I have never commented on LW before, so I’m not sure what the policy is on links, but I wrote a whole post explaining my worries about superforecasting. On the off chance that it serves as a useful appendage to this post here’s the link:
“Black swan” seems to me a very useful concept and anything that you would ask GDP to forcast and put a probability on per definition isn’t a black swan. Taleb is concerned about events that are actually black swans. I think it’s unhelpful to confuse them with modeled low-probability events the way you do in your post. I think Taleb actually has a valuable point but I don’t think that you argued that point.
If you have probabilities you can easily do an utilitarian benefit calcuation to find that you shouldn’t engage in an action with a 5% probability of failure if the impact of the failure is too bad. That’s very simple math.
It’s much easier to do that utilitarian calcuation then when you have reports that round up the 95% to “almost certain” they way the US for example handeled WMD’s in Iraq. That bad decision lead them to run the tournament that GJP won.
I think you ignore that in practice listening to superforcasters bring current decision makers to have to accept much higher uncertainty then they are currently faced with.
I have never commented on LW before, so I’m not sure what the policy is on links, but I wrote a whole post explaining my worries about superforecasting. On the off chance that it serves as a useful appendage to this post here’s the link:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2020/05/30/my-final-case-against-superforecasting-with-criticisms-considered-objections-noted-and-assumptions-buttressed/
“Black swan” seems to me a very useful concept and anything that you would ask GDP to forcast and put a probability on per definition isn’t a black swan. Taleb is concerned about events that are actually black swans. I think it’s unhelpful to confuse them with modeled low-probability events the way you do in your post. I think Taleb actually has a valuable point but I don’t think that you argued that point.
If you have probabilities you can easily do an utilitarian benefit calcuation to find that you shouldn’t engage in an action with a 5% probability of failure if the impact of the failure is too bad. That’s very simple math.
It’s much easier to do that utilitarian calcuation then when you have reports that round up the 95% to “almost certain” they way the US for example handeled WMD’s in Iraq. That bad decision lead them to run the tournament that GJP won.
I think you ignore that in practice listening to superforcasters bring current decision makers to have to accept much higher uncertainty then they are currently faced with.