From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré

The great baseball coach Yogi Berra has a saying, “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” While he did not produce the writings that would allow him to be considered a philosopher, in spite of his wisdom and intellectual abilities, Berra can claim to know something about randomness. He was a practitioner of uncertainty, and, as a baseball player and coach, regularly faced random outcomes, and had to face their results deep into his bones.

In fact, Yogi Berra is not the only thinker who thought about how much of the future lies beyond our abilities. Many less popular, less pithy, but not less competent thinkers than he have examined our inherent limitations in this regard, from the philosophers Jacques Hadamard and Henri Poincaré (commonly described as mathematicians), to the philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (commonly described, alas, as an economist), to the philosopher Karl Popper (commonly known as a philosopher). We can safely call this the Berra-Hadamard-Poincaré-Hayek-Popper conjecture, which puts structural, built-in limits to the enterprise of predicting.

“The future ain’t what it used to be,” Berra later said.* He seems to have been right: the gains in our ability to model (and predict) the world may be dwarfed by the increases in its complexity—implying a greater and greater role for the unpredicted. The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict. Sorry.

The problem is not only what we can predict, but how confidently we predict it. Gains in knowledge can be accompanied by gains in confidence that outrun them.

* Note that these sayings attributed to Yogi Berra might be apocryphal—it was the physicist Niels Bohr who came up with the first one, and plenty of others came up with the second. These sayings remain, however, quintessential Berraisms.

The scandal of prediction

Being “almost” right can still leave a forecast far short of what matters.

One March evening, a few men and women were standing on the esplanade overlooking the bay outside the Sydney Opera House. It was close to the end of the summer in Sydney, but the men were wearing jackets despite the warm weather. The women were more thermally comfortable than the men, but they had to suffer the impaired mobility of high heels.

They all had come to pay the price of sophistication. Soon they would listen for several hours to a collection of oversize men and women singing endlessly in Russian. Many of the opera-bound people looked like they worked for the local office of J. P. Morgan, or some other financial institution where employees experience differential wealth from the rest of the local population, with concomitant pressures on them to live by a sophisticated script (wine and opera). But I was not there to take a peek at the neosophisticates. I had come to look at the Sydney Opera House, a building that adorns every Australian tourist brochure. Indeed, it is striking, though it looks like the sort of building architects create in order to impress other architects.

That evening walk in the very pleasant part of Sydney called the Rocks was a pilgrimage. While Australians were under the illusion that they had built a monument to distinguish their skyline, what they had really done was to construct a monument to our failure to predict, to plan, and to come to grips with our unknowledge of the future—our systematic underestimation of what the future has in store.

The Australians had actually built a symbol of the epistemic arrogance of the human race. The story is as follows. The Sydney Opera House was supposed to open in early 1963 at a cost of AU$ 7 million. It finally opened its doors more than ten years later, and, although it was a less ambitious version than initially envisioned, it ended up costing around AU$ 104 million. While there are far worse cases of planning failures (namely the Soviet Union), or failures to forecast (all important historical events), the Sydney Opera House provides an aesthetic (at least in principle) illustration of the difficulties. The opera-house story concerns a costly planning failure, rather than one that caused the spilling of innocent blood. But it is nevertheless emblematic.

We certainly know a lot, but we have a tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do—enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble. That gap matters whenever our decisions depend on a prediction.

Why on earth do we predict so much? Worse, even, and more interesting: Why don’t we talk about our record in predicting? Why don’t we see how we (almost) always miss the big events? I call this the scandal of prediction.