Raison d'Etre (Reason for Being)

I recently picked up Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment, an insightful analysis of expert opinion. Although there are many factors that might distinguish experts in the ability to predict outcomes, liberal versus conservative, intellectual depth and education, source material, etc., Tetlock found that the best predictor of forecasting accuracy was thinking like a fox, as opposed to the hedgehog, ala Isaiah Singer's essay. Fox thinking is nuanced and composed of many different themes, often conflicting, while hedgehogs tend to believe in one big, overarching idea.

This site, and my expected use, is to document my own failures and successes in predicting political and economic futures. The title, Elephant's Memory, alludes to the fox-like tendency, maybe even need, to remember one's own flawed predictions and adjust future reasoning accordingly.

Comments

For Trump, ‘a War Every Day,’ Waged Increasingly Alone - Responses

#1 @Jim Cricket - I think there might have been a more direct or apropos moral to the story, at least as it relates to Trump, in that he goes around blaming everyone else, fires them, until his term ends - the bottom of the bowl - and there is only one person left, and everyone realizes that there is only one person to blame, Trump himself. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/us/politics/trump-two-years.html?comments#permid=29862349:29864948 #2 Some people have seen a method to the madness of Trump, but he has always been a blithering, destructive idiot, and artless, heartless, and ignorant man. The only real question is how can we stop him? Minor mention, many, myself included, have thought impeachment might be problematic, Trump replaced by Pence, but considering all the harm Trump has caused, Pence would never really be quite so bad. Bad, but not nearly so.

Review: Valuing Wall Street

Valuing Wall Street by Andrew Smithers My rating: 5 of 5 stars The material was simple enough to digest, and certainly believable. It also provided good insights on the real behavior of investors, i.e. most investors are not long-term investors and the perils of retiring during a down period. The book also provides a good benchmark for when to invest, although the fact that I rode the market up on its fallacious valuation has not harmed me, since I transferred my portfolio to bonds before the market started heading down. View all my reviews

Response: Paging Robert Burns by Krugman

Along these lines, from a recent release, and supportive of your post: "Previous portraits of Davos delegates as uprooted jetsetters or global networkers easily overlook their influence on society. Our findings reveal that the forum actively shifts the burden for the solution of problems from governments and corporations to individual consumers, with significant personal and societal costs," the authors conclude. The release from Eurekalert

Foxes and Hedgehogs

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