Sublime

What is rational is what allows the collective—entities meant to live for a long time—to survive. Not what is called “rational” in some unrigorous psychology or social science book.*4 In that sense, contrary to what psychologists and psycholophasters will tell you, some “overestimation” of tail risk is not irrational by any metric, as it is more th

And some forecasts are meant to comfort

10Xers lead their companies with productive paranoia.

Humans can also be heavily motivated by uncertainty.

That’s why the intelligence services attach probability ratings to their briefings: they know that their forecasts, however scrupulous, are riddled with contingencies, accidents, luck and change.

Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst

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.

People adopt sensible rules of thumb that usually work well but sometimes lead them astray,

With practice, our estimates can get better. What distinguished Tetlock’s hedgehogs is that they were too stubborn to learn from their mistakes. Acknowledging the real-world uncertainty in their forecasts would require them to acknowledge to the imperfections in their theories about how the world was supposed to behave—the last thing that an ideolo