Superforecasting

Everything we do involves making predictions about the future. Whether we are buying a house, changing jobs, creating a new product, getting married, or making an important business decision, we are constantly trying to predict what is likely to happen next. These predictions influence many of the choices we make every day.

 The challenge is that predicting the future accurately is much harder than it seems.In a landmark twenty-year study, Wharton professor Philip Tetlock examined the forecasting abilities of experts and discovered that many experts were only slightly better at predicting future events than ordinary people making informed guesses. However, his research also revealed something remarkable: some people consistently performed much better than others.

Tetlock's later research included a large-scale forecasting tournament involving thousands of participants and millions of individual predictions. The results showed that certain ordinary people could make remarkably accurate predictions about future events. These individuals came from a wide variety of backgrounds. They were not necessarily famous experts or people with special access to information. Instead, they stood out because of the way they thought, analyzed information, evaluated evidence, and updated their beliefs.