emergentfutures:

Mollusc medium picks Spain to win World Cup

The two-year-old celebrity octopus, who has accurately picked the outcome of all six of Germany’s World Cup matches so far, quickly tipped Spain to beat the Netherlands. It took him only three minutes to make up his mind.

Paul Higgins: I know that this is all a bit of fun but the coverage of this is amazing. It is a good lesson in who we believe in making predictions and why. It reminds me of the internet scam where you send out a million emails with half of them saying the stock market will go up next week and half saying the opposite. Then you send out 500,000 emails to the people who received the accidentally correct email with half of them saying the stock market will go up and half saying the stock market will go down. The following week you end out 250,000 emails to the people who had two correct in a row and so on. At the end you can send out nearly 1000 emails to people who have received your predictions where you have been correct 10 times in a row. You then ask them to send you $10,000 and you will tell them the system. If 10% send you $10,000 you just made $100,000. The key question for any prediction - how likely was it to be right just by chance?