Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘forecast’

Misc. articles

Posted in Links, tagged , , , , on September 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

How to Get Into an Ivy League College — Guaranteed. Would the rise of this kind of services worsen inequality and education arms race?

The Trouble With Harvard –  The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it. Steven Pinker’s response to William Deresiewicz’s article I linked to earlier.

How to see into the future — by Tim Harford

So what is the secret of looking into the future? Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness – although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

Read Full Post »

What I’ve been reading

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2013| 1 Comment »

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

An interesting read. The main theme of the book is that commonly perceived advantages and disadvantages can be misleading. For example, based on various studies, Gladwell argued that sending your children to the most prestigious schools might not be in the kids’ best interests. Obviously brand names matter, but there are also many less obvious factors that could be important. If I have a kid who wants to study economics, it’s unclear to me whether GMU is a worse choice (assuming most of my favorite bloggers are still teaching there) than the top 5 econ departments. The section on legitimacy and punishment are something the Chinese leaders should read.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t

I think good predictions require some understanding of statistics, common sense, and avoidance of bias (confirmation bias, overconfidence bias, attribution bias, etc.). The more interesting bits I got from the books are chapters about earthquake and climate predictions, topics I’m less familiar with.

Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

I didn’t learn much since I already came across most the research. I’ve also become more skeptical about the robustness and importance of many of these psychology findings.

Die Empty: Unleash your Best Work Everyday

Haven’t read a pure self-help book for a while. Its main message is to structure our daily life around things that matter to us. Similar to other self-help books it motivates and has some sensible advice, but ultimately it’s our job to figure out what is important to us and find ways to develop habits that lead to the results we want.

I like this epigraph: “The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.”

Read Full Post »