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Abstract

In recent years, the Western world has experienced a series of unexpected and highly consequential events, such as the 9/11 terror attacks, the 2008 financial collapse, the European refugee crisis, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump, to name a few. These events were unanticipated by the general public, but also by most social scientists whose job would have been to foresee such events. One response has been to offer plausible ex post explanations for each instance and discover with hindsight what factors we should have looked at to make the right predictions. A second approach takes a much wider perspective and asks how we, and especially experts, make predictions and what broader consequences various predictive technologies carry. This line of research accepts that the future is fundamentally uncertain, and understands predictions as strategic devices.

In three lectures, Akos Rona-Tas will follow this second path. Each lecture will represent a different world of prediction and will be built around comparing three expert domains.

Lecture 1
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future, as physicist Niels Bohr is said to have remarked. The first lecture introduces the problem of prediction and the role of time in social action. We look at predictions of natural phenomena in three domains: earthquakes, the weather, and biomedicine. We discuss how the natural sciences have informed our understanding of society and human behavior and influenced the ways we make predictions in the social sciences.