This article explores the limitations of forecasts, highlighting that accuracy alone doesn't guarantee usefulness. It uses examples of past warnings, such as the prediction of a global pandemic in 2019 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to illustrate how timely and actionable forecasts are crucial for effective response.
Here’s the problem with forecasts: some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, and by the time we find out which is which, it’s too late. This leads to what we might call the forecasting paradox: the test of a useful forecast is not whether it turns out to be accurate, but whether it turns out to prompt some sort of useful action in advance. Accuracy may help, but then again it may not. Forewarned is not necessarily forearmed.
Consider the challenge I was set when speaking at a post-pandemic conference. One questioner told me that at the previous conference, in late 2019, the keynote speaker — a famous scientist — had warned of the risk of a global pandemic. Could I offer a better forecast than that? It depends on what you mean by better. Could I offer a more timely, accurate forecast about a question of global consequence? Of course not. But could I offer a more useful forecast? Probably. The bar had been set lower than you might think. The 2019 audience had heard a generic warning that there might be some kind of pandemic one of these days, collectively shrugged and done nothing. Neither they nor the speaker realised the pandemic in question was just weeks away and none of them were in a position to do much about it anyway. The forecast had been brilliant — and useless. Twenty years ago, the forecasts of disaster facing New Orleans should have fared better. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had warned that one of the three most probable catastrophes facing the US was a hurricane striking low-lying New Orleans. As the storm closed in, in 2004, newspapers described every detail of the risk, from a failure of the levees to the impossibility of a mass evacuation and the prospect of hundreds or even thousands of deaths. At the last minute the hurricane — Ivan — turned aside. Yet the prophecies of doom came true in almost every respect a year later when in 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans
FORECASTING PREDICTION USEFULNESS HURRICANE DISASTER PREVENTION
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