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

3. It is as though we have collectively concluded that sizing up the starting lineup for the Yankees deserves greater care than sizing up the risk of genocide in the South Sudan. Of course the analogy between baseball and politics is imperfect. Baseball is played over and over under standard conditions. Politics is a quirky game in which the rules are continually being contorted and contested. So scoring political forecasting is much harder than compiling baseball statistics. But "harder" doesn't mean impossible. It turns out to be quite possible.

There is also another objection to the analogy. Pundits do more than forecasting. They put events in historical perspective, offer explanations, engage in policy advocacy, and pose provocative questions. All true, but pundits also make lots of implicit or explicit forecasts. For instance, the historical analogies pundits invoke contain implicit forecasts: the Munich appeasement analogy is trotted out to support the conditional forecast "if you appease country X, it will ramp up its demands"; and the World War I analogy is trotted out to support "if you use threats, you will escalate the conflict." I submit that it is logically impossible to engage in policy advocacy (which pundits routinely do) without making assumptions about whether we would be better or worse off if we went down one or another policy path. Show me a pundit who does not make at least implicit forecasts and I will show you one who has faded into Zen-like irrelevance.

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.