OT: "Your" money and Duped by the Soviets

"Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on IN THE SECRET MEETINGS of Freemasons, Illuminati, and READING SOCIETIES" (New York, 1798):

America the paranoid for over 200 years

Certainly didn't do the Russians any good - this so-called conspiracy. And isn't the problem in the US these days that the rich are getting rich faster than anyone else? Hardly seems to match White or Keynes forecasts. However most economic (and any other) forecasts have failed for any period over a few months. I've been reading a fun book called "Future Babble - Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyways" by Dan Gardner. Fascinating. Talks about economic forecast and how they always fail, along with weather prediction, and other chaos based predictions. And how even the failed predictors keep believing their own nonsense and just make excuses (rationalizing) as to why the prediction failed. In most cases you are better off to flip a coin. What is curious is how some prognosticators were worse than chance - perhaps if one bets opposite to what they say and you may have a better than 50/50 chance of being right!

John

I dunno, even in supposedly notoriously unpredictable New England I find short to medium-term weather predictions to be remarkably accurate. Over the past couple years during the winter if the Google search on "7 day weather forecast " shows a high probability of bad weather on a given day a week out or less I start adjusting plans because I know it nails it much more often than not.

It's not like there weren't financial experts who correctly predicted the financial collapse of 2008. It's not like there weren't geopolitical experts who correctly predicted the near-term collapse of the Soviet Union a decade before it happened. And they weren't making Miss Cleo-like psychic hotline stabs in the dark, they laid out their arguments and in hindsight analysis the causal chain of events was more-or-less what they said it was going to be.

e.g. it was pretty clear to Middle Eastern geopolitical experts who watched the Soviets stand by helplessly as the Israelis shattered the best military hardware they could send them in huge quantity during the Lebanon/Syrian conflicts of the early 1980s that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger and an empire stretched to its breaking point, with no ability whatsoever to effectively support its "allies".

I think it's more the fact that the "experts" of average skill are the ones who seek attention and fame the hardest to compensate. Also that you'll never lose a buck by telling people what they want to hear.

Take a look at the book I recommend reading. You will see that your so-called experts predicted just as many or more things that didn't happen the way they anticipated - so they got lucky. If you predict enough stuff something hits the mark or is close enough that you can claim credit. Everyone just ignores the many more misses...

For example - the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was totally unexpected and appears to have hinged on one of the Germans being asked on East German television when East Germans could visit West, he shuffled his notes and suddenly said something like "today", masses of East Germans then went to the border where the East German guards, having heard the announcement opened the gates. Leading to the toppling of the wall. If the same person had said (what was most likely in his script) "Tomorrow" then the East German government would have had time to tell the border guards how to behave. This one c*ck-up pretty much led to the tearing down of the wall (along with other influences).

Check the records of all these learned economic predictions and you will find the odd hits, but far more misses. And the experts always seem to forget they had misses.

Price of oil barrel? No one knows. Even the oil executives admit that it will change, but go up or down over any period more than a few months is a total guess.

Its why Futures exist on the stock market - it is all a gamble.

Weather predictions? Pretty good up to three days, reasonable (50:50) to five, beyond that is chance. I live in a rain forest environment, so chances are it is going to rain in our winter. Forecasters usually get the amounts wrong where they go past three days. However knowing it is a La Nina or El Nino year gives us a pretty good idea of the tendency for the winter - this winter should be like last, more snow than average. Beyond that? Who knows?

Other predictions? Mass starvation worldwide? Didn't happen. From the days of Malthus through the Club of Rome, to the recent past everyone likes to predict how the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, yet we live longer and more people have better health and better fed, with more access to education and information, and better incomes than any other time in history.

These are the good old days, my friend and it is just getting better and better!

John

Inland in the USA, when there is prevailing winds from the west, incoming weather is pretty obvious. Here on the west coast, we get swirley stuff off the ocean, and narrow snakey atmospheric rivers of cold and wet, so even short-term forecasts are bad.

A few did. But nobody important believed them.

It's not like there weren't geopolitical

In the areas where serious experiments are not possible, most experts are usually wrong.

That's a beautiful butterfly, one accidental mumble changing history.

Yes. We make progress awkwardly, but we make progress.

You mean like that financial genius, George W. Bush?

Pretty reductive view of how history played out, there. It was only "unexpected" if you take the event in a total vacuum ignoring everything else going on in Europe at that time, i.e. as unexpected as what you'd expect to happen to an $80,000 BMW left on the side of the South Bronx Expressway with the keys in the ignition circa November 1989. Did you want someone to predict the exact date and time? Like on a Tuesday at

It's true in the sense that the "cause" of the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was "structural failure due to some kind of fire" and then there's nothing more to say.

There's an amusing scene in one of the Star Trek: TNG series episodes where the doctor's crewmates are slowly disappearing, but everyone carries on like there's nothing wrong. Eventually the crew is reduced from a thousand to 500, 300, 100, 50 and they all think up some plausible explanation for why a starship built for 1000 people is only carrying 50.

Eventually she learns that she's trapped in a "bubble universe" that's slowly collapsing. The event horizon eventually intersects with the hull and there's an explosive decompression. She asks the computer "What was that?!" and the computer says nonchalantly something like "Cause determined to be a flaw in the starship's design. No hull structure exists aft of Deck 26."

Or so John Larkin tells himself. John Larkin has a rather restricted idea o f what constitutes an "experiment" and a strong inclination to preferring h is own silly ideas (or on climate change, the silly ideas he gets spoon-fed by denialist websites) to those endorsed by recognised experts.

If we build something, and it doesn't work, we soon get serious feedback. Like, career feedback.

But things go to a certified EMC lab and then pass or don't pass. More feedback.

"Yes and no" is an incredibly weak form of information.

The same as one who builds, say, a power amplifier, turns it on, it explodes, they make a tweak and replace the transistors, it explodes again, and so on.

A bucket of dead transistors is only a bragging right for one's stupidity.

Incredibly weak information. Most go there and do the machine learning process: this didn't work, that didn't work, so on and so forth. With no understanding of what's actually going on, it's incredibly inefficient.

The half-smart ones come back and decide to write articles about it. They still don't understand what's going on, they just know that so-and-so worked in this-and-that situation. And thus it spreads.

On the other hand, the smart ones realize that these are all real numbers, that their instruments can measure everything that's going on. They build a representative circuit based on those measurements, point to a few branches and say "there". They write articles too, but they get lost in the noise of everyone else's.

Tim

When something goes wrong with one of my designs, I don't give up and throw it away. I understand what happened, fix it, and learn.

Unless you do it on purpose.

Test labs don't just give pass/fail grades. They deliver test reports with graphs and stuff.

Speak for yourself. We measure things, understand things, document things, do better next time.