Predictions and Predictors

Baseball is far from the only area in which predictions can disappoint, and in recent years, a handful of writers have drawn attention to the biases and habits that influence our ability to make good forecasts. The two most recent entrants in this category, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, appeared to wide acclaim in late 2012, with each author winning scores of favorable reviews and profiles; both received invitations to Silicon Valley to speak at Google’s prestigious Authors@Google series within weeks of each other. The two books, then, seem to have captured the zeitgeist—despite having largely contradictory messages and methodologies.