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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting study, November 17, 2001
It is a study of some diverse fields attempting to give a measure of how well we understand a field and how well we can predict the future. I am not sure why various fields were selected but overall they give a good range of concepts - weather, biology, stock market, outbreak of war and mathematics. The writer then at the end of the discussion gives his own grading for how well we can predict an event and how well we can explain it. These figures are purely subjective and I often disagreed with them. There are often two problems in trying to predict something using science. The first is how good is your scientific knowledge of something occurs. The second is how good is your data. For example imagine a rocket being feed wrong data. Although our knowledge of mechanics is excellent, it will probably crash. Three of them are actually fields that I have spent a considerable period of time and study on and can comment on them in detail. The weather I found very interesting. It is a case where we have very good data and our theories look good. The major problem seems to be our ability to process the data.
He then goes into predicting climate. Here we have good data but lousy theories. We really know very little about this field. Stock market - I found his study starting to being very good on the theoretical points of the merits of different theories. Unfortunately just as he started to get interesting he stopped. Possibly as his study is to short or he lacks the experience in this field. Here again we have a field where we have good data but lousy theories. However many studies of various theories of the market are examined. Some that the writer states show that the market is not perfect. But he seems a bit dubious about this at times. Quite rightly I feel. For example he shows over time that smaller companies are more profitable. This maybe due to because they are riskier they are undervalued by the market. This argument is true of even large companies with low P/E that the writer misses altogether. There is often a very good reason why the market gives them a low P/E. But the logical point now is that if this is so what does it say about the market. If the market is overcompensating for risk then it cannot be perfect. The other main problem that in my experience from many years in the stock market there are three main variables on a share one how well the company does, how well the market does and how well the shareholder does out of it. They can and often are very different. If the market is near perfect as some theories suggest because the public know enough of the facts. As people do not know or use the information equally well some people must be using the information better then others. Some are showing over the years repeatedly better performance then the average. Buffet is a huge one and I am a tiny one. Now why? This is not explained. Buffet does not buy heaps of shares but a few selected ones. The next discussion was on trying to predict war. This is even harder to predict. Here we have little data. For example how much knowledge did the US have on the North Vietnamese government thinking processes at the start of the Vietnam war or how much did the Egyptians of the Israeli government in 1967? Here the writer claims that after the event our theories can offer scientifically defensible schemes for explaining how any given war came about. This is nonsense. Historians are still debating the causes of just about every war I know of! Often there reasoning seems like rationalisations for what happened. He does go though a few theories that just shows that we really know almost nothing about predicting war. Almost all historians would probably admit that even knowing what they know now, very few war could have predicted say a month before it happened. One historian I read stated that Germany attack on Russia was remarkable as it's about the only war that you could predict. Interesting though I would argue that Stalin did not.
Above all he claims to make war you need cash. This is true but it predicts little as in today's world a country can often by a third party be given the cash. This is the same problem with the master variables discussed - population, technology and resources. Where he states that you need technology to make war. This maybe true but predicts nothing, as a country may be able to get it without having it. For example Egypt under Nasser had the population. Russia supplied the technology and never got paid as Egypt had little resources. The last section is about mathematics and I am a bit confused as to why he put it in. There he goes though Godel's principal. I found this whole section a rather confused mess. Mathematics is more a study of human thought then science as such.
Perhaps the writer was trying to say that we could never really be sure of anything even an idealised system. He then gives it a B for predictability that is quite arbitrary. Overall I found the book interesting as one-person attitude to this concept of looking at certainty.
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