Looking Toward Tomorrow

Accurate Insight

Would you like to learn how to predict future events with greater certainty? Sorry, that’s almost impossible. But you can learn to draw more accurate insights about what may happen later by studying what is right in front of you now and projecting those insights into the very near future.

Philip E. Tetlock, a renowned behavioral scientist and author of Expert Political Judgment, writing with journalist Dan Gardner, provides a clear overview of the methods and pitfalls of trying to see what’s coming. This isn’t a self-help book that will turn you into an accurate predictor of future events. Instead, it’s something much more unusual and valuable: a readable, unpretentious, accessible guide to analyzing your thought processes and applying your perceptions to considering the future more productively.

Forecasting is not a ‘you have it, or you don’t’ talent. It is a skill that can be cultivated.Philip E. Tetlock

Tetlock, the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania with appointments at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, co-leads the Good Judgment Project. He wrote Expert Political Judgment and co-wrote – with Aaron Belkin – Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Journalist Dan Gardner wrote Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear and Future Babble.

Tetlock and Garner’s prodigious insights and methods can be helpful tools for anyone willing to use the right blend of skeptical thinking and open-mindedness to consider scenarios and to solve problems. 

Two Brain Systems. 

As Daniel Kahneman wrote in his ground-breaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the brain works in two different modes. System 1 covers “automatic perceptual and cognitive operations.” It is always on, but it functions beneath your consciousness and remains opaque to you. System 2 includes “conscious thought,” areas where you deliberately give your attention. System 1 emerged through evolution to keep your ancestors alive. People who heard a noise in a bush had to decide immediately if that noise meant a lion or a rabbit. They had no time to apply System 2 to weigh all their options carefully. Their dilemma came down to fight or flight: Eat or be eaten.

We are all forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a project or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future will unfold.Philip E. Tetlock

System 1 intuitive thinking doesn’t really care about how good the evidence is when it makes a decision. It responds definitively to what Kahneman called “WYSIATI” – “What You See Is All There Is.” Your brain wants to create order amid all the perceptions racing in from the world’s chaos, so your intuitions don’t have time to discriminate. They decide quickly. Most people know they should “slow down and think before drawing firm conclusions,” no matter what their intuition says. But instincts can be stubborn and resistant.

Foxes and Hedgehogs

The Greek warrior-poet Archilochus wrote 2,500 years ago that the fox’s knowledge encompasses many fields, but the “hedgehog knows one big thing.” Tetlock sees “eclectic experts” as generalist foxes and “Big Idea” pundits as focused hedgehogs.

It is one thing to recognize the limits on predictability, and quite another to dismiss all predication as an exercise in futility.Philip E. Tetlock

Foxes gather evidence from many sources. They’re willing to make predictions when they have only a 60% to 70% chance of being accurate, though they also acknowledge built-in uncertainty. Hedgehogs claim 90% to 100% accuracy, but they’re seldom correct, just noisier than foxes. Beware of media, business or academic pundits who tell you how things will be. The more certain they are, the less certain you should be about them.

Crude Data

If all you have is crude data, make the most of it. Take Peter Backus, a single man in London in 2010. He tried to take a rational approach to quantifying a “fantasy” question: how many potential female romantic partners were available to him in London.  He broke his quest down into manageable components and drew the likeliest conclusions.

Every day, all of us – leaders of nations, corporate executives, investors and voters – make critical decisions on the basis of forecasts whose quality is unknown.Philip E. Tetlock

First, Backus cut London’s population of six million in half to identify females. He cut that three million in half to calculate single women. Then he winnowed down the possibilities by estimating the percentage of women in his age group (20%), those who graduated from college (26%), those who would attract him (5%), those he was likely to attract (5%), and those offering potential mutual compatibility (10%). That left him with 26 potential mates. Backus’s calculations teach a valuable lesson: You can find solid probabilities even in “remarkably crude” suppositions and conjecture. If crude input is all you have, apply your most sophisticated thinking to it and trust your conclusions.

10 Commandments of “Superforecasting”

As a working guideline, Tetlock offers 10 commandments of superforecasting. They provide a convenient reference to his methods, given his 11th admonishment to use the 10 rules judiciously. Even if you don’t read the entire book – though given the strength of Tetlock’s prose and knowledge and the entertainment value of his illustrative tales, you would gain from reading it – at least take these tenets to heart.

First, concentrate on forecasting questions whose answers will bring you value. Don’t bother guessing pie-in-the-sky outcomes, like currency fluctuations. You risk two possibly crippling mistakes: You could “fail to try to predict the potentially predictable,” or you could try to “predict the unpredictable.” Consider your goals and avoid both traps. Ask “which error would be worse” in your circumstances.

Old forecasts are like old news – soon forgotten – and pundits are almost never asked to reconcile what they said with what actually happened. The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction.Philip E. Tetlock

Second, deconstruct insurmountable issues into a connected, smaller issues. Admit where you lack data. Identify and question your assumptions. Speculate and rejoice in being proven wrong; now you know to move in another direction. If rough guesses are your only option, guess away and see what happens. Third, equalize ideas from inside and outside your situation. Consider both viewpoints to achieve clarity.  Look for comparable events and one-off examples.

Fourth, respond to evidence appropriately. Don’t under- or over-react to any input. Update your beliefs as you examine new findings. Remember that hard-to-get information is not necessarily more valuable than information easily at hand. Fifth, seek the opposing “causal forces” in every question. If you are a fervent foreign-policy hawk, even the most “devout dove” is likely to have insights that can enhance your view. In classical argument, “thesis meets antithesis, producing synthesis.” However, sometimes the road to an accurate conclusion is to integrate multiple perspectives to create a nuanced “dove-hawk” that can see both sides. Don’t limit yourself.

Sixth, look for all the likely doubt in your issue, but “no more.” Almost nothing is definite or impossible. Learning to recognize uncertainty, which comes in many forms, improves forecasting. Don’t bother delving deeply into questions with little value. Seventh, temper your judiciousness with resoluteness. Recognize when, given what you know, you have too much or too little confidence. Don’t rush to judgment or ponder every option forever. When you have sufficient evidence to be certain, act on it. When you don’t, say so.

Eighth, find the mistakes in your reasoning that caused you to reach the wrong supposition, but don’t dwell on the past. Embrace errors and learn from them so you don’t make the same mistake again. 

Ninth, help your team members succeed, and let them help you. Offer solid recommendations without micromanaging. Learn to present an opposing argument convincingly, ask the right questions to help others reach decisions, and use “constructive confrontation” to question others’ ideas without being disagreeable.

Our desire to reach into the future will always exceed our grasp. But…I believe it is possible to see into the future, at least in some situations and to some extent, and that any intelligent, open-minded and hard-working person can cultivate the requisite skills.Philip E. Tetlock

Tenth, learn to balance your mistakes. Take chances and apply what you’ve learned in the real world. You may fail or succeed; accept and honor both. You can’t be a forecaster if you don’t make forecasts and learn to live with the results.

Tetlock’s eleventh caveat is: Never blindly follow commandments. Nothing ever happens the same way twice, so no rules apply in every case. Live with tje guidelines, and then trust your skills and perceptions.

Superb Storytelling

Tetlock offers excellent anecdotes to demonstrate how to apply the most desirable combinations of instinct, rational thought, will, intuition, patience, rashness, education, stupidity, street smarts and foolhardiness to make as much sense of your world as you can, given whatever evidence you can glean. He writes with grace and drive, and his level of straightforward common sense is rare in academics and almost invisible in the future-predicting pundit class he derides. Tetlock’s basic message is that nobody can see the far-off future, but with a little insight, you may well be able to predict what might happen next week if you pay sufficient attention to what’s happening right now.