Shared by JohnH

Strange to see NNT making ANY kind of prediction, in principal. I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan- he thought of his ideas as ‘probes’, not meant to be taken literally, but to serve as areas of intellectual energy he felt should be better examined. My sense is that that is what NNT is doing here.

Paradoxically, one can make long-term predictions on the basis of the prevalence of forecasting errors. A system that is over-reliant on prediction (through leverage, like the banking system before the recent crisis), hence fragile to unforeseen “black swan” events, will eventually break into pieces. Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salient: connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then.

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

Shared by JohnH

It’s great to see NNT’s ideas put to use. Raise the standards!

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has written about this. He calls it the “narrative fallacy” which is a fancy way of saying the news media takes the facts at hand and weaves together a story line that either a) they think readers/viewers want to hear or b) reinforces the reporter/editor’s point of view.

International or not, all breaking news reporters – this one included – are guilty of this. Even magazine journalists can make such mistakes – Maclean’s magazine’s “Too Asian” story is a recent, ripe example.

Taleb writes in his book:

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another – there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from … Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the world cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the results of experiments, not stories.

So with my most recent piece on China’s scientific publishing industry – and in a forthcoming analysis on China’s mental health problems, I am steering clear of narrative fallacies and striving to produce more analytical stories, backed up not by anecdotes but by empirical research. But empirical research takes time, you see. It’s not something a political scientist, doctor or economist can always drum up in time for a reporter’s deadline.

These days, this reporter is enjoying a more flexible deadline. The result, I hope, is for a better, a smarter and a more accurate story for you, dear readers.