Philip E. Tetlock

@PTetlock

Annenberg University Professor, Wharton & School of Arts and Sciences (Psychology & Political Science)

Joined October 2011

Media

  1. Jan 26

    Let’s lock in a mutual-admiration triad: I think very highly of both Tim’s and Matthew’s work. And we are not only complimentary. We are complementary. Read us to discover why

  2. Jan 23

    Feuds between rival methods can be productive. But I see polling & prediction markets as each adding forecasting value. And here is some evidence of how these methods can complement each other:

  3. Jan 8

    “Superforecasters” did so well in tournaments because our scientific competitors were allergic to the cognitive elitism of tracking above-average people into superteams. Tracking had exactly the inequality-amplifying effect that egalitarians fear tracking in schools will have

  4. Jan 6

    Here’s a robust psychological effect that does not wilt under replication scrutiny. Kurt Lewin noticed it in the 1930s: making public commitments “freezes” attitudes in place. So saying something dumb makes you a bit dumber. It becomes harder to correct yourself. Tweeters beware.

  5. Jan 2

    How to save lives and money: Define forecasting accuracy as skill at achieving both a high Hit rate & low False-Positive rate. It’s trivially easy to claim you can predict every recession, war,… when no one is tracking your False-Positive rate.

  6. 21 Dec 2019

    Vague-verbiage forecasts plant a jumble of probabilities in our minds that easily sum to < or > 1.0. So 2020 “could be” 1.Xi’s worst year (say 20%-80% range) year (say 10-40%) 3.a mix of successes & setbacks (say10-70%) Why not just give your best guess?

  7. 19 Dec 2019

    "Superforecasters" are better at tuning in signals—& tuning out noise. It’s not the millions of words had no effect. They had lots of effects, mostly tiny offsetting ones

  8. 14 Dec 2019

    A curious thing: Behold how easy it is to win the contempt of both left & right—& virtually impossible to win the approval of both. That tells us something about the state of debate in the early 21st century (we ignore that something at our peril)

  9. 12 Dec 2019

    Revisit the fine line between subtle & misleading clues: I saw a 10% chance Niall was right about another hung Parliament before the election & if I hadn’t jotted it down, I’d likely now recall it as 5%. Hindsight bias is not one of those hard-to-replicate psychological effects

  10. 8 Dec 2019

    Best time to appreciate fine line between subtle vs. misleading clues is BEFORE you know outcome One guarantee: in a few days, we’ll look back & say EITHER “wow, how could markets have missed something so obvious?” OR “how could Niall have talked himself into knots over nothing?”

  11. 5 Dec 2019

    Behind each of these high-body-count utopian schemes is a wildly miscalibrated forecast grounded in a fanciful view of human nature. Kant nailed it in 1784: Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

  12. 14 Nov 2019

    I’ve learned so much from this wonderful scholar. My early work on historical counterfactuals was shaped by Donald & my thinking on cultural-economic co-evolution has been shaped by Deirdre. A beautiful mind.

  13. 14 Nov 2019

    In each round of FOCUS Counterfactual Tournaments, we struggle with: Did things have to work out this way in this Simulated World? Like Groundhog Day, with Gould-Morris debate over how often “humans” emerge if we could rerun evolutionary history 1000s of times

  14. 31 Oct 2019

    Look at race through Nate's lens: a “little nuts” to price Harris win at 1.6% when his estimate is, say, 4.8%. A factor of 3! Look at race through cloudy lens of vague-verbiage: Harris is another long-shot, anything between .0001% & 10%. Mispricing potential, a factor of 100,000

  15. 26 Oct 2019

    Superforecasting made the cut into this year’s SAT, which will work to the advantage of the tiny % of high-school students who get exposed to principles of judgment under uncertainty (a core survival skill—relative, say, to trigonometry).

  16. 26 Oct 2019

    Depends on the “bulletin.” Panic: NASA says asteroid will hit Earth 3/2/2020 with p (.999) Yawn: someone says asteroid might hit Earth unless we do what they want Watch-your-wallet alert: vague-verbiage forecasting coupled to special pleading from suspect sources

  17. 16 Oct 2019

    Headlines like this make our noisy world even noisier. To keep your sanity, keep in mind Kahneman 101: 1) Best base-rate forecast is none of those moments will matter; 2) Base rates are hard to beat; 3) Nothing is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

  18. 16 Oct 2019

    You don’t have to agree with the outcome to admire the process. “Deliberative democracy” is like “superforecasting,” a Platonic ideal we struggle to approximate—& then fuhgeddaboudit. Easier to pretend to listen

  19. 14 Oct 2019

    “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” Bertrand Russell (capturing 100+ years ago, why we should push ourselves to translate vague-verbiage hunches into testable probabilistic propositions--the essence of "superforecasting")

  20. 10 Oct 2019

    This tweet has aged better than most. Falling in love is hazardous to forecasting accuracy

Loading seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

    You may also like

    ·