If you took your ten best super forecasters and brought them into the hedge fund people at goldman sacks, who would be teaching whom? I think it's extremely hard to do that. There are many markets out there which predict something. Sports betting markets are simply the most obviously, most explicit about prediction. So if there was something the world needn't know about, pre ion already, those markets should be inefficient? Yes or no? Why would you think the answer would be yes?"...
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.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded March 26th, 2020 Other ways to connect