How Canadians helped U.S. glimpse future
Toronto-born professor led team that set new standard for intelligence predictions
WASHINGTON— Amir Bagherpour already has a detailed set of charts predicting how everything will play out in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations, even though they don’t actually start for a few more weeks. He makes predictions for a living. The U.S. intelligence community runs a prediction market where forecasters across government compete for prognosticative supremacy — it looks like a golf tournament leaderboard, only instead of birdies and bogeys, people are ranked by how correctly they call coups d’état and counterinsurgencies.
Bagherpour was one of them. He was a U.S. State Department analyst under the Democrats and made predictions about such things as Israeli- Palestinian peace, the Syrian conflict, Colombia’s negotiations with FARC rebels and the counter-Daesh campaign.
His predictions are often bang on: he foresaw the rise of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency and predicted Bashar Assad would cling to power in Syria. Sometimes, however, they miss the mark: he gave Brexit a onethird chance of success.
The U.S. intelligence community has created more than a half-dozen forecasting programs over the past few years through its research unit, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). One example is an ongoing tournament between hybrid teams combining humans and machines. It’s based on evidence that the best forecasting comes from a combination of computer algorithm and human guidance.
IARPA was modelled after the older Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that helped create the Internet. DARPA was shelved in 2003 and its Pentagon boss forced to resign when it created a terrorism futures market after the 9/11 attacks that allowed participants to place bets on the occurrence of future terrorist acts.
The initiative was reborn with a new generation of projects years later — minus the cash payouts — and Canadians played a major role in the resurrection.
The team that dominated the first IARPA tournament was co-created by Philip Tetlock, a researcher, author and University of Pennsylvania professor who was born in Toronto and raised in Winnipeg and Vancouver.
His team beat a control group by a whopping 60 per cent and 78 per cent in the competition’s first two years starting in 2011. It was so lopsided, they ended the competition and Tetlock’s team continued alone.
The U.S. government has just released the data collected from his team to help future researchers.
Some secrets to successful forecasting are quite simple, Tetlock says. He includes a so-called Ten Commandments in his book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, cowritten with Canadian public servant Dan Gardner.
“I’m not talking about people who have Nostradamus clairvoyance properties,” Tetlock said.
“We’re talking about people who are better at assigning realistic odds to everything. Does that mean they’re going to see everything — that whenever history hits a sharp corner they’re going to be able to see around the corner? Absolutely not. There are limits on foresight.
“It helps to be smart. It helps to be well-informed.” So, what about NAFTA? Bagherpour used a blend of game theory, expert surveys and data run through the software his company created to produce charts filled with predictions.
They concluded: NAFTA will survive; there won’t be a trade war; the deal will be rebalanced slightly to reduce the U.S. trade deficit; the U.S. will open negotiations with hardball demands, then soften them to reach a deal.
He predicts Canada won’t demand much. He shrugs when a reporter says Canada insists it has many demands, including softwood lumber and expanding professional visas.
He replies: “That’s not what this shows.”