Reliable forecasts versus speculative opinion....

 The apparently trivial here has a high degree of reliability and is, in a genuine rather than business jargon use of the term, robust - retains its truth across a wide variety of settings:

"I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s a very interesting question.

I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.

You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.” Or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible.

So we know the energy we put into these things today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it."

— Jeff Bezos

Noise.... the book is here. Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein

 

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment: Kahneman, Daniel ...

www.amazon.com › Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-K...

In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection, there is judgment, there is noise.

Some decades ago Nobel winner Fischer Black wrote the Classic Paper "Noise". Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote much on noise - sometimes in the guise of random processes - throughout the early years of this century. Awareness of the confounding effects of noise are not new.

Bringing these minds (Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein) together on the topic likely is new. A great difficulty with handling noise is producing strong frameworks to make the relevant ideas cohere, develop structures to analyse the phenomenon within and to figure ways to ask the "right" questions about noise. Currently, these three are likely the best shot on the planet at doing just that.