Is Arbitrage Predicted Super Forecasting Absurd or Useful?

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The best forecasters can distinguish between ten and fifteen degrees of uncertainty. But how useful is it to be able to distinguish very varying degrees of uncertainty? Is goingto hinge on the kind of game you're playing. If it's poker, ah, youw you might well want someone who's very adept at distinguishing things to, say, three decimal points....

Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren’t just intelligent, but fox-like integrative thinkers capable of navigating values that are conflicting or in tension.

He joined Tyler to discuss whether the world as a whole is becoming harder to predict, whether Goldman Sachs traders can beat forecasters, what inferences we can draw from analyzing the speech of politicians, the importance of interdisciplinary teams, the qualities he looks for in leaders, the reasons he’s skeptical machine learning will outcompete his research team, the year he thinks the ascent of the West became inevitable, how research on counterfactuals can be applied to modern debates, why people with second cultures tend to make better forecasters, how to become more fox-like, and more.

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Recorded March 26th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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