This course examines why people turn to quantitative forecasts to create certainty about inherently uncertain futures. Emphasizing how forecasts are shaped by their purpose and use, we will investigate how experts forecast weather, earthquakes, policy impacts, macroeconomics, elections, and the end of human civilization. We will consider how forecasts are constructed and evaluated, surveying topics including machine learning, utility maximization, scoring rules, stochastic recurrence models, simulation, silicon sampling, conformal prediction, and superforecasting. Pairing historical and sociological readings with mathematical and computational foundations, the course interrogates the ways forecasts acquire authority and shape the world they predict.
The course is broken down into topical units of two lectures. The first lecture will discuss readings from the history of technology and science studies to provide historical and sociological context (HSC). The second will focus on the mathematics and computation of forecasting techniques (MC).
8/27/26 - Lecture 0: The course at a glance
Unit 1: Past Returns Predict the Future Performance
9/1/26 (HSC) - Halley’s historical extrapolation
Assigned Reading
Chapman, A. (1994). Edmond Halley’s use of historical evidence in the advancement of science. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48(2), 167-191. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1994.0022
Edmond Halley, “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 17 (1693): 596–610. Read pp. 596–603 and look at the life table. https://jhanley.biostat.mcgill.ca/c609/material/Halley1693.pdf
Additional Reading
Hughes, D. W., Fowler, P. H., Lovell, B., Lynden-Bell, D., Message, P. J., & Wilkinson, J. E. (1987). The history of Halley’s Comet. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 349-367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1987.0091
David R. Bellhouse, “A New Look at Halley’s Life Table”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A 174, no. 3 (2011): 823–832. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00684.x
Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht. Patterns, Predictions, and Actions. Princeton University Press. 2023) Read the two excerpts in the Introduction and Conclusion about Halley, his life tables, and Isaac Newton
9/3/26 (MC) - Forecasting the future by minimizing errors in the past
Unit 2: Weather Forecasting
9/8/26 (HSC) - Should I bring an umbrella?
9/10/26 (MC) - Proper scoring rules and calibration
Unit 3: Seismology
9/15/26 (HSC) - What is the chance of an earthquake?
9/17/26 (MC) - Stochastic methods for time series prediction
Unit 4: Government
9/29/26 (HSC) - Governance by Cost-benefit analysis.
10/1/26 (MC) - Expected utility maximization
Unit 5: Economics
10/6/26 (HSC) - Forecasting the economy
10/8/26 (MC) - Uncertainty quantification and prediction intervals
Unit 6: Epidemiology
10/15/26 (HSC) - The preparedness paradox
10/20/26 (MC) - Parametric modeling and model discrimination
Unit 7: Public Opinion
10/22/2026 (HSC) - Opinion polls: From surveys to predictions
10/27/2026 (MC) - Model-based and survey-informed statistical adjustment
Unit 8: Human Behavior
10/29/2026 (HSC) - Simulating People to Forecast Policy Outcomes
11/3/2026 (MC) - Silicon Sampling
Unit 9: Prediction markets
11/5/2026 (HSC) - The promise of prediction markets.
11/10/2026 (MC) - Defensive Forecasting
10 - p(doom)
11/17/2026 - I feel fine
11/19/2026 - The course and beyond
Project presentations on 12/1/2026 and 12/3/2026