<![CDATA[Why Not Forecast The Future?]]>Jay Ulfelder notices that, despite their relative accuracy, statistical models are very rarely used by policymakers to anticipate future crises:

The finding that models outperform subjective judgments at forecasting has been confirmed repeatedly by other researchers, including one prominent 2004 study which showed that a simple statistical model could predict the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases much more accurately than a large assemblage of legal experts. Because statistical forecasts are potentially so useful, you would think that policy makers and the analysts who inform them would routinely use them. That, however, would be a bad bet. I spoke with several former U.S. policy and intelligence officials, and all of them agreed that policymakers make little use of these tools and the “watch lists” they are often used to produce.

One potential explanation:

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