[Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)

fortyeridania

How to see into the future, by Tim Harford

The article may be gated. (I have a subscription through my school.)

It is mainly about two things: the differing approaches to forecasting taken by Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Babson; and Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project.

Key paragraph:

So what is the secret of looking into the future? Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness – although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

How to see into the future, by Tim Harford

The article may be gated. (I have a subscription through my school.)

It is mainly about two things: the differing approaches to forecasting taken by Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Babson; and Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project.

Key paragraph:

So what is the secret of looking into the future? Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness – although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

My inside perspective is that story points aren't an estimate of how much time a developer expects to spend on a story (we have separate time estimates), but an effort to quantify the composite difficulty of the story into some sort of "size" for non-developers (or devs not familiar with the project). As such it's more of an exercise in expectation management than forecasting.

This is something i have tried explaining multiple times, but I cant really say that i understand the point. It's harder, so it takes longer, right? My response is that it is a combination of time to complete and probability that the estimate is wrong and it takes a lot longer. But it seems to me that it would be better to decompose those aspects. The benefit of putting it in one number is that it is easier ti use to manage expectations. It's like giving an estimate that is higher than your true estimate based on risk. Frequently, you should end up with sp... (read more)

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[Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)

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[Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)

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