Welcome back to forecaster training, inspired by Part V of Edge.org's Master Class in Superforecasting. The unique skill of superforecasting resonates deeply with DBT Ventures due, in part, to the immense impact across the four key components of the DBT endeavor: ideas, data science, customer success, and leadership.

This segment draws heavily from Danny's contingent valuation experiments which, if you haven't perused before, are a hygienic read (1,832 academic citations agree).

The contingent value experiments reveal the similarity between 3 superficially very different things:

  1. Subject's judgement of value, i.e. scope sensitivity

  2. Likelihood of an event happening between 2 different time periods

  3. Scenario bias

For example what is more probable: the first scenario, or the second?

 

. . . while continuing to manifest a vexing problem: people's judgement of explanations and forecasting accuracy are vulnerable to rich narratives, i.e. attribute substitution. 

We can also fall prey to assigning too much probability to too many possibilities which violates the axiom of probabilities to begin with.

Yet scenarios CAN be useful when thinking backward in time. The relationship between counterfactuals and hindsight bias (which we discussed previously) is powerful.

Getting people to imagine counterfactual alternatives to reality is a way of counteracting hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is a difficulty people have remembering past dates of ignorance. Counterfactual scenarios can reconnect us to our past states of ignorance. And that can be a useful, humbling exercise. Its good mental hygiene. Its useful for de-biasing. 

"One learns from Shakespeare that self-overhearing is the prime function of soliloquy. Hamlet teaches us how to talk to oneself, and not how to talk to others." -Harold Bloom

Get people to listen to themselves think about how they think, i.e. can you build the capacity to listen to yourself talk to yourself. . . and decide if you like what you hear, a fleeting achievement of consciousness to be sure, but relevant to superforecasting nonetheless.

So how can superforecasting improve the world? Well, we could use forecasting skills to improve the quality of high-stakes policy debate. Today's political discourse is NOT motivated by pure accuracy goals. Quite the opposite. And political pundits have a myriad of habits/tactics/issues which actively remove accuracy from the conversation:

  • Ego defense

  • Self-promotion

  • Loyalty to a community of co-believers

  • Rhetorical obfuscation

  • Attribute substitution (big one)

  • Functionalist blurring, and—one of the most pervasive—

  • Super (qualified) forecasting

So what should we do? Introduce a superforecasting tournament in order to disrupt "stale-status heirarchies" and invite pundits to compete. Boom. Politics solved.