(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore) As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. Unfortunately predicting is hard, and unsurprisingly people look for the Magic Trick™ that can resolve all the uncertainty.

Erik Bernhardsson

Drawing on the fox-vs-hedgehog framework from 'Expert Political Judgment', the author argues that no single mental model or 'magic trick' reliably predicts outcomes in complex domains like recruiting, investing, or forecasting. After 500+ tech interviews, the author found weak correlation between predicted and actual candidate performance, attributing this to overconfidence and adverse selection in competitive markets. The key insight: collect many independent signals and combine them, mirroring the machine learning principle of ensemble methods and boosting — where aggregating many weak learners consistently outperforms any single model.

There is no magic trick