Excerpt from Superforecasting by Philip E. Tetlock, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But I realized that as word of my work spread, its apparent meaning was mutating. What my research had shown was that the average expert had done little better than guessing on many of the political and economic questions I had posed. "Many" does not equal all. It was easiest to beat chance on the shortest-range questions that only required looking one year out, and accuracy fell off the further out experts tried to forecast--approaching the dart-throwing-chimpanzee level three to five years out. That was an important finding. It tells us something about the limits of expertise in a complex world--and the limits on what it might be possible for even superforecasters to achieve. But as in the children's game of "telephone," in which a phrase is whispered to one child who passes it on to another, and so on, and everyone is shocked at the end to discover how much it has changed, the actual message was garbled in the constant retelling and the subtleties were lost entirely. The message became "all expert forecasts are useless," which is nonsense. Some variations were even cruder--like "experts know no more than chimpanzees." My research had become a backstop reference for nihilists who see the future as inherently unpredictable and know-nothing populists who insist on preceding "expert" with "so-called."

So I tired of the joke. My research did not support these more extreme conclusions, nor did I feel any affinity for them. Today, that is all the more true.

There is plenty of room to stake out reasonable positions between the debunkers and the defenders of experts and their forecasts. On the one hand, the debunkers have a point. There are shady peddlers of questionable insights in the forecasting marketplace. There are also limits to foresight that may just not be surmountable. Our desire to reach into the future will always exceed our grasp. But debunkers go too far when they dismiss all forecasting as a fool's errand. I believe it is possible to see into the future, at least in some situations and to some extent, and that any intelligent, open-minded, and hardworking person can cultivate the requisite skills.

Call me an "optimistic skeptic."


The Skeptic

To understand the "skeptic" half of that label, consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It's the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they're going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it's a lie. They're shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves.


1. Why single out Tom Friedman when so many other celebrity pundits could have served the purpose? The choice was driven by a simple formula: (status of pundit) X (difficulty of pinning down his/her forecasts) X (relevance of pundit's work to world politics). Highest score wins. Friedman has high status; his claims about possible futures are highly difficult to pin down--and his work is highly relevant to geopolitical forecasting. The choice of Friedman was in no way driven by an aversion to his editorial opinions. Indeed, I reveal in the last chapter a sneaky admiration for some aspects of his work. Exasperatingly evasive though Friedman can be as a forecaster, he proves to be a fabulous source of forecasting questions.

2. Again, this is not to imply that Friedman is unusual in this regard. Virtually every political pundit on the planet operates under the same tacit ground rules. They make countless claims about what lies ahead but couch their claims in such vague verbiage that it is impossible to test them. How should we interpret intriguing claims like "expansion of NATO could trigger a ferocious response from the Russian bear and may even lead to a new Cold War" or "the Arab Spring might signal that the days of unaccountable autocracy in the Arab world are numbered" or . . . ? The key terms in these semantic dances, may or could or might, are not accompanied by guidance on how to interpret them. Could could mean anything from a 0.0000001 chance of "a large asteroid striking our planet in the next one hundred years" to a 0.7 chance of "Hillary Clinton winning the presidency in 2016." All this makes it impossible to track accuracy across time and questions. It also gives pundits endless flexibility to claim credit when something happens (I told you it could) and to dodge blame when it does not (I merely said it could happen). We shall encounter many examples of such linguistic mischief.

Excerpted from Superforecasting by Philip E. Tetlock. Copyright © 2015 by Philip E. Tetlock. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.