The problem with predictions
People have always yearned to see into the future, to peek around the corner and make sense of what’s going on, according to author and mathematician David Orrell. But predicting the future is difficult. And what’s more, the search for the “perfect model” of prediction often reveals as much about people’s sense of aesthetics as it does about the future, Orrell said last Thursday during “Perfect Model: The Past, Present, and Future of Prediction,” a talk sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The ability to predict trends has grown over the centuries, he said, but not as much as people might think, especially in a few important areas. Climate change prediction, for example, is no better now than it was 30 years ago, he said; nobody predicted the 2008 financial crisis; “and even though the human genome is now mapped, we still can’t predict the spread of pandemics like avian...