[chillacy]

That's a fair take. In research about forecasting, they do indeed find that timeline greatly impacts forecasting accuracy.

Even if we were to fix this particular bucketing issue with a large enough dataset of foreign policy predictions X months into the future... one could still say this tells us nothing about this specific question because... maybe even among the geopolitical questions, this question is somehow different in some way which makes it noncomparable.

Or by analogy it would be like we were flipping what we think are coins and someone snuck a dice roll on one of the tries. Maybe the Taiwan question is the dice roll and therefore not subject to comparison with other geopolitical questions X years out.

This is of course afaik an unknowable problem, and Taleb would agree that we should just assume these predictions are tea-leaves.

At the same time it may be a valuable source of info (certainly imo more empirical than pundits and the news)

For consideration:

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-03-26/is-it-pos...