Thursday, January 3, 2013

2013 Forecast


Here it comes: the new year. It means people start to make predictions about the future and stuff. They fill up the air with illusions and stories about the events that 'will' take place in their lives and surroundings. If it would be that simple.

The fact is, after reading The Zurich Axioms, book about investments, I currently understand people can't predict the future. We would always wonder, 'he's good at what he's saying, he studied', but the future is decided by a scramble of events, people included. So, where you find human beings, you may know unpredicted things happen.

People make decisions without much sense sometimes, and there are a whole lotta planet full of people, each person different from the other. It's not hard to think what it causes. Markets, wars, elections are all transformed by people. 

There are others who think it is, yes, possible to predict future. Nate Silver, the author of The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail - but Some Don't celebrates the fact that investigation of a matter - from all sides - can bring up the solution, as I read in a book review this week. Nate gets better in predictions if the organizations he consults are liable and honest, because he knows all people fail!

Hence we know there are two ways of thinking related to forecasting. I'm sticking to the first one for the moment; it's easier not to predict right, mostly because I'm not in the business of antecipating events for a living. But who knows what the future holds?