superforecasters

“And that's what super forecasters are pretty good at doing. Breaking down seemingly attractable problems into semi-attractable components and then just pushing. They're not afraid of looking stupid and making estimates that observers can see and look at and sa…”

“Well, what we find in the ARPA tournament is, is that there certainly is an element of chance in predicting geopolitical and geoeconomic outcomes but the skill luck ratio seems to be about 70 30.”

“And supers do that too. But they also second guess their successes. They say, well, were we lucky just where we really nailed this question, but were we lucky? Could it have gone otherwise? Were we almost wrong? That's an unusual question for people to ask the…”

“If you want to be a good forecaster, you don't spend very much time working on roulette wheel type problems. I mean, if, I mean, if you go to, if you visit casinos, you'll find lots of people who think they can detect patterns in roulette wheel spins. And they…”

“They tend to score higher on measures of fluid intelligence. They tend to score higher on measures of active open-mindedness. But if I had to identify one factor that I think best distinguishes super forecasters from other forecasters who are equally intellige…”

“They are numerate, so they can distinguish between 10% probability and 15% probability, and they can change their predictions by a percentage point or two percentage points, so they're well calibrated in their use of probabilities. But most of all, they seem t…”