Forecasting world population is about calling India and China right-if they don't act as expected, all bets are off-Nate Silver, prediction expert

5/3/13, "Nate Silver: 'Prediction is a really important tool, it's not a game'," UK Guardian, James Ball
 
"Nate Silver made a name for himself with his uncannily accurate predictions of baseball scores and US election results. But some things – from earthquakes to terrorism – even he can't predict."

"We asked Nate Silver to gauge how predictable different things in life were: from politics to cricket, from terrorism to sexual orientation. Here's how he scored ten different areas, on a prediction scale of 0 to 10."...

"World population in 100 years: 7

Forecasters from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich have got population predictions drastically wrong – but Silver thinks they can reach a reasonable degree of accuracy.

UN forecasts, he says, are pretty good. Looking five years ahead, the odds of being right are extremely high. Looking further, there are more ways to be wrong. For one, Silver says with a degree of understatement, "to have some mass catastrophe is one downside risk," but getting the population of the next century right is really about calling India and China right: if they don't act as expected, all bets are off."...via Baseball Think Factory  






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