How do experts go wrong? There are several kinds of expert failure. The most innocent and most common are what we might think of as the ordinary failures of science. Individuals, or even entire professions, get important questions wrong because of error or because of the limitations of a field itself. They observe a phenomenon or examine a problem, come up with theories and solutions, and then test them. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. ... Science is learning by doing. Laypeople are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and they prefer answers rather than caveats. But science is a process, not a conclusion. Science subjects itself to constant testing by a set of careful rules under which theories can be displaced only by other theories. Laypeople cannot expect experts to never be wrong; if they were capable of such accuracy, they wouldn’t need to do research and run experiments in the first place. If policy experts were clairvoyant or omniscient, governments would never run deficits, and wars would break out only at the instigation of madmen. ... The most important point is that failed predictions do not mean very much in terms of judging expertise. Experts usually cover their predictions (and an important part of their anatomy) with caveats, because the world is full of unforeseeable accidents that can have major ripple effects down the line. ... The goal of expert advice and prediction is not to win a coin toss, it is to help guide decisions about possible futures.

In the mid-to-late nineteen-sixties, as gold’s role in the international monetary system was about to implode, a handful of top Johnson Administration officials, a few sympathetic members of Congress, and hundreds of government-paid scientists set off on a nuclear-age alchemical quest. Barr gave it the code name Operation Goldfinger. The government would end up looking for gold in the oddest places: seawater, meteorites, plants, even deer antlers. In an era during which people wanted badly to believe in the peaceful use of subatomic energy, plans were drawn up to use nuclear explosives to extract gold from deep inside the Earth, and even to use particle accelerators to try to change base metals into gold. ... Operation Goldfinger represented the logical culmination of a government obsession with not having enough gold. The post-war global economy was expanding much faster than the gold supply that propped it up. Dollars freely convertible to gold were the underpinning of the world’s monetary system, and President John F. Kennedy—and many others—feared that if holders of dollars and other U.S. securities were to cash in their paper for gold, there wouldn’t be enough gold to exchange, and a global crisis could ensue.

The takeaway: Gaming may be mainstream entertainment, but game companies are hit-driven—and none has successfully expanded beyond videogames. ... Activision Blizzard hopes to be the first. It’s not just dragon-centric TV shows that are being spun out of its massive vault of proprietary characters ... There are multiple movies under development, loosely based on the bestselling war-game franchise Call of Duty. There’s a newly launched consumer products division, tasked with developing everything from comic books to apparel based on Activision Blizzard’s intellectual property. ... And most notably, there is an “e-sports” empire in the works—a major foray into the booming world of competitive videogaming. That genre, once merely a niche, is reaching a tipping point. About 385 million people worldwide are expected to view e-sports events in 2017—mostly online, but increasingly on cable television and at live competitions. ... It might be more accurate if ESPN not only distributed football games but also owned the National Football League—and made all the footballs in the world as well.

This is not a joke, but neither should you worry if you are long oil, as the price will most likely hit (at least) $100 long before it heads south, and that is due to a rising deficit between oil production and new oil discoveries ... I should have said fossil fuels, not oil, in the headline above, but there wasn’t enough room for all those extra characters! In other words, what I meant to say is that fossil fuel (oil, gas and coal) prices will most likely approach $0 over the very long term. ... Just to complicate matters even further, strictly speaking, not even that is correct. What will happen to fossil fuel prices in the future is anybody’s guess, but what almost certainly will happen at some point is that demand for fossil fuels will approach zero. ... The problem in a nutshell is the geological depletion of existing fields and the growth of higher cost, geologically less attractive, fields. ... Tying up so much capital in one industry has become a significant drain on productivity in other parts of the economy. ... This will eventually have a major, and overwhelmingly negative, impact on GDP growth, all other things being equal.

A year ago a hacker stole $55 million of a virtual currency known as ether. This is the story of the bold attempt to rewrite that history. ... Rather than moving bitcoin from one user to another, the ethereum blockchain hosts fully functioning computer programs called smart contracts—essentially agreements that enforce themselves by means of code rather than courts. That means they can automate the life cycle of bond payments, say, or ensure that pharmaceutical companies can authenticate the sources of their drugs. Yet smart contracts are also new and mostly untested. Like all software, they are only as reliable as their coding—and Gün was pretty sure he’d found a big problem. ... Gün feared the bug could allow a hacker to make unlimited ATM-like withdrawals from the millions, even if the attacker, who'd have needed to be an investor, had only $10 in his account. ... This staggering amount of money lived inside a program called a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. Dreamed up less than a year earlier and governed by a smart contract, the DAO was intended to democratize how ethereum projects are funded. Thousands of dreamers and schemers and developers who populate the cutting edge of computer science, most of them young, had invested in the DAO.

Hof claims that people can address, prevent, and treat most any malady by focusing the mind to control the metabolic processes in their cells. ... Wim Hof’s curriculum vitae includes holding his breath for six minutes, running a marathon above the Arctic circle in only shorts, and achieving a Guinness world record for the longest ice bath (nearly two hours). Hence the name. ... He describes commercial pressures on Hof as external—the man himself owns little more than a handful of t-shirts and would be fine to remain that way. ... gets to the point that the Wim Hof Method isn’t really a method in any traditional sense. Method implies a systematic study with an end goal, whereas this is more a set of principles—basic concepts and a couple techniques—to be continued throughout life. Cold exposure is supposed to help people train themselves to suppress a fight-or-flight response, and holding one’s breath teaches an ability to suppress a reflex to gasp. Through these exercises, you’re meant to gain a sense of control over the body’s autonomic processes.