Is predicting vol better worth the effort and does the VIX help?

I'm a vol scaler. There I've said it. Yes I adjust my position size inversely to vol. And so should you. But to this well we need to be able to predict future vol; where the 'future' here is roughly how long we expect to hold our positions for. Some people spend a lot of effort on this. They use implied vol from options, high(er) frequency data, GARCH or stochastic vol models. Other people don't…