Data scientist Nate Silver gained attention for his election predictions. But even the best prognosticators get it wrong sometimes. He talks to Steve about making good decisions with data, why…
…predictions, I will gladly join the throng. Until then: no deal. InTrade is an example of a prediction market that punishes bad predictions. Unfortunately, participation is voluntary. Wouldn’t it be…
…we discussed how the incentives to predict are skewed. Big, bold predictions that turn out to be true are handsomely rewarded; but predictions that turn out to be false are…
Government corn predictions are based on the work of people like Phil Friedrichs, gathering data in a corn field in Hiawatha, Kansas. (Photo: Stephen Koranda) What do Wall Street forecasters…
…predictions. Making predictions within the intelligence community, for example, is a different game than betting on basketball: In March Madness, everyone has access to the same information, at least theoretically….
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
…a better way than by embarrassing myself with the annual Kentucky Derby predictions! I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a Kentucky Derby. It’s not that…
…incentives to make bold predictions and weak penalties for bold predictions don’t come true. For example: I could write here today that the Dow will reach 35,000 by the end…
…future. Fact: Because the incentives to predict are quite imperfect — bad predictions are rarely punished — this situation is unlikely to change. A couple of recent cases in point:…
…Stephen Dubner and Kai Ryssdal chatted about this on the Freakonomics Radio segment on Marketplace. The question remains: “should bad predictions be punished?” As mentioned in the segment, the U.S….
…years, my computer model has some strong predictions for this year’s Derby. The two horses I like best from a betting perspective (i.e. the ones I think actually have a…
…there should be punishment for wrong predictions. For instance, there have been economists who predicted Japan’s economy would race past the American economy, that there would be depressions and ages…
…“wisdom of the crowds” information. And it is natural to ask whether the predictions of the league are more accurate than the predictions of a statistical algorithm developed by Andrew…
Over Analyze I whiffed on the Kentucky Derby and caught lightning in a bottle at the Preakness. Let’s see if I can do it again. All eyes are on Orb…
The breakdown of Eight Belles in this year’s Kentucky Derby, just a few years after Barbaro‘s broken leg in the Preakness, has a lot of people worried about the safety…
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” is built around the premise that humans love to predict the future, but are generally terrible at it. (You can download/subscribe…
Experts and pundits are notoriously bad at forecasting, in part because they aren’t punished for bad predictions. Also, they tend to be deeply unscientific. The psychologist Philip Tetlock is finally…
We recently introduced you (or should that be “introductified” you?) to the Freakonomics Prediction Center that Predictify built for this blog. And you all went and predicted like mad. So…
…while we were at it, we decided to also document each station’s weather predictions and compare them to the actual results to see if one station was better than the…
Photo: RubyGoes In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” we talk about the incentive structure behind making predictions. Wrong predictions almost always go unpunished, which is why…
…(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or read the transcript here.) But predictions about world politics and the economy are hard — there are so many moving…
…predictions about the future. The paper, by Dan Johnson of Colorado College and Ayfer Ali, assembled an impressive dataset on Olympic medal performance by nations in the Winter and Summer…
…in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next? So we checked in with some clever people who care a lot…
Also: How do you recover from a bad day?…
…if they gave actual probabilities of winning/losing. Levitt wrote earlier about making money by betting on contestants using DialIdol. And their predictions have continued to be surprisingly accurate. This season…
…coin toss fair. Hence, the prediction was essentially useless. However, participants were happy to pay for the predictions — particularly if the predictions in the earlier rounds had been correct….
…entirety. The market’s predictions have been off by “only 6.6 percent,” which doesn’t sound so great to me, but I guess that says something about the difficulty of predicting the…
…predict nothing. The nice thing about making so few predictions is that by the time next year’s predictions roll around, no one can remember how last year’s predictions turned out….
Image: cambodia4kidsorg Economists are notorious for making bad predictions. There are endless examples, but the first one that comes to mind is a book written by economist Kevin Hassett and…
