photo of flooded Thames by elyob

The Long Now’s Long Bets project asks us, active bettors and wider public alike, to think more deeply and carefully about the medium- to long-term future than our assumptions (and busy schedules) might otherwise allow.

Nudging our culture towards assuming greater responsibility for addressing (and creating) possible. . .   Read More

Philip Tetlock (screen shot from high-res Seminar video available to members) Philip Tetlock recently presented a Seminar About Long-Term Thinking to the effect that confident forecasters ought to be ignored. Despite his research showing the profound unreliability of such speculation, it’s rare to find even a moderately systematic evaluation of political forecasts in the popular […]

The online version of Popular Science magazine is offering a prediction market for science and technology. It uses token dollars instead of real money (in order to avoid gambling laws). Here is what they say about it:

Ready to bet on the future?
Join the PopSci Predictions Exchange.

Welcome to the PPX, the first place. . .   Read More

This is a very short article on how economists are using prediction markets to predict weather at least as good as meteorologists, which is not very good.
Penn State Researchers Testing Futures Markets For Weather Forecasting

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (March 21, 2007) – Economists at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business and College of Earth. . .   Read More

It’s a bit rare that we see such clear and succinct predictions. These three by Ari Emanuel were published at the Huffington Post and were forwarded to me by Paul Saffo:

I have three predictions to make this morning: 1) John McCain will not be the Republican Party’s nominee. 2) Hillary Clinton will. . .   Read More

Ignore confident forecasters

“What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?” From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the. . .   Read More

  With the Republican control of the House and Senate, there is no scenario in which a Democrat can become President by August 2005 (the two-year horizon of my original Bet). Looking at the two arguments, Eno’s is persuasive in detail, mine clearly wrong. The morning after the election I wrote Eno my summary of […]

  The Red Sox have won the Series and with it falls Mike Elliot’s argument around the speed of globalization vs. the Red Sox pitching depth.  Below is the write up in the New York Times. Hey, Cliff Clavin, This Time Sam Malone’s the Smart One By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER The New York Times Published: November […]

This article was written by Peter Schwartz for Red Herring’s 02002 Scenarios issue. This is the original un-edited piece.

Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada is more a ridge than a mountain. It slowly rises from a height of four thousand feet to six thousand feet along its’ length of six miles. On February. . .   Read More