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  • Book Review: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

    Agent of change. This retroactively intriguing phrase tips Elizabeth E. Eisenstein (hereafter, “EEE”)’s hand at what she will present in her project The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, originally published in 1979: that the development of the printing press produced such wide-ranging disruption across early modern Europe that its closest analogy is not…

  • Base Rates in Destined for War

    Forecasters often use base rates to inform their probabilistic forecasts. Conceptually, applying a base rate to a topic of present-day interest is a concession to modesty: very few events or hypothetical events are completely unprecedented. Base rates also set a marker such that a probabilistic claim that dramatically departs from the base rate is an…

  • Base Rates: What Are They?

    One foundational concept in forecasting is base rates. Base rates are the observed past frequency of an outcome of interest. For example, if we want to forecast the probability of tomorrow’s 2:00 flight to Los Angeles arriving on time, we might look at numerous past frequencies: how frequently the 2:00 flight to Los Angeles has…

  • Fixing A Bug In Nate Silver’s “River”

    This isn’t a “book review” of Nate Silver’s On The Edge, but I read the book and thought its main point got some important things wrong. In my words that thesis would be that a new class of elites is gaining economic and cultural power in the United States through avenues such as tech companies…

  • Important Differences Between Prediction Markets And Elicitation Platforms

    There is significant overlap between two types of emerging forecasting systems: prediction markets and elicitation platforms. Prediction markets generate contracts corresponding to various potential outcomes (similar to tickets in horse racing), assign a payoff to owning the contract corresponding with the outcome observed in reality, and facilitate trading of these contracts by participants until the…

  • Forecasting: Four Increasingly Elaborate Definitions

  • Reflections On Superforecasting In 2024

    I. Introduction What is expertise? One model is that it is someone who has command of a vast library of facts, like a Jeopardy player who breezes through a category on South American capitals. A second model is success in the marketplace: a Fortune 500 CEO can be assumed to be an expert on running…