There is no such thing as pure value neutrality. Accuracy which questions they choose to predict that reflects values. Even if you had a perfectly objective forecasting turniment system, if you had people degenerating the questions, hav promoting a political agenda, you could skew the results. I got endless grief wheni my wife and i decided to leave berkeley and move to philadelphia. The three people thought, wer your border line in sane? We left for very personal reasons....
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