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I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup
by charlieflowers 14y ago
I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup that succeeds big.
So it's worth the read to me. Just a little mind-stretcher, but one of the things I come to Hacker News for.
- jacques_chester 14y agoPredicting the future is, as the saying goes, hard. Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly. Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty. The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".