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Taleb has anecdotes and insults. Tetlock has data piled on data.

• trishankkarthik 6y ago
  IDK how many more times I have to repeat this before it gets through your head that one warned about the pandemic blowing up before it happened, therefore only one can be taken seriously. You don't need evidence to run away when someone shouts that a bear is coming your way.
  • jacques_chester 6y ago
    "There will be a pandemic" is a prediction with 100% accuracy. Any rare event, as Taleb likes to hang his entire career on, will eventually happen. But such a prediction is basically worthless without a horizon. Information about when a pandemic happens affects what actions have to be made to deal with it. Pandemics that definitely happen tomorrow require far more expensive and disruptive actions than ones happening sometime in the next decade with gradually increasing probability. Tetlock's work is about people who actually have to define a date and for whom the deciding measurements are objective. You can't just say "a pandemic!", you have to say "a pandemic is declared by WHO on or before January 1st, 2019". In fact, Tetlock's data undermines Taleb's entire thesis that dramatic events are systematically under-predicted. He showed that dramatic scenarios are over-predicted by experts. They have higher emotional salience, and history that is taught focuses on dramatic, outlier events because of their disproportionate impact. Due to availability bias and hindsight bias, experts typically predict that dramatic events will happen more frequently than they actually do. Such predictions are regularly roflstomped by hilariously simple forecasting methods like "yesterday's weather" or fitting a line on a handful of data points. As I said earlier: Taleb has anecdotes and insults. Tetlock has data.