Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future?

“Who experts were—professional background, status, and so on—made scarcely an iota of difference,” Tetlock concludes. “Nor did what experts thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, realists or institutionalists, optimists or pessimists.” But “[h]ow experts thought—their style of reasoning—did matter.” The critical variable turned out to

But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks,

In an allocation economy, the person who wins isn’t the expert who knows the exact answer to a question.

It’s the one who knows which questions to ask in the first place.

Foxes, Tetlock found, are considerably better at forecasting than hedgehogs.