We produce 30-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer --- our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but absence of awareness of it.
Nassim Taleb
Isn't it a common-place of forecasting (and chaos theory in particular) that short-term projections can be terribly inaccurate, even while long-term forecasting can be extremely accurate?
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