Superforecasting

The Art and Science of Prediction

De: Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Narrado por: Joel Richards

From one of the world's most highly regarded social scientists, a transformative book on the habits of mind that lead to the best predictions.

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?

In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people - including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer - who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They've beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They've even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters".

In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future - whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life - and is destined to become a modern classic.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2015 Philip Tetlock Consulting, Inc., and Connaught Street, Inc. (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

I must not be smart enough to get this

I guess I was expecting the secrets of the universe revealed, but by the end of this book, I continued to scratch my head as to how these super forecasters are doing it. I was expecting practical tips and techniques to reproduce their success, but perhaps I got lost in the hours of extraneous examples of super forecasting. It is an interesting idea but I really think this book could have been 1/3 to 1/2 the length and still conveyed all of the relevant information. The Narrator did a great job and kept my attention.

Forecasting Near-Term Can Work

A measurement-driven experiment was sponsored by IARPA and Tetlock and Gardner showed documented evidence that forecasts of less than three years can be accurate. Superforecasters are not the pundits, experts or talk show guests you see in the media. The techniques for good forecasting can be used by business, government, not-for-profits and others to make better decisions. The narration was good, the examples were enlightening and the concepts are useful.

interesting

Not much groundbreaking material, but a good introduction for those contemplating investing time to build an analytics toolset.

I was surprised he addresses the topic as humbly as he did, acknowledging the imperative of score keeping and accountability, along with the need to constantly work hard at improving forecasts.

There is just as much art as science. Nobody can predict the future, but good forecasters can be prepared.

As they reference in this book, Taleb's books (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, AntiFragile) contain imperative caveats forecasters should bear in mind in interpreting and challenging their models.

Awesome

Really great book, I had no idea how good it was, and it was a pleasant surprise to select it randomly.

This is a must read

Synthesizes thinking fast and slow by Daniel kahneman, chaos theory, and perspectives from all sorts of arenas and presents them in a memorable way, with the ultimate goal of making us more effective, evidence based people. The stated goal is forecasting measurable world events, but offers extremely good perspective on where this can be applied. Heck it even has actionable advice and systhesis/summary on effective leadership.
Explores a lot of false dichotomies and brings up many of the cognitive biases and other pitfalls of forecasting we need to correct for.