## Press [enter] to continue
Sound theory, but do not know whether the antecedent conditions have been satisfied. E.g., we know that revolts/revolutions/wars tend to happen when there is a famine, but were unable to predict the famine
Two criteria:
How do we measure it?
From Tversky and Koehler, p. 553: “Stanford undergraduates (N= 196) estimated the percentage of U.S. married couples with a given number of children. Subjects were asked to write down the last digit of their telephone numbers and then to evaluate the percentage of couples having exactly that many children. They were promised that the 3 most accurate respondents would be awarded $ 10 each. As predicted, the total percentage attributed to the numbers 0 through 9 (when added across different groups of subjects) greatly exceeded 1. The total of the means assigned by each group was 1.99, and the total of the medians was 1.80. Thus, subadditivity was very much in evidence, even when the selection of focal hypothesis was hardly informative. Subjects overestimated the percentage of couples in all categories, except for childless couples, and the discrepancy between the estimated and the actual percentages was greatest for the modal couple with 2 children. Furthermore, the sum of the probabilities for 0, 1,2, and 3 children, each of which exceeded .25, was 1.45. The observed subadditivity, therefore, cannot be explained merely by a tendency to overestimate very small probabilities.”
Interdeterminacy is due to the properties of the external world. A world that would be just as unpredictable if we were smarter.
We mispredict because of the way our (limited) minds work
But hedgehogs are here to stay, mainly because of media attention and our strong desire for “expert” advice
See also Why the World Can’t Have a Nate Silver “This problem bears some resemblance to forecasting U.S. presidential elections, in which most of the 50 states dependably vote Democrat or Republican; the hard part is predicting the dozen or so swing states. In international politics, there are many cases that seem reliably”immune" to certain crises, and there’s often also a small but self-evident set of usual suspects. It’s the small but critical set of cases in between those two extremes that make us work to earn our paychecks."