Archive for the 'Prediction Markets' Category

Taking Stock

September 5th, 2008

On the off chance you hadn’t heard (or don’t live in the U.S.), John McCain is delivering his acceptance speech tonight to the Republican National Convention. This marks the end of the convention and since the Democrats already had theirs, the race to the presidency begins tonight.

So who’s going to win? It’s a question a lot of people want to know the answer to - especially political junkies such as myself. If you look at the polls, it’s been fairly tight for about the last 9 months, with Obama leading a bit more often than McCain and …

“Predictions Are Often Wrong, Especially About the Future”

March 7th, 2008

I’m not quite sure who’s responsible for the quote that’s the title of this post, but whoever said it, I agree. I’m not even sure where I first read the quote, but I my best guess is that it was in one of Nassim Taleb’s books, which I blogged about a while back. But just because we’re bad about predicting the future, does that mean we can’t find a better way to do so?

Well, some events are easy to predict, at least. These are events that Taleb says belong to “Mediocristan”, a fictional place where everything happens …