There’s a quote from professional baseball player Yogi Berra: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
It’s hard to say it better, but Dan Gardner’s book, Future babble: Why expert predictions fail — and why we believe them anyway, may just do that and a lot more.
At the essence of it, the book outlines how forecasting politics, markets or societies is like predicting who will win the NHL or NBA championships. So many unknown things will happen during the regular games and playoffs that it makes early-season predictions almost useless. Players will get injured or traded, a weak team will suddenly start to click or a powerhouse team won’t gel. Truly unbelievable buzzer-beater baskets from half court will go in, or a team will give up a five-to-one lead in the third period.
Read Also
Manitoba cattle prices Dec. 16
Here’s what local farmers were getting paid last week for their cattle at Manitoba livestock auction marts; prices covering the week Dec. 8-12, 2025.
Likewise, for markets to be predictable, politics, social change, weather and the advance of science and technology would all have to be predictable. They aren’t, of course, so price forecasts routinely fail. However, there are things you can do to be more comfortable with the unknown and allow you to adapt or adjust to take on the future as it unfolds.
Firstly, the book explores how “certain styles of thinking and decision-making do a far better job in dealing with the future to find a path ahead.”
“Experts who did particularly bad were not comfortable with complexity and uncertainty,” the book reads. “These experts are also more confident than others that their predictions were accurate. Also, knowing too much can actually make things worse and can result in overconfidence. Experts who did better than the average drew information and ideas from multiple sources and sought to synthesize it. They were self- critical, always questioning whether what they believed to be true really was. And when they were shown that they had made mistakes, they simply acknowledge they were wrong and adjust their thinking accordingly. The experts who were more accurate than others tend to be much less confident that they were right.”
A second factor to be aware of is that news and events are random. How people react to them are random, and the interactions and feedback loops of all these series of events will be complex, chaotic and random as well. However, “we treat random results as if they are meaningful and we consistently over- look randomness to see patterns everywhere, whether they are there or not.
“We even go looking for patterns in randomness. Data mining is now a big problem for precisely this reason. Statisticians know that with plenty of numbers and a powerful computer, statistical correlations can always be found. These correlations will often be meaningless,” Gardner says.
Finally, there is a “tendency to take current events and project them into the future.”
Trends are called trends for a reason, but they don’t apply forever.
“The further we look into the future, the more opportunity there is for current trends to be modified, bent or reversed,” the book reads. “Predicting the future by projecting the present is like driving with no hands. It works while you are in a long stretch of straight road but even a gentle curve is trouble.”
It will always be difficult to make forecasts and predictions of where markets will be tomorrow or next week, let alone next month, next year or in three years. So, you have to keep your eye on the road and be ready to shift gears and change direction when the path ahead weaves in and out or traffic patterns change.
Bottom line, as a final point, the book points out that “a good decision is one that delivers positive results in a wide range of outcomes.”
This is a role that options play in farm marketing. With them, you won’t be forced to just guess or predict. Instead, use option strategies to replace opinion with process so you can capture opportunities while still managing the risk, especially in this very volatile environment of record-high prices.
