Prediction Challenges Quotes

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

Predicting voter turnout is not hard, it’s impossible.

Predictions are so often, so wrong ... The future is just too complicated.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.

most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.

One thing I learned from meteorology is that being an actual science was no guarantee of exactness.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

Foresight is an imperfect thing - all prevision in economics is imperfect.

If we're going to forecast the business cycle, surely it is a good idea to know the business cycle. Sounds reasonable, but it's not that easy.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.

You cannot predict how well a film will do.