No, neither of them was right or wrong. That’s just not how probabilities work and simplifying in that way confuses what’s going on.
By “wrong” here I mean “incorrectly predicted the future”. If there is a binary event, and I predicted the outcome A, but the reality delivered the outcome B, then I incorrectly predicted the future. Perhaps the source of confusion here is my inability to precisely express ideas in English (I’m a non-native English speaker), and I apologize for that.
If you want to draw more general conclusions you would have to look at those events where government officials made forecasts and then nothing happened like Iraqi WMDs as well.
I agree, it’s an excellent idea. In general, it’s quite possible that some politicians would use the high risk of a catastrophe (real or fake) to achieve political goals.
No, neither of them was right or wrong. That’s just not how probabilities work and simplifying in that way confuses what’s going on.
By “wrong” here I mean “incorrectly predicted the future”. If there is a binary event, and I predicted the outcome A, but the reality delivered the outcome B, then I incorrectly predicted the future.
Maybe an intuition pump for what I think Christian is pointing at:
Assuming you have a 6-faced die, and you predict that the probability that you next will roll a 6 and not one of the other faces is about 16.67%.
Then you roll the die, and the face with the 6 comes up on top.
Thanks! I think I now see the root of the confusion. These are two closely related but different tasks:
predicting the outcome of an event
estimating the probability of the outcome
In your example, the tasks could be completed as follows:
“the next roll will be a 6” (i.e I know it because the die is unfair)
“the probability of 6 is about 16.67%” (i.e I can correctly calculate it because the die is fair)
If one is trying to predict the future, one could fail either (or both) of the tasks.
In the situation there people were trying to predict if Russia invades Ukraine, some of them got the probability right, but failed to predict the actual outcome. And the aforementioned pundits failed both tasks (in my opinion), because for a well-informed person it was already clear that Russia will invade with the probability much higher than 40%.
By “wrong” here I mean “incorrectly predicted the future”. If there is a binary event, and I predicted the outcome A, but the reality delivered the outcome B, then I incorrectly predicted the future. Perhaps the source of confusion here is my inability to precisely express ideas in English (I’m a non-native English speaker), and I apologize for that.
I agree, it’s an excellent idea. In general, it’s quite possible that some politicians would use the high risk of a catastrophe (real or fake) to achieve political goals.
Maybe an intuition pump for what I think Christian is pointing at:
Assuming you have a 6-faced die, and you predict that the probability that you next will roll a 6 and not one of the other faces is about 16.67%.
Then you roll the die, and the face with the 6 comes up on top.
Was your prediction wrong?
Thanks! I think I now see the root of the confusion. These are two closely related but different tasks:
predicting the outcome of an event
estimating the probability of the outcome
In your example, the tasks could be completed as follows:
“the next roll will be a 6” (i.e I know it because the die is unfair)
“the probability of 6 is about 16.67%” (i.e I can correctly calculate it because the die is fair)
If one is trying to predict the future, one could fail either (or both) of the tasks.
In the situation there people were trying to predict if Russia invades Ukraine, some of them got the probability right, but failed to predict the actual outcome. And the aforementioned pundits failed both tasks (in my opinion), because for a well-informed person it was already clear that Russia will invade with the probability much higher than 40%.