superforecasting means being willing to change your mind.

A related network, the Campbell Collaboration, aims to do the same thing for social policy questions in areas such as education and criminal justice.

The counterintuitive result is that presenting people with a detailed and balanced account of both sides of the argument may actually push people away from the center rather than pull them in. If we already have strong opinions, then we’ll seize upon welcome evidence, but we’ll find opposing data or arguments irritating. This biased assimilation of

One of the reasons facts don’t always change our minds is that we are keen to avoid uncomfortable truths.

try to take both perspectives—the worm’s-eye view as well as the bird’s-eye view. They will usually show you something different, and they will sometimes pose a puzzle: How could both views be true? That should be the beginning of an investigation. Sometimes the statistics will be misleading, sometimes it will be our own eyes that deceive us, and

Onora O’Neill argues that if we want to demonstrate trustworthiness, we need the basis of our decisions to be “intelligently open.” She proposes a checklist of four properties that intelligently open decisions should have. Information should be accessible: that implies it’s not hiding deep in some secret data vault. Decisions should be

There is no easy answer to the balance between the bird’s-eye view and the worm’s-eye view, between the broad and rigorous but dry insight we get from the numbers and the rich but parochial lessons we learn from experience. We must simply keep reminding ourselves what we’re learning and what we might be missing.

We don’t need to become emotionless processors of numerical information—just noticing our emotions and taking them into account may often be enough to improve our judgment. Rather than requiring superhuman control over our emotions, we need simply to develop good habits.

Second, keeping score was important.