First God, Then History, and Now Prediction: All Dead Like Marley
January 3, 2017
I read a chunk of what looks to me like content marketing called “The Death of Prediction.” Prediction seems like a soft target. There were the polls which made clear that Donald J. Trump was a loser. Well, how did that work out? For some technology titans, the predictions omitted a grim pilgrimage to Trump Tower to meet the deal maker in person. Happy faces? Not so many, judging from the snaps of the Sillycon Valley crowd and one sycophant from Armonk.
The write up points out that predictive analytics are history. The future is “explanatory analytics.” An outfit called Quantifind has figured out that explaining is better than predicting. My hunch is that explaining is little less risky. Saying that the Donald would lose is tough to explain when the Donald allegedly “won.”
Explaining is like looser. The black-white, one-two, or yes-no thing is a bit less gelatinous.
So what’s the explainer explaining? The checklist is interesting:
- Alert me when it matters. The idea is that a system or smart software will proactively note when something important happens and send one of those mobile phone icon things to get a human to shift attention to the new thing. Nothing like distraction I say.
- Explore why on one’s own. Yep, this works really well for spelunkers who find themselves trapped. Exploration is okay, but it is helpful to [a] know where one is, [b] know where one is going, and [c] know the territory. Caves can be killers, not just dark and damp.
- Quantify impact in “real” dollars. The notion of quantifying strikes me as important. But doesn’t one quantify to determine if the prediction were on the money. I sniff a bit of flaming contradiction. The notion of knowing something in real time is good too. Now the problem becomes, “What’s real time?” I have tilled this field before and saying “real time” is different from delivering what one expects and what the system can do and what the outfit can afford.
It’s not even 2017, and I have learned that “prediction” is dead. I hope someone tells the folks at Recorded Future and Palantir Technologies. Will they listen?
Buzzwording with cacaphones is definitely alive and kicking.
Stephen E Arnold, January 3, 2017
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