How to catch a "black swan"? Why only some forecasts come true, and then - rarely. Silver N.

Most forecasts regarding the economy, politics, emergency situations and other areas are failure due to an incorrect assessment of probabilities in conditions of uncertainty. Often we mistakenly accept more confident forecasts for more accurate ones, while excessive confidence turns on fiasco. Only by deepening the understanding of chance and uncertainty, we will be able to make our forecasts closer to the truth. Nate Silver, founder and editor -in -chief of the FiveThirtyight site, relying on its innovative system for predicting the results in sports and politics, shows how to extract a true signal from an array of side effects - information “noise”. Silver considers the most accurate forecasts in various fields: from natural disasters to the pandemic, from the poker table to the stock market, from global warming to sports. He analyzes how the most successful forecasters think and what unites them.

What is the reason for their success? They are better than others - or are they just lucky? What patterns do they reveal? And are their forecasts really true? Silver notes that the authors of the best forecasts are excellently owned by probabilistic tools. They distinguish predictable from unpredictable and notice many small details that bring them closer to the truth. Thanks to the correct assessment of probabilities, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

The book of Nate Silver, who is largely consonant with the ideas of Nassim Taleb, helps to dignily meet with “black swans” and is equally significant for everyone who is dealing with big data and calculates the development options.