Foresight isn’t a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity.

aggregating the judgments of an equal number of people who know lots about lots of different things is most effective because the collective pool of information becomes much bigger.

we must run carefully crafted experiments. Assemble forecasters. Ask them large numbers of questions with precise time frames and unambiguous language. Require that forecasts be expressed using numerical probability scales. And wait for time to pass. If the researchers have done their jobs, the results will be clear.

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

No model captures the richness of human nature. Models are supposed to simplify things, which is why even the best are flawed. But they’re necessary. Our minds are full of models. We couldn’t function without them. And we often function pretty well because some of our models are decent approximations of reality. “All models are wrong,” the

future accurately, but that’s often not the goal, or at least not the sole goal. Sometimes forecasts are meant to entertain.

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.

Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution.