One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2015

Read: January 2021

Publisher Summary: In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are “superforecasters.”

Genre: Cognitive Psychology

Rating: 8/10

Who Should Read This?

• Forecasters, handicappers, and prognosticators
• Intellectual dilettantes seeking a raison d’etre outside of trivia night
• Anyone who wants to see the future more clearly (and yet, ironically, the future will probably look less clear to you after reading the book…quite the conundrum)

Skimmable? Yes

Notable Quotables:

• Disturbed, Kent went back to his team. They had all agreed to use “serious possibility” in the NIE so Kent asked each person, in turn, what he thought it meant. One analyst said it meant odds of about 80 to 20, or four times more likely than not that there would be an invasion. Another thought it meant odds of 20 to 80 – exactly the opposite. Other answers were scattered between those extremes. Kent was floored. A phrase that looked informative was so vague as to be almost useless. Or perhaps it was worse than useless, as it had created dangerous misunderstandings.
• “I’d rather be a bookie than a goddamn poet” (Sherman Kent)
• Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors throughout the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
• The more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was.  That’s not because editors, producers, and the public go looking for bad forecasters.  They go looking for hedgehogs, who just happen to be bad forecasters.  Animated by a Big Idea, hedgehogs tell tight, simple, clear stories that grab and hold audiences. As anyone who was done media training knows, the first rule is “keep it simple, stupid.”  Better still, hedgehogs are confident.  With their one-perspective analysis, hedgehogs can pile up reasons why they are right –”furthermore,” “moreover” – without considering other perspectives and the pesky doubts and caveats they raise.
• Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.
• It’s natural to be drawn to the inside view. It’s usually concrete and filled with engaging detail we can use to craft a story about what’s going on. The outside view is typically abstract, bare, and doesn’t lend itself so readily to storytelling.
• Epistemic uncertainty is something you don’t know but is, at least in theory, knowable…Aleatory uncertainty is something you not only don’t know; it is unknowable.
• Science doesn’t tackle “why” questions about the purpose of life. It sticks to “how” questions that focus on causation and probabilities.
• So finding meaning in events is positively correlated with well-being but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?
• Unpack the question into components. Distinguish as sharply as you can between the known and unknown and leave no assumptions unscrutinized. Adopt the outside view and put the problem into a comparative perspective that downplays its uniqueness and treats it as a special case of a wider class of phenomena. Then adopt the inside view that plays up the uniqueness of the problem. Also explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.
• Computer programmers have a wonderful term for a program that is not intended to be released in a final version but will instead be used, analyzed, and improved without end. It is “perpetual beta.” Superforecasters are perpetual beta.
• The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt – the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility….In fact, this combination can be wonderfully fruitful. Intellectual humility compels the careful reflection necessary for good judgment; confidence in one’s abilities inspires determined action.