Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

But there’s a much bigger collaboration I’d like to see. It would be the Holy Grail of my research program: using forecasting tournaments to depolarize unnecessarily polarized policy debates and make us collectively smarter.

So is reality clocklike or cloud-like?

Leaders must be reasonably confident, and instill confidence in those they lead, because nothing can be accomplished without the belief that it can be. Decisiveness is another essential attribute. Leaders can’t ruminate endlessly. They need to size up the situation, make a decision, and move on. And leaders must deliver a vision—the goal that every

When we combine calibration and resolution, we get a scoring system that fully captures our sense of what good forecasters should do.

In 1972 the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote a paper with an arresting title: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” A decade earlier, Lorenz had discovered by accident that tiny data entry variations in computer simulations of weather patterns—like replacing 0.506127 with 0.506—could

“Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.

You may wonder why the outside view should come first. After all, you could dive into the inside view and draw conclusions, then turn to the outside view. Wouldn’t that work as well? Unfortunately, no, it probably wouldn’t. The reason is a basic psychological concept called anchoring.

Animated by a Big Idea, hedgehogs tell tight, simple, clear stories that grab and hold audiences.

Here, the right test of skill would be whether a forecaster can do better than mindlessly predicting no change.