Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…They can now do Math Olympiad problems. There’s one forecast by someone working on this that, within a year, they’ll win Math Olympiads. It could be wrong, but when you say that it’s only a year away, I would take that pretty seriously. I think prediction is actually a pretty hard skill that probably life experience helps. Some types of prediction — if you have a phone book of millions of records, and you’re trying to predict what’s the likelihood that this spam email will be responded to and result in additional sale, I’m sure AI is already better than humans at that. But things that are less structured, I think, are harder for AIs and hard for humans. Why do businesses not seem to care that much about most predictions? Surely this has puzzled you. For 20 years, I’ve been waiting for prediction markets to take off. Obviously in politics, sports, it’s more than up and running, but in most areas, they’re pretty weak. What’s the actual problem on the demand side?…

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