Karl Schroeder Quotes

A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

I'm a futurist.

Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

In a sense, there are as many forecasting methods as there are forecasters. But I would argue that most projections are derived from two major methods: macro-econometric models and eclectic judgment.

I am an analyst; my job is to analyze.

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.

Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future.

If I would need to make a prediction I still believe Kaplan's scenario is very plausible.

So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by the laws.