuki (which is a mix of the previous players, plus Huberdeau). It's a very solid list. If you ignore Etem's presence, Scott Laughton is arguably the second worst player on that list of 7 players.
  
  Obviously it gives no definitive prediction. There is much uncertain about prospects, so with the rare exception of top-end talent, it's hard to predict whether the player is NHL-ready. All of us were wrong about Kotkaniemi's NHL-readiness last year, for example. That being said, it allows us to have a better informed idea of his odds of making the NHL.
  
  If you look at the list of the four years CHL players, then Suzuki looks like it'll take some time to settle and will benefit from a year or two in the AHL. On the other hand, his first three years and his OHL playoff performance suggest a different kind of player. In either case, there's a solid chance we have a second line or better player. Suzuki's closest comparable is actually Kadri, which isn't bad at all. While it's possible he'll flop (i.e., Hodgson and Etem), he's more likely than not going to play in the NHL. He isn't overhyped.
  
  People tend to look down upon uncertain conclusions (Truman famously demanded a one-handed economist), but studies demonstrate that analysts who make these mitigated predictions are by far the most accurate. Good forecasting requires to be aware of the uncertainty, and acknowledging it is a signal of competence. I'm more wary of those who use sport analytics to arrive to very confident conclusions.

Run from this project. Everyone else in this thread has already given you great reasons. I want to recommend a book, Nate Silver's Signal and Noise. It's a great read, and I think useful to any data scientist even though it's geared towards the general public.

Specifically, he introduces the reader to weaknesses in forecasting complex systems, as well as the efficient market hypothesis .

I've worked on a social media based market predictor before, and I definitely fell into many of the pitfalls Nate Silver describes.

Ahhhh that post is so embarrassing lol. *\^_\^*

It's been a while since I read it, but some of my ideas came from the book The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, who also is involved in Stratfor, if you want more glimpses of how things may turn out in the near future. Stratfor in particular is pretty dense, so maybe you'll enjoy it! He also has two books, called The Next Decade (2011) and Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe (2015) that I want to read (although the former may be a little...well, late, lol). Oh, also, CaspianReport is fantastic. :D (Pretty sure he's INTP!)

ETA: Ohhhhh I also have to recommend The Crash of 2016 by Thom Hartmann! It set its predictions a year or two early but otherwise is spot on imo. You can see a ~1 hour video on the topic of the book with its author here.

This is why statistics are so easy to lie with. No one puts the basic effort into understanding what they mean.

Plenty of teams have overcome low odds. There's plenty of variance in sports and the weaknesses of 538s model for direct-game prediction is well known (for ex: the fact CARMELO measures players instead of teams as a unit, that it uses data from the regular season despite large post-season statistical gaps, etc).

The later into the playoffs the more accurate it will get. But it's still a small amount of data but despite all of that it's still one of the best we've got.

FWIW, if you care, 538's creator wrote a good book about bayesian statistics and prediction modelling: https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087/

He's talking about Deep Blue's move 44 of game 1. To quote Nate Silver's excellent (and highly recommended fun read) The signal and the Noise:

> ... Deep Blue did something very strange, at least to Kasparov's eyes. On its forty-fourth turn, Deep Blue moved one of its rooks into white's first row rather into a more conventional position that would have placed Kasparov's king into check. The computer's move seemed completely pointless. At a moment when it was under assault from every direction, it had essentially passed its turn, allowing Kasparov to advance one of his pawns into black's second row, where it threatened to be promoted to a queen. Even more strangely, Deep Blue resigned the game just one turn later.

> What had the computer been thinking? Kasparov wondered. He was used to seeing Deep Blue commit strategic blunders--for example, accepting the bishop-rook exchange--in complex positions where it simply couldn't think deeply enough to recognize the implications. But this had been something different: a tactical error in a relatively simple position--exactly the sort of mistake that computers don't make.

> "How can a computer commit suicide like that?" Kasparov asked Fredric Friedel, a computer chess journalist who doubled as his friend and computer expert, when they studied the match back at the Plaza Hotel that night. There were some plausible explanations, none of which especially pleased Kasparov. Perhaps Deep Blue had indeed committed "suicide," figuring that since it was bound to lose anyway, it would rather not reveal any more to Kasparov about how it played. Or perhaps, Kasparov wondered, it was part of some kind of elaborate hustle? Maybe the programmers were sandbagging, hoping to make the hubristic Kasparov overconfident by throwing the first game.

> Kasparov did what came most naturally to him when he got anxious and began to pore through the data. With the assistance of Friedel and the computer program Fritz, he found that the conventional play--black moving its rook into the sixth column and checking white's king--wasn't such a good move for Deep Blue after all: it would ultimately lead to a checkmate for Kasparov, although it would still take more than twenty moves for him to complete it.

... As Friedel recalled:

>> Deep Blue had actually worked it all out, down to the very end and simply chosen the least obnoxious losing line. "It probably saw mates in 20 and more," said Garry, thankful that he had been on the right side of these awesome calculations.

> ...

> ... there were some bugs in Deep Blue's inventory: not many, but a few. Toward the end of my interview with him, Campbell somewhat mischievously refered to an incident that had occurred toward the end of the first game in their 1997 match with Kasparov.

> "A bug occurred in the game and it may have made Kasparov misunderstand the capabilities of Deep Blue," Campbell told me [Nate Silver]. "He didn't come up with the theory that the move that it played was a bug."

> The bug had arisen on the forty-fourth move of their first game against Kasparov; unable to select a move, the program had defaulted to a last-resort fail-safe in which it picked a play completely at random. The bug had been inconsequential, coming late in the game in a position that had already been lost; Campbell and team repaired it the next day. "We had seen it once before, in a test game earlier in 1997, and thought that it was fixed," he told me. "Unfortunately there was one case we had missed".

> In fact, the bug was anything but unfortunate for Deep Blue: it was likely what allowed the computer to beat Kasparov. In the popular recounting of Kasparov's match against Deep Blue, it was the second game in which his problems originated--when he had made the almost unprecedented error of forfeiting a position that he could probably have drawn. But what had inspired Kasparov to commit this mistake? His anxiety over Deep Blue's forty-fourth move in the first game--the move in which the computer had moved its rook for no apparent purpose. Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence. He had never considered that it was simply a bug.

Another study showed something similar, but from the other point of view. I believe I read it in Nate Silverman's The Signal and the Noise. It showed that people who made more money were seen as, for lack of a better word due to my own forgetfulness, more intelligent and deserving of their money. They would arbitrarily choose a subject in a group to be paid more, and that person was more likely to be listened to. I believe it also showed that a certain amount of respect is given for those who make or are perceived to make more money. I let someone borrow the book, so I don't currently have access to the passage/study.

Awesome! Put them in touch with me and we'll find a way. peter@fringesport.com

And yes, the US has a ton of unfair advantages for companies now, including an amazing logistics infrastructure. If you are interested in learning more about this, I highly recommend "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century"

> I have trouble seeing the need for greater political diversity in the sense of having more right-wing academics. I think that this is an attempt at a false balance. The right-wing (of U.S. political culture) seems to be genuinely and significantly anti-science and anti-intellectual (q.v. intelligent design and climate change denial), so we should expect them to be very underrepresented in scientific circles. But this isn't a problem – this is probably as it should be.

This was actually a common element in the response pieces published alongside that article on lack of political diversity in the academy. There was discussion of cross-country differences in political attitudes, differences over times in what seemed to constitute the right-wing, and other dimensions along which discrimination seemed to exist (e.g. religious). Lee Jussim has those responses as well as the author's response posted on his website - they're not at the link that seems to most often get posted.

> Regarding the superior performance by laymen, it's possible that this could be the result of a wisdom of crowds phenomenon. Since the well-read layperson is exposed to the aggregated views of all of the experts via summary newspaper articles and the like, the layperson's opinion might be closer to the average of the entire field than the opinion of any one expert would be.

Try adding Tetlock's Superforecasting to your reading list. Certain individuals did better in some ways of evaluating things, but groups of those better-performing individuals did better still.

I think keeping up with events in a meaningful way is quite a laborious undertaking.

Like, it is difficult to understand the significance of the recent killings in Jerusalem without being aware of the rising tensions over the past few months, the current political climate in Israel, the history of Palestinian uprisings, the relationship between Israel, the Palestinian people, and neighbouring states, the deep connection between Jewish identity in the diaspora and the Israeli state, and so on.

Even with a lot of historical context, significant developments in world affairs, national politics, or what have you typically require a lot of thought to sort out--especially when there are many contrary narratives on offer. Trying to maintain such a grasp on a wide array of events constitutes a major time investment.

A headline-level awareness of, say, Russia's recent intervention in the Ukraine is hardly better than no sense of that conflict at all. Grand events are endlessly complicated, their implications are multifaceted and prohibitively difficult to predict--let alone to usefully apply to one's life.

(Total aside, Philip Tetlock's book on professional forecasting was really good and you would probably like it.)

> Even if it doesn't affect my life right now, the fact it might affect my life in 5 or 10 years means I am better off keeping up with it.

Most developments you'd read about in the news? Probably not outside of your ability to discuss them. (Granted, that ability is in and of itself important in many social circles.)

The original guy posted his prediction to a public discussion website. If he didn't want it spread around he would have kept it within his nice quiet home.

And I brought it up because it contrasted interestingly with Buffett's stance - to trigger a discussion.

> ... this poonslapper will DEFINITELY hear about it from me ...

Me? To my knowledge, I haven't made any specific predictions (because most people are bad at making specific predictions). Feel free to glance at my comment history, I guess?

I could make a prediction if it makes you feel better: Someday there will be a recession, markets will go down and up.

De acord!

Depinde și ce înțelegi prin imaginație, în unele aplicații un soft poate fi mai inventiv decât noi. Citeam în The Signal and the Noise că la unele turnee de șah ăia care trișează sunt prinși tocmai pentru că fac niște mutări atât de inventive și ieșite din comun încât ridică semne de întrebare că niciun om nu poate gândi atât de mult în perspectivă, deci trebuie să fie "ajutat" de un AI.

La ce te referi prin imaginație? Care ar fi aplicațiile imaginației noastre prin care ne-am păstra totuși un avantaj față de AI? Sunt sincer curios.

As globalization becomes more and more pronounced America will become less and less important in Global Politics.

Being in a superior geographical position (Access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) has been very advantageous to the American economy. The only reason why America is the world's only superpower right now, is the sheer size of the American Navy. The future of America as a superpower will be directly tied to preserving naval dominance.

Here's a good book on the subject

Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

makes me think about what ML/AI/DS can do and can not do. What should I be focusing on...

The Data Science Handbook: Advice and Insights from 25 Amazing Data Scientists

Good inspirations from many data scientists

The Last Samurai? I thought it was called Dances With Samurais!

Though I can't really say I care much for the East in general, Japan's such an amazing place (I love demographics and that's one homogeous biatch). It's a long shot, but you might want to check out The Next Hundred Years -- this guy's predicting a return of a strong Japan!

We're all trying to do the best we can in this crazy place called crypto.

As to your comment, that's why there is no DCF or dividend discount model or the like in my post. Scenario analysis is a start of something and it gives context. It leans on assumptions and guesses and it's weak for it. But it gives better context than just rolling the dice or guessing without going through the rigor of breaking it down. Have you read Superforecasters? I highly recommend it.

Another framework to use that might be of some use would just to look at comparable cryptos. LTC/BTC relationship, estimated of TX/day and number of users and value, etc.

Technically, we have world peace, right now, but are you proposing an Alliance, but there will always be dissenters, so should the US and China start agreeing to things, Russia will feel almost compelled to veto- unless of course it's absolutely also in their interests as well. But that's the problem of politics, William H. Riker and especially Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's EXECELLENT "The Predictioneer's Game" - explains how this stuff works far better than I've seen in many other books on politics.

Here you'll find some holt winters which I've tried using: https://gist.github.com/andrequeiroz/5888967.

Depending on your business industry, this might produce somewhat reliable results. I can tell you though, that from a e-commerce perspective, this will in the best case lead to +30%-50% accuracy (based on weekly based historical data from 3 years, forecast horizon of 6 weeks) .

I've went ahead and bought some forecasting books and more or less written code in vba with the use of solver which gives me a better reliability and flexibility (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Business-Forecasting-Keith-Ord/dp/0324311273/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450279175&sr=1-1&keywords=principles+of+business+forecasting)

Let us know if you do find something though ^^

I think the answer is that we really can't predict much beyond that it will increase, probably substantially. There's a really good book on this topic (well, in a general sense, not specific to computing): The Next 100 Years.


The first chapter of the book points out how 100 years ago, there's no way anyone could have conceived of how things turned out technologically or politically, but that we can try to make some guesses based on current trends.

Specifically regarding computing: most of the advancement in computing power has come from the scaling (i.e. shrinking down) of CMOS technology. CMOS is the flavor of transistor manufacturing that dominates digital design, and is why Moore's law is a thing. As transistors get smaller, they consume less power and operate faster. There are also architectural improvements that help too, but the bulk of advancement is in manufacturing.

The thing is, we're getting close to the limit of how much we can shrink transistors. Eventually things will be 1 atom thin, or require only a few atoms of a certain material in a specific manufacturing step. Can't get smaller than 1 atom... From there we have to move to different types of transistors, but those are years away, so it's really hard to say what will happen.

It would be interesting. That reminds me of Nate Silver. He is a statistician that has done everything from baseball stats to presidential election stats.

His presidential election stats were very accurate, and they used a system you are describing. They took in all the predictions, then weighted those predictions based on prior accuracy of the predictor. Very interesting stuff described in his book The Signal and the Noise. I'm reading it now, and it is fascinating.

I started reading this book and it seems pretty good. It would be a good reference, and I think it covers some of working with others.

https://www.amazon.com/Forecasting-principles-practice-Rob-Hyndman/dp/0987507109

Hmm.. The only other two I can think of is:

1. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
   
2. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
   
   **edit: Ah! Looks like you figured it out! :)

And mocking him for being "wrong" just belies a complete lack of understanding of statistics and probability. I mean, if he had her penned at 70% (as the post up above indicated), then he's forecasting a 30% chance she'll lose. 30% is a pretty significant chance - not unlikely at all!

The problem is that, emotionally, people would rather somebody forecast something with certainty (even if the prediction is completely divorced from reality) than have someone use all the information we have, as well as we can use it, and arrive at the conclusion that "we really don't know for sure".

Nate Silver's book talks about this quite a bit and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in data analysis and/or political punditry.

So MS-13 is simply a FedEx of drugs? I doubt that assumption and what is taking place in the whole of Latin America goes beyond drugs. It's a cultural item that is deeply complex and I won't get into.

Being resistant to bribes is true but MS-13 and alike don't care at this point. The can access, move, transport with much ease once on US soil. I agree drawing attention isn't the best avenue but we're not dealing with like-minded people here.

The question is: What is their goal? I don't think it has a business plan on file with the SBA but I would think it is to spread for many base ideals. Continue recruitment and repeat. Unless someone has a solution handy, I don't think this stops until.... as I noted earlier by a few researcher publications. Cited below.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767923057/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1455583685/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

The Signal and the Noise is a very light read as math(s) books go, but it's definitely interesting!

The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver. (Goodreads, Amazon)

Speaks about the way we make predictions in various fields, such as the economy, politics, weather, stock market, sports (which teams win championships, which players will become successful) and others.

He's the chief editor of the news website fivethirtyeight. Although its America-centric, the quality of the reporting there is peerless because its entirely backed up by data, rather than opinion.

A little tidbit (of the synchronicity variety)... The (basically) game theory of Nobel Prize winner John Nash has become the cornerstone of economic planning in many quarters. It has also affected the thinking of social and political theoreticians, such as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:

http://www.amazon.com/Predictioneers-Game-Brazen-Self-Interest-Future/dp/081297977X/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1302785594&sr=8-8

It seems that as computer game-playing has become more mainstream, it has become a more widespread part of people's experience, and consequently, its structures and behaviors have become a more acceptable element of other "real-world" activities. For example, the military is filled with young people who have made the leap between FPS games and strategic games to real military situations. Such folk used to be looked down upon as geeks and freaks. Now they're commonplace.

One of the models I'm playing with is based somewhat loosely on the ideas presented in The Predictioneer's Game.

The author is a little grandiose with his view of himself, but some of the ideas he puts forward have been interesting to play with.

Here is the source on Gove's comments on experts. It isn't stupid at all, but backed up by a 20+ year study by a famous Ivy League professor

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/everybodys-an-expert

The book is called

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/1511358491

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

After he taught his lessons of prediction to random members of the population, he pitted them against analysts from the NSA, CIA and military in "The Good Judgement Project". His "superforecasters" - random members of the population taught a few lessons - out performed the trained analysts with access to classified information by 30%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project

The guy who ran Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, also a former SPAD for Gove, is a big fan of Tetlock and his forecasting methods.

Not your question, but in one book I read, the Japanese used a base on the dark side of the moon to launch anti-satellite projectiles. I guess it might be more accurate to say anti-space-station, because the target was a very large manned station.

For asteroid defense, your concept would make sense, but just like my fictional reference, the projectile would need small rockets and telemetry (for course correction). You can't just fire a gun and hit something. If you had an advanced "maglev" system, that could be viable, but I picture early space guns as something that would crush any functional equipment in the projectile.

I highly recommend Proofiness. It's a great book about how statistics are misused in the media, both intentionally and unknowingly.

Also, Steven Strogatz, who did a number of really well written articles about math for the New York Times a few years back compiled them with more into The Joy of X

Finally, I have Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise right next to me, but I haven't actually started reading it so I can't vouch for it fully.

I read this book when i was a teenager. He did really good at predicting what was going to happen. I still like to look back at what i read and see how well he did. http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057

Love stuff like this and this.

It's been out since 2010. It's like a American nationalist sci-fi novel lol.

https://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057

Mostly Harmless Econometrics

and

The Signal and the Noise

are my recommendations for an introduction into more advanced topics in econometrics. If you want more of a textbook Th3Plot_inYou's suggestion is good (I still have mine from my class).

Edit: Signal and the Noise is more theoretical about forecasting in general.

Ditto over here. I just started reading and I know I'm going to have to come back later. Nate Silver writes some interesting words in the preface of "The Signal and The Noise" that relate to this topic. He states that what we're experiencing now has analogues in history - the most salient example being that the advent of the printing press was eventually responsible for newspapers that catered to every viewpoint or belief structure. The Internet has just made the rabbit hole deeper and more lifelike while requiring considerably less imagination to continue on.

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.

It's a great introduction to how probability and statistics can be used to model real events in the future, and why many of those predictions don't work very well at all. The book is more about the logic and principles of predictions than the math behind them, so if statistics intimidate you but forecasting fascinates you, this is the book you'll want to read.

Calibration exercises may not be common outside the rationality sphere, but they certainly didn't start within the rationality sphere either. AFAIK, Philip Tetlock started the trend in Expert Political Judgement when he ran a series of experiments comparing expert predictions to random university undergrads. The experts outperformed, but they could further be divided into foxes and hedgehogs - those who know many things, and those who are quite certain of one thing.

Anyway, Silver quotes Tetlock in his book The Signal and the Noise, so I'm guessing that's where he got the idea.

Superforecasting has been on my "get to soon" list since I got it last Christmas. It just got a nice nod in the latest CAS magazine.

Along the probability/math lines, other books I've enjoyed are:

• How Not to Be Wrong
  
• The Drunkard's Walk
  

He is a statistician and analyst who wrote a pretty good and very accessible book called The Signal and the Noise

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but-ebook/dp/B007V65R54

It was the title of Nate Silvers book which I am sure helped popularize the concept. I know it is used fairly frequently in statistics as well.

Yes. That also gets into the more specific issue of America's hegemony over the seas, partly thanks to her pan-continental existence.

A few books that really discuss all these things:

https://www.amazon.ca/Prisoners-Geography-Explain-Everything-About/dp/1501121464

https://www.amazon.ca/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057

NWS is one of the sources for raw data, but they have their own forecast algorithms. Nate Silver did a lengthy piece on weather forecasting in The Signal and the Noise, which discussed how for profit forecasting services tend to skew the forecast depending on their advertisers since it's a game of probability.

Have you read Superforecasting? It's all about predicting the future, and how some people do it well. Interestingly, they tend to use very little actual math.

I don't know about that one, but I liked this one

Marketing High Technology, William Davidow

http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Davidow/dp/1451697589

If you can get your hands on it, this is the best depiction of a future Japan.

Tl:dr - A re-militarized Japan allied with a nationalist Germany and Turkey becomes a future threat to the United States, starts WW3 or WW4 by shooting down an American space station, and there's power armor involved in all of this. I'm not making this up.

There is an author who has written about the coming century and his take on Mexico is:

Its economy takes off.

It's migrants to the US never integrate because unlike every previous wave of migration the migrants are crossing a land border and do not feel the same need to integrate as Irish or Italians or Indians with an ocean separating them from home.

This creates a tension, with CA, AZ, TX etc. becoming predominantly Hispanic, perhaps Mexico offering 2nd and 3rd generation diaspora voting rights at home.

At some point (e.g. the 2080s and beyond) the border states leaving the US and joining Mexico could start to look attractive. This seems unthinkable but in 1913 so did the idea of the US being the most powerful nation on earth.

He is not speculating sequelae, just identifying a future fault line.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/038551705X

I just saw this book on my friends coffee table yesterday. I haven't read it, but plan to. Only took a quick glance, but might be worth the read.

>Except an election is not random probability

No one is claiming that, they use predictive probability I just gave an example that's simpler.

>His method for calculating the chances was straight up wrong.

Do you have a source that backs that up?


Please read this

And this

And if you don't understand what those are saying, please read this

*edits

According to this this book, there's going to be a population crash (which is already starting in some countries like Russia and Japan).

Our taxes will go up to support our elderly people, but we'll be making more money because labor will be in short supply. Housing will get cheaper, but services will become more expensive, again because of the labor shortage. We'll also stop trying to keep immigrants out and start trying to attract them to help make up the gap.

I think many liberals are the "useful idiots" , that are getting played. This is a good book The next 100 years
The problem isn't exactly Syria or Iran. It's Iran+Turkey+Syria+(others). Does the West want to fight them one at a time or as a group...

-PamPoovey22, parent

This subreddit and bot are not in any way affiliated with the moderators of /r/The_Donald. Direct questions about removal to them.

The book Bursts by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi uses this very story as information pertaining to the hidden patterns in everyday life. Really good read.

You made me think of a very good book that I read. It's called The Next Decade. The US is currently a republic and an empire. However, only one of these can survive.

Your rules link doesn't work.

Read: http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Prediction-Philip-E-Tetlock/dp/0804136696/

if you want some helpful insight into making accurate forecasts

Finally, something I can answer on this sub!

I got a degree in cell biology, did the lab jobs, and didn't like it. I'm working on applying to post grad degrees in statistics and CS now. There are a lot of specialized data science degrees out there too.

Here's a book on broad ideas of data to get you started.

If you do happen to like dealing with big data, you must learn programming to get work at all. There's a lot of online programs built for this. I'm doing Udacity' data analyst nanodegree. I'd say your biology degree is mostly useless when applying for these jobs. Entry level into data science is mostly going to be about data wrangling which is pretty much all programming. You'll want to brush up on your statistics class, Python, SQL, and R.

The current military industrial complex will never change in the U.S. The control is a geographical necessity to support the USA's existing hegemony. I wish these kind of posts about military spending would stop.

This book provides a good overview of global foreign policy, especially the USA. The future stuff may seem far fetched, but given our current information it would seem reasonable.
http://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290004768&sr=8-1

Naval control and political power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Thayer_Mahan

I will admit to not being a seismologist either, but what I've read says that is just flat-out not true. It may very well be that the fundamental average is 140 years, and that we've had a string where they're about that long, but the next one might come in 140 years, or it might be 500 years. It's absolutely impossible to know ahead of time. Here's the technical information on a Poisson process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_process

The basic idea, as I said, is that in any given time interval the odds of a Poisson process occurring are exactly the same. The poster child of this is radioactive decay (which I actually am a specialist in). If you have a radioactive atom with a half-life of t, and you watch it for time T, there's some odds of it decaying. If it doesn't decay, and you watch it for time T again, then it has the exact same odds of decaying as the first time you watched it. In any given time window the odds are the same.

So, if earthquakes are a poisson process (and like I said I've read that they are, and while most of these links are PDFs they seem to back it up: https://www.google.com/search?q=earthquake%20poisson%20process), and we assume that 140 years is the half-life of the Hayward fault, what that means is that the odds of an earthquake happening in the next 140 years are 50%, and that's true regardless of how long it's been since the last big quake. That's what my original post meant, there is absolutely no sense in which a fault can be "due" for a quake.

If you want to read more about this, Nate Silver's book (http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/159420411X/) has a chapter about it that should be accessible to most anyone, and the rest of the book is awesome too.

Generally speaking, it is from Bayesian probability

For more, Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is a good primer

I like this one much more http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057 . America will end, but not simply be destroyed or become a dictatorship, but rather be absorbed into a global government. I personally think the rise of the UN is inevitable.

I thought it was general knowledge that the climate model forecasts have overestimated the rise in temperature. Nate Silver had some interesting things to say about it in his book.

What purpose is the figure with the smoothed data points supposed to serve other than to mislead?

Nonfiction:

• Desert America by Ruben Martinez
  
• Ghost Dances by Josh Garrett-Davis
  
• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
  
  On the fiction front, I potentially want to read Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. The thing is... with new fiction, I tend to wait for friends/colleagues to read the novel first.
  

You should read Superforcasting. They specifically talk about people who make percent guesses down to the decimal point like this lol.

Really dig STRATFOR. I also recommend "The Next 100 Years" for an expansion of those ideas, written by the same fellow.

This is what the book Superforecasting is about. It's not just geopolitical events, it's general estimation and prediction ability. Here's a review and excerpts. There's also a Freakonomics podcast episode on the book.

TL;DR: Use Bayes' Theorem.

How about Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise or Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's The Theory that Would not die? Both good books about statistics/data science.

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538957790&sr=8-1&keywords=the+signal+and+the+noise

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050QB3EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Duuuuuuude have you read Superforecasting? This skill is literally an important part of the modern rationality movement.

Gawa kaya tayo ng subreddit para dito?

So I usually tell my MBA students to just read books, not textbooks. Here are a few of my general suggestions:

Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein

Misbehaving Thaler

Superforecasting Tetlock and Gardner

Zombie Economics Quiggin

If you need more suggestions or want to discuss any of the ideas in these books, don't hesitate to ask.

I get that. I guess it all depends on the context, your environment and chosen career path. I look at this from an entrepreneurial and/or high powered corporate point of view (i'm in sales, probably the worst job for an INTP) because that's the context I find myself in. If you feel that you want to stick more to your true self find something that encourages low risk, weighing all the pros and cons by all means go for it.

Recently I've read an interesting book that helped me wrap my head around being indecisive and speaking more openly about things I'm not certain of - Superforecasting. On the whole it's a meh book, but one thing that it taught me that everything can be handled by talking in probabilities. Instead of thinking in certainties you talk about probabilities of 70%-80% (there's a scene in Zero Dark Thirty showing exactly this). I found that this helped me to make decisions faster and act faster.

Отлучная статья от ребят которые предсказывали какой-то конфликт на одной из границ Украины еше пару лет назад, почитайте. http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057

Чуствую к завтра эту статью переведет Petr i Mazepa.
----------------
Very good article from people who predicted some kind of conflict within Ukraine borders couple of years ago. Their book is worth a read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057

Have a feeling petrimazepa.com will translate it into Russian by tomorrow.

There are numerous reasons. Demographics, currency manipulation, and political instability being some of them.

Check out George Friedman's The Next 100 Years as a good start.

We're already seeing the beginnings of their slow down.

If your interested, read up. But no one on this site reads books...

> http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Strategies-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting/dp/1936488604

> http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/0895260263

> http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Secret-War-Worldwide-Struggle/dp/0767917855/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453493219&sr=1-1&keywords=americas+secret+war

> http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057

You should take a look at Nate Silver's book "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't".

It explains exactly what you're talking about in intense detail.

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's book, "he Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future" starts out addressing this very historical situation.

book link

Perhaps you're referring to Philip Tetlock's work. Those people were far from mundane though; it took a specific set of habits and personality traits.

He wrote a mainstream book about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/038551705X

Hi, I'm looking for the following textbook:

Principles of Business Forecasting, Keith Ord & Robert Fildes
ISBN-13: 978-0324311273

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Business-Forecasting-Keith-Ord/dp/0324311273

Read this and you'll "get it" Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

I recommen Practical Time Series Forecasting with R and Forecasting: principles and practice

Stratfor, the list that he is on, is a "CIA Front".
The CEO is George Friedman who appears to be the author of one of the books that he's on the list for. Is this just a book ordering list?
https://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057

This article calls it Pentagon consulting firm: http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/19/the-hilarity-of-george-soros-in-munich/

More mention as a CIA front:
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/leaked-memo-shows-soros-ngos-payed-macedonian-students-1500-come-regime-change-ideas/ri7179

At first glance, I thought it was just STRATFOR keeping an eye on whoever bought the book The Next Decade, which this guy did.

He was in the Statfor leaks, I dont know why founder of Stratfor is author, on a mailing list for this book.

The Next Decade :

https://www.amazon.com/Next-Decade-Empire-Republic-Changing/dp/0307476391/

Has anyone read this book? Is it any kind of guidebook/instruction manual?

Or this one.

Stratfor founder George Friedman wrote a book - the Next 100 Years. In it he predicts that the three superpowers of the 22nd century will be Poland, Japan and Turkey.

(I would note the immigration policies of two of those countries...)

https://www.amazon.ca/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock.

Reminded me of this book: link. Same thing, but for this century. Good read if you're in to that kind of thing.

My thought is whoever made these graphs should read: http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/159420411X

Are you thinking of The Signal and The Noise?

Or reading through The Next Hundred Years again.

read my post history. obviously not ctr.

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/25/255880_order-of-1500-copies-of-the-next-decade-january-18-2011-.html

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/17/17236_1500%20to%20Janice%20at%20BN%2001182011.xls


https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307476391/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478412950&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=the+next+decade&dpPl=1&dpID=51SuGu1GsgL&ref=plSrch

Let me explain it another way.

If you throw a dice, I'll give you a prediction of 83% chance that you won't roll 6.

If you roll 6, my prediction was still valid.

There is no "making up for it". You simply cannot tell by just one outcome.

I highly recommend this book to read up more on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

Oh, and btw, so that nobody thinks I'm biased. I personally hate Augur :)

Soccernomics is a similar book, but about soccer (football).

The Signal and the Noise, while not being exclusively about sports (there are chapters about baseball and poker though), applies statistics in a similar way to other real-life problems like voting, earthquakes, and financial crashes.

Nate Silver has a book addressing this exactly.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159420411X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

I am not Nate, just a fan of his work.

I suggest you read The Next 100 Years (http://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/038551705X) if you're questioning the US's military spending.

Oh yes, I just needed to get to a PC:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057

The most immediate thing mentioned is the new cold war between the US and Russia which is ongoing.

Recent psychology research is showing some people can make accurate predictions about the future--though, the research discussed concerns predictions on a <10 year timescale. Still a good place to start though.

People dis Kurzweil, but on Less Wrong a bunch of volunteers went through a ton of his old predictions and the result is that maybe 30% of them were accurate. Not super impressive, but it's a lot better than it could be given that the predictions were made 10 years in advance.

Somebody read: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Don't know why this is getting so heavily downvoted, this is an incredibly important development.

Anyone who isn't disturbed by this doesn't understand the gravity of what's going on with Turkey.

An alliance between Turkey and Russia might very well mean a permanent end to US (i.e. Western) hegemony.

Personally, I see lots of war in the future. This is not a good development at all.

Erdogan should have never gotten to power, Turkey should have joined the EU a long time ago. What is developing now is the worst possible outcome for Europe, the US, and the Western world in general.

The real question is why exactly it happened though. It most likely can be inevitably be traced back to US warmongering in the Middle East.

Turkey will be one of the key players of the 21st century and after China the second most important puzzle piece of geopolitical developments of our lifetime. How Turkey will align itself will ultimately decide the fate of Euroasia's future.

It's really that fucking important and anyone believing it isn't should definitely read up on these topics.

As this is an American website, I will say that for Americans I would recommend to listen to/read George Friedman (founder of the American geostrategic think tank Stratfor):

Explanation of the situation and historical background.

Interview about most common points made regarding Turkey.



["The next 100 years", noteworthy book by him touching on topics like this.](
https://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=0767923057&linkCode=w61&imprToken=rb7PLDckxG56jDm0nxllzA&slotNum=0)

In George Friedman's book, he predicts WW3 between the US and a Japanese-Turkish alliance that is started by attacks from a Japanese lunar base on US Battlestar satellites.

Potential conflict 2020:

UK perspective (Ununited Kingdom, Operation Imperfect Storm):

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/2020-World-War-Paul-Cornish/dp/1473640326
  
• https://books.google.de/books?id=azJ6DQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (excerpt)
  
  Australian perspective (China, Islamisation in Indonesia etc):
  
  
• https://www.aspi.org.au/opinion/preparing-war-2020
  
  
  References:
  
  
• Paul Cornish https://rusi.org/expert/paul-cornish
  
• Kingsley Donaldson http://www.cipcr.org/aboutcipcr/management-board/
  
  

you can know your shit too!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/159420411X

oh im not saying its still even remotely possible, these are long term strategic plans hence stratfor most of these were concerns prior to the first gulf war when the meddling started. the last 10-20 years have been the actions they have taken to avoid that possibility

source wise (the next 100 years by George Friedman aka one of the main guys at stratfor) http://www.amazon.ca/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057
and a pdf version if you care http://www.mysearch.org.uk/website1/pdf/715.2.pdf

the major foreign policy there has been to sew discord and keep them fighting each other so they won't work together. the US makes a lot of money off all the arms they have flooded the region with.
Israel backs the plan because it prevents them from ganging up and chasing out the zionists

If you're stupid, why bother asking questions?

In all seriousness, the child equation is flipped in low income or agrarian societies. Children, esp. male children, are both a means of near term income as they contribute work, earned income, dowry (for daughters) and offer an insurance against the future. They have a relatively low investment compared to industrial societies as the need for education is reduced and the period of childhood is comparatively short (lasting to around the onset of puberty).

In modern industrial, finance, and information societies, the cost of rearing a child is orders of magnitude higher requiring more education and more resources over a prolonged childhood, often reaching into their 20's. Families cannot invest nearly as much as so self limit the number of children. Likewise, the insurance afforded by the investment is proportional to the resources per child invested early on and there is reduced benefit more children.

Family sizes, however, are driven to a large degree by societal pressure and it takes generations often for the society to adapt family expectations to economic realities.

Read The Next 100 Years. Some of it is utter crap, but there are insightful nuggets.

Lots. In fact, nearly every book I have ever read has changed my worldview in one way or the other, some more than others. But, the most recent books to change my outlook on the world are:

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for The 21st Century by George Friedman

Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan

Most are liars; There are ways to predict future player behavior, though. NateSilver is legendary for exploiting this ability, and he's published a guidebook on it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/159420411X

More generally, predictions hinge on other skills. You'll want to learn [[statistics]] and [[probability]], followed by domain-specific research into what exactly you want to predict (for predicting other players, you'll want [[psychology]], for example).

I recently read a interesting book about what might happen in the coming century.

One of the ideas is that the American (if not the world) economy works in cycles and one of the things makes it crash is trying to solve today's problem with yesterday's solution. To wit: the previous financial crsh was due to a lack of available investment. The solution was therefore to deregulate to get things started. The book proposes that once the American economy becomes strong again, it will suffer from a lack of manpower, thus driving prices offer down and prices up. Deregulation will not solve the problem but make it worse because what you need is more people making stuff. Hence immigration.

Not for quite the same reason, but Germany wants (some) immigration because their natality is low and without new people, they won't be able to maintain productivity.

>The only country on the planet that could even begin to fight a war with the United States (nuclear weapons notwithstanding) is Mexico.

I thought of Canada for a brief moment, and then I chuckled.

Have you read this book? Much of what you say is consistent with ideas presented there, including Mexico eventually becoming a threat.

Le problème, c'est qu'aucun expert n'est capable de prédire le devenir d'un système politique. Un extrait du bouquin "Thinking fast and slow" de D. Kahneman (prix nobel d'économie pour ses travaux sur la psychologie de la prise de décision):

"Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized and in regions about which they had less knowledge. Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Which country would become the next big emerging market? In all, Tetlock gathered more than 80,000 predictions. He also asked the experts how they reached their conclusions, how they reacted when proved wrong, and how they evaluated evidence that did not support their positions. Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing.

The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists. Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. (...) Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons."

L'expert est incapable de prédire ce que va devenir le système: il sait faire du diagnostic (identifier un pb quand il s'est produit), pas du pronostic (prédire le pb). Et comme le montrent les travaux de Tetlock, il n'admet pas cette incompétence. L'expert n'en sachant pas plus sur l'avenir que le citoyen de base, la défiance envers les experts s'explique alors très bien.

Après, la pertinence du raisonnement du citoyen de base, c'est une autre question...

Edit: apparemment, Tetlock aurait sorti un bouquin récemment sur le thème: https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

À lire?

> I keep mentioning a surprise to the upside, but no one wants to listen because apparently only 3 sigmas can happen to the downside (to an asset class with a historical tilt very much to the upside).

Is it POSSIBLE? Yes. Is it PROBABLE? No. It comes across as wishful thinking more than anything. That's not an investment strategy.

> But to me, there's just as much risk in being underweight equities right now, leaving purchasing power on the table

All (Western) sovereign bond yields for as far as the eye can see point to deflation, not inflation, so the purchasing power argument is moot, unless you're going to claim greater insight than the bond market.

> and perhaps missing a financial goal or two, as there is involved for anyone "expecting" somewhat similar historical risk-adjusted returns.

I'm not sure if FOMO is a legitimate argument for being fully invested. I think you underestimate the sophistication of both the models and posters advocating low forward returns. This isn't the 1960s where we still think the Phillips curve will hold, there HAS been substantial progress in econometrics and forecasting over the past 70 years.

I can also make a book recommendation. Check out The Next 100 Years. Might be up your valley.

> Friedman predicts that the United States will remain the dominant global superpower throughout the 21st century, and that the history of the 21st century will consist mainly of attempts by other world powers to challenge American dominance. Although mainly about the geopolitics and wars of the century, the book also makes some economic, social, and technological predictions for the 21st century.
>
> Friedman claims that around the year 2050 a Third World War will take place, between the United States, the "Polish Bloc," Britain, India, and China on one side, and Turkey and Japan on the other, with Germany and France entering the war in its late stages on the side of Turkey and Japan. The war will probably be started by a coordinated Turkish-Japanese sneak attack against the United States and its allies. In the book, Friedman predicts that the attack will take place at a time in which the Americans will be taken completely off guard, and hypothesizes 5:00 p.m. on November 24, 2050 (Thanksgiving Day) as a potential time.[1]
>
> In 2015, Stratfor published a decade forecast for 2015-2025, which revised the predictions made in the book on Russia and China. Rather than the Russian government completely collapsing, it envisioned that the Russian government would lose much of its power, and the country would gradually fragment into a series of semi-autonomous regions. In addition, while the book had postulated that Chinese fragmentation was more likely than the re-imposition of authoritarian rule, the analysis predicted that regional fragmentation was now a less-likely scenario for China, with the most probable result being the re-imposition of strict authoritarian rule

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_100_Years:_A_Forecast_for_the_21st_Century

However to some large extent, I agree with one of the critics, but that's just me. Personally I don't agree with some of his predictions but I thought you may enjoy it.

>The San Francisco Chronicle criticized the book's US-centrism and military emphasis: "Friedman's strangely provincial stance resembles some frightened insomniac who can't stop playing Age of Empires because he desperately needs to win before dawn."

The is no disagreement that climate change is real, there is however disagreement over the extent of climate change. If you get a chance, Nate Silver's book has a great chapter on this topic, a great book very worth reading. https://www.amazon.ca/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/159420411X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463230626&sr=8-1&keywords=nate+silver

The truth on the extent of climate change is not fully agreed upon, and there is a lot of misinformation and agenda pushing even within the scientific community. There are cases of scientists using incorrect data to push their agenda because they felt that the agenda was more important than the science.

Predicting the extent of climate change is a messy thing. Saying climate change isn't real is clearly wrong, but it becomes problematic to say that we expect x carbon emission to cause y climate change over z time.

As usual, the devil is in the data.

The first one: it was racist until obama requested the same thing for a different case for the exact same reason. Then the articles stopped flowing.

The other two are regressive sites nit picking small phrases to create their bubbles of fear. Taking someone out of context, or simply applying the labels 'racist, sexist, etc' to something still dont make it true.

When discussing mexico and the wall, it is about the cartels and the effect they have. If we, as a nation were to build a wall and legalize pot we would shut them down, lower our crime, better our economy and help the already nationalizing mexico muster itself into full gear for the powerhouse they could be on the international stage. Hell, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezaw-g6TIQI this is no new topic. Read: https://www.amazon.com/Next-100-Years-Forecast-Century/dp/0767923057

As for the muslims, the talk is about people from war torn areas, who have been through the worst, and are affected in ways that anyone would be. Couple that with some being raised to hate those they are coming to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian_textbook_controversy and you have a powder keg that is currently churning in europe.

I argue semantics because the full conversation is not about race, but about the safety of us all. Let us not forget Cologne Germany so soon, or the long standing effects of the war on drugs and the cartels both domestically and abroad.

This is the message I just sent to the admins

------

I remember when /u/Spez came back and did his big AMA, one of the big questions was about moderators abusing power. Then /u/Spez just did another AMA and the two biggest questions were in regard to moderators being abusive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4megfw/ama_about_my_darkest_secrets/d3uu949

Now we have a huge mass shooting. And the mods at /r/news are silencing discussion and conversation about it. It's absurd.

I actually woke up, 830 CT, checked Reddit, saw nothing out of the ordinary, started cooking breakfast. My girlfriend woke up, checked CNN and told me about the shooting. I re-opened the Reddit app and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Went to /r/News finally and saw that nuked thread. Went to /r/all and of all the god damn subs on Reddit, it's /r/the_donald leading the charge in reporting news.

Is this what you imagined Reddit to be? I certainly never thought it would come to this. For the last 5 years, I've always come to Reddit when events like this happen, because Reddit gave me the best perspective. Locals, professionals, lay people who are smart as hell: all gathered together, bringing their knowledge to bear on a situation. Reddit embodies one of the key lessons in the book Superforcasting—groups are smarter than individuals. Reddit live threads and megathreads have been amazing. /r/news and /r/worldnews have been, in the past, places that left mainstream media in the dust.

But today was an ugly day. Today was Reddit at its worst. Corrupted.

I hope you all take this seriously and send a message that moderation like this won't be tolerated. I recommend you remove every single one of the /r/news and /r/worldnews mods. Start fresh. That may take more work, but it's the healthiest choice you can make. Mods like this are legitimately a cancer. If you leave them alone, they will fester and continue to wreak havoc on the body "in toto".

Whether you all like it or not, Reddit has become a political tool. It's become a business tool. It's become a marketing tool. You've created something amazing that helps shape the world. But it's also shaped by the world. And, just like a gun, there are people who would use Reddit in evil ways. It's time to stop ignoring the issues with moderators and moderation. People with selfish interests have, overtime, worked their way into key moderation positions in reddit. Mod abuse is real. And mod abuse is something that will wreck your site, that will leave Reddit a hollow shell of what it began is, what it was, and what it could have been.

Please, do something. You're our only hope.