Sublime

The idea is to estimate your chances of success and failure. For all the reasons that I’ve discussed, the chances are good that your prediction will be too optimistic.

because their causes were knowable, their consequences were predictable. But only individually, for not even the canniest seer can specify cumulative effects. Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can’t let uncertainties paralyze them. They must appear to know what they’re doing, even when they don’t.

Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”

When predictability is poor—which it is in most of the studies reviewed by Meehl and his followers—inconsistency is destructive of any predictive validity.

errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable.

Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst

Foxes may have emphatic convictions about the way the world ought to be. But they can usually separate that from their analysis of the way that the world actually is and how it is likely to be in the near future. Hedgehogs, by contrast, have more trouble distinguishing their rooting interest from their analysis. Instead, in Tetlock’s words, they cr

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.