Prediction Markets - Are They Super Predictors or Can They Beat Financial Markets?

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Are financial markets, in essence, super predictors to begin with? Or can super predictors, on average, beat financial markets? Oh boy. The i see the intelligece commute doesn't let us make those markets deep and liquid the way they on wall street. When prediction markets fall short, they do typically not perform quite as well as forecasting tournaments. But there are lots of very powerful institutional actors, like goldman sacks and so forth, that are continually trying to do exactly what you describe is an ongoing process....

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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