If you want to know the future, ask a chimp
SUPERFORECASTING: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PREDICTION by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
(Random House)
RIGHT-THINKING people have long suspected that the vast majority of the pontificating political and economic pundits on TV and in the press are like Manuel the waiter in Fawlty Towers . . . They ‘know nothing’.
For many years, Philip Tetlock, an American professor from the University of Pennsylvania, has been gathering evidence that provides scientific proof for such suspicions. The average ‘expert’, it turns out, is about as good at predicting what the future holds as a dart-throwing chimp is at hitting the bullseye.
In a 20-year survey, Tetlock examined the accuracy of thousands of predictions made by ‘experts’ about the economy, stocks and shares, elections, wars and other important issues.
He discovered the average expert did only as well as a random guesser. Not only that, the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he or she was.
People are prepared to listen to, and pay out for, forecasts that are ‘as dubious as elixirs sold from the back of a wagon’.
In co-operation with a littleknown branch of US intelligence services, he established The Good Judgment Project. For the reward of a $250 Amazon gift voucher, nearly 3,000 volunteers helped out with it.
The aim was to identify ordinary people who were good at forecasting. People like Doug Lorch, a retired computer programmer who rapidly became one of Tetlock’s ‘superforecasters’.
Lorch was asked hundreds of obscure questions: will Serbia be officially granted European Union candidacy by December 31, 2011? Will the London Gold Market fixing price of gold exceed $1,850 on September 30, 2011?
Lorch, with the other superforecasters, proved to have an almost spooky ability to predict correctly. Foresight is real, it seems, and some people have it in spades.
As Tetlock writes: ‘They aren’t gurus or oracles with the power to peer decades into the future, but they do have a real, measurable skill at judging how high-stake events are likely to unfold three months, s months, a year or a yearand-a-half in advance.’
Why on Earth, you might think, does the US spend billions of dollars annually on geopolitical forecasting when it could just give Lorch an Amazon voucher and ask him to get on with it?
Why are the superforecasters so good at shortterm prediction and so many of the alleged experts like chimps with fists full of darts?
Tetlock thinks he has the answer to that question, which, put most simply, is that they have an openmindedness, an intellectual curiosity and a freedom from ideological preconceptions.
Superforecasting is a fascinating book. It may sometimes be hard to disagree with the critic who argues that: ‘What matters can’t be forecast and what can be forecast doesn’t matter.’
Yet Tetlock’s star performers clearly do possess a particular set of skills, which he is confident can be passed on to others.