UNDERESTIMATING UNCERTAINTY.

UNDERESTIMATING UNCERTAINTY. Nate Silver’s book is about the problems of making predictions. (Silver just successfully predicted which presidential candidate would win the 2012 election in each of the 50 states). Silver says: “… in general our predictive errors come in thinking that there is more certainty in the world than there really is.” I have also been rereading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s first book, FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS, a book which Nick gave me last year for Christmas. (THE BLACK SWAN was Taleb’s second book.) Taleb says: “more generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything….”