Reference class forecasting is k way regression, right.
One issue is that recent events—the pandemic, cryptocurrency—seem to just be “off the graph” events. You can try to use the “Spanish flu” as a predictor for the pandemic but it was so far away in time and world structure as to be useless. Cryptocurrency can be compared to the Tulip mania and other bubbles but again it’s not the same.
We can’t predict something then with this method if we don’t have references.
Well, sorta. For my entire lifespan the science press is full of breathless optimism. A professor somewhere wrote a paper and got something to vaguely work. And thus flying cars and cyborgs or free energy is 5 minutes away!
Obviously nothing came out of any of that. The things that lead to progress had money—gigadollars—behind them. Like these white leds and the chip in the device I use to write this message and it’s OLED screen and so on. And it took years and years and many generations of the tech past the breathless article stage—at least 20 years for OLED—to not suck.
Reference class forecasting is k way regression, right.
One issue is that recent events—the pandemic, cryptocurrency—seem to just be “off the graph” events. You can try to use the “Spanish flu” as a predictor for the pandemic but it was so far away in time and world structure as to be useless. Cryptocurrency can be compared to the Tulip mania and other bubbles but again it’s not the same.
We can’t predict something then with this method if we don’t have references.
Well, sorta. For my entire lifespan the science press is full of breathless optimism. A professor somewhere wrote a paper and got something to vaguely work. And thus flying cars and cyborgs or free energy is 5 minutes away!
Obviously nothing came out of any of that. The things that lead to progress had money—gigadollars—behind them. Like these white leds and the chip in the device I use to write this message and it’s OLED screen and so on. And it took years and years and many generations of the tech past the breathless article stage—at least 20 years for OLED—to not suck.