Thinking books · Decision making · Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner, 2015
Superforecasting — the big ideas
What distinguished the people who predicted world events better than everyone else, including experts.
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The big ideas
The best forecasters were not the most knowledgeable but the most willing to break a question into parts, start from base rates, and update in small increments.
They used fine-grained probabilities — 63% rather than "likely" — and their accuracy dropped measurably when forced to round.
Confident, famous experts with a single big idea did worse than careful generalists who held many partial explanations at once.
Forecasting improved with feedback and scoring. Without a record and a score, practice produces confidence rather than accuracy.
Practise it — no need to have read it
Make three predictions about the next three months with a percentage on each. Diary a date to score them.
A hint: The scoring is the whole exercise. Predictions nobody checks make people more confident, not more accurate.
Where it shows up in real life
- Planning
- Assessing risk
- Any claim about what will happen
Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.
Thinking methods from this book
- Updating by degrees — Moving a belief a proportionate amount when new evidence arrives, instead of all or nothing.
- The outside view — Estimating from what usually happens in cases like this, before reasoning from your own.
The thinking it builds
- Logical Thinking — Reason consistently
- Decision Thinking — Make better decisions under uncertainty