ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
The origins of unpredictability in life outcome prediction tasks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structured Inequality, Uncertain Lifespans: Demographic Perspectives on Predicting Individual-Level Longevity.Population and development review · 2026Article
- Evaluating the statistical realism of LLM-generated social science data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Large language models predict cognition and education close to or better than genomics or expert assessment.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Using machine learning to explore the efficacy of administrative variables in prediction of subjective-wellbeing outcomes in New Zealand.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The InterModel Vigorish (IMV) as a flexible and portable approach for quantifying predictive accuracy with binary outcomes.PloS one · 2025Article
- The value of qualitative data in understanding failure in prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Why are some life outcomes difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multidecade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process was informed by the earlier efforts of hundreds of researchers to predict life outcomes for participants in this study. The qualitative evidence we uncovered in these interviews combined with a mathematical decomposition of prediction error led us to create a conceptual framework. Our specific evidence and our more general framework suggest that unpredictability should be expected in many life outcome prediction tasks, even in the presence of complex algorithms and large datasets. Our work provides a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work on unpredictability in human lives.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.