CM 026: Dan Gardner on Predicting the Future

How can you better forecast the future? What are the characteristics and habits of mind of those who are the best in the world at doing it? And why are those people rarely the forecasters featured in the national and international media? In their  bestselling book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner have shared their research on the elite few who correctly predict events that have not yet happened. Dan is an award-winning journalist, an editor, and the author of two other books, Risk and Future Babble. He recently joined the Canadian Prime Minister’s office as a senior advisor. In this episode, we talk about: what separates superforecasters from others making predictions the limits of even the best forecasters the two types of forecasters -- Hedgehogs and Foxes -- and which one is better how the intelligence community learned surprising things about their predictions the most common mistakes of amateur forecasters why the best forecasters are not smarter and don’t have more access to information the role of intellectual humility in forecasting how to learn to be a superforecaster Dan also shares the things he’s most curious about working on next. Episode Links @dgardner @ptetlock Philip Tetlock Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction The Good Judgement Project The Fox and the Hedgehog George Soros IARPA Groupthink John F. Kennedy Bay of Pigs Cuban Missile Crisis Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow Paul Slovic If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening!