Videos in: 2015

The beauty of forecasting tournaments is that they’re pure accuracy games that impose an unusual monastic discipline on how people go about making probability estimates of the possible consequences of policy options. It’s a way of reducing escape clauses for the debaters, as well as reducing motivated reasoning room for the audience.

Tournaments, if they’re given a real shot, have a potential to raise the quality of debates by incentivizing competition to be more accurate and reducing functionalist blurring that makes it so difficult to figure out who is closer to the truth. 

[29:26 minutes]

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in Wharton, psychology and political science. He is co-leader of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year forecasting study, the author of Expert Political Judgment and (with Aaron Belkin) Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, and co-author (with Dan Gardner) of Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction (forthcoming, September 2015). Philip Tetlock's Edge Bio Page.

A famous economist, Albert Hirschman, had a wonderful phrase, "self-subversion." Some people, he thought, were capable of thinking in self-subverting ways. What would a self-subverting liberal or conservative say about the Cold War? A self-subverting liberal might say, "I don’t like Reagan. I don’t think he was right, but yes, there may be some truth to the counterfactual that if he hadn’t been in power and doing what he did, the Soviet Union might still be around." A self-subverting conservative might say, "I like Reagan a lot, but it’s quite possible that the Soviet Union would have disintegrated anyway because there were lots of other forces in play."

Self-subversion is an integral part of what makes superforecasting cognition work. It’s the willingness to tolerate dissonance. It’s hard to be an extremist when you engage in self-subverting counterfactual cognition. That’s the first example. The second example deals with how regular people think about fate and how superforecasters think about it, which is, they don’t. Regular people often invoke fate, "it was meant to be," as an explanation for things.

[33:47 minutes]

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in Wharton, psychology and political science. He is co-leader of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year forecasting study, the author of Expert Political Judgment and (with Aaron Belkin) Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, and co-author (with Dan Gardner) of Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction (forthcoming, September 2015). Philip Tetlock's Edge Bio Page.

There's a picture of two people on slide seventy-two, one of whom is one of the most famous historians in the 20^th century, E.H. Carr, and the other of whom is a famous economic historian at the University of Chicago, Robert Fogel. They could not have more different attitudes toward the importance of counterfactuals in history. For E.H. Carr, counterfactuals were a pestilence, they were a frivolous parlor game, a methodological rattle, a sore loser's history. It was a waste of cognitive effort to think about counterfactuals. You should think about history the way it did unfold and figure out why it had to unfold the way it did—almost a prescription for hindsight bias.

Robert Fogel, on the other hand, approached it more like a scientist. He quite correctly recognized that if you want to draw causal inferences from any historical sequence, you have to make assumptions about what would have happened if the hypothesized cause had taken on a different value. That's a counterfactual. You had this interesting tension. Many historians do still agree, in some form, with E.H. Carr. Virtually all economic historians would agree with Robert Fogel, who’s one of the pivital people in economic history; he won a Nobel Prize. But there’s this very interesting tension between people who are more open or less open to thinking about counterfactuals. Why that is, is something that is worth exploring. 

[46:31 minutes]

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in Wharton, psychology and political science. He is co-leader of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year forecasting study, the author of Expert Political Judgment and (with Aaron Belkin) Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, and co-author (with Dan Gardner) of Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction (forthcoming, September 2015). Philip Tetlock's Edge Bio Page.

Tournaments have a scientific value. They help us test a lot of psychological hypotheses about the drivers of accuracy, they help us test statistical ideas; there are a lot of ideas we can test in tournaments. Tournaments have a value inside organizations and businesses. A more accurate probability helps to price options better on Wall Street, so they have value. 

I wanted to focus more on what I see as the wider societal value of tournaments and the potential value of tournaments in depolarizing unnecessarily polarizing policy debates. In short, making us more civilized. ...

There is well-developed research literature on how to measure accuracy. There is not such well-developed research literature on how to measure the quality of questions. The quality of questions is going to be absolutely crucial if we want tournaments to be able to play a role in tipping the scales of plausibility in important debates, and if you want tournaments to play a role in incentivizing people to behave more reasonably in debates. 

[47:54 minutes]

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in Wharton, psychology and political science. He is co-leader of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year forecasting study, the author of Expert Political Judgment and (with Aaron Belkin) Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, and co-author (with Dan Gardner) of Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction (forthcoming, September 2015). Philip Tetlock's Edge Bio Page.