Forecasting in general is a silly affair. As a data scientist I get all kinds of requests for all kinds of predictions, and my only real job is to part those requesting parties from their money.

The party relies on divide and conquer of uniformed fools. But the fools are in the minority by now - and the divide and conquer is one sneaky trustfall decentralized communication platform away from never working again.

Or in other words, if you want to say "this time is different" and deviate from the base rate, you actually need to look at the previous times to find out whether it really is different this time, and if so, by how much.

If the information is entirely new (ie, what impact does aliens taking over the Moon have on China/Taiwan) then there'll always be difficulty estimating that impact

Also, as the article notes, scholars like Tetlock have studied the the track record of scholars and experts and found them to be less accurate than this type of approach.

It’s a literary sleight of hand but useful to note as it undermines the entire premise of the article. That’s because these predictions are bunk because these techniques don’t work with the stock market which uses far more rigorous statistical methods for pricing (which happened 60s-90s with the rise of quants).

It can be hard to convince people with math alone.