I’ve been buried in finishing up my dissertation (which I will be defending on June 15th!!). I have a few posts in the hopper so look for those in the next week. In the meantime, wanted to hear from you on what’s on your mind. I’ll kick it off with the topic of my dissertation: counterfactual forecasting. This is a particular type of forecasting where instead of predicting what might happen in the future, you predict what would have happened in the past if things had been different. Think, “What if I had married the one that got away?” or “What if the US had a more muscular response to the annexation of Crimea? Would they still have invaded Ukraine in 2022?” The work I did for the dissertation (along with Phil Tetlock, Barb Mellers, and others) is on training novices to be better at this type of forecasting.
I love the topic of what-ifs forecasts. Would love your thoughts on it. Or on anything else that’s on your mind really!