How to see into the future

Saturday, October 18th, 2014

So, what is the secret of looking into the future?

Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness — although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

This is because our predictions are about the future only in the most superficial way. They are really advertisements, conversation pieces, declarations of tribal loyalty — or, as with Irving Fisher, statements of profound conviction about the logical structure of the world.

Some participants in the Good Judgment Project were given advice, a few pages in total, which was summarised with the acronym CHAMP:

  • Comparisons are important: use relevant comparisons as a starting point;
  • Historical trends can help: look at history unless you have a strong reason to expect change;
  • Average opinions: experts disagree, so find out what they think and pick a midpoint;
  • Mathematical models: when model-based predictions are available, you should take them into account;
  • Predictable biases exist and can be allowed for. Don’t let your hopes influence your forecasts, for example; don’t stubbornly cling to old forecasts in the face of news.

Comments

  1. Rollory says:

    A certain blogger, whom I will not name because I have no interest in giving him any traffic, once made an alarmist post about how Senator Charlie Rangel had just introduced a bill to reinstate the draft and this was a red-alert situation-critical imminent-danger situation.

    I and a couple other people posted comments noting that Rangel had introduced the same bill multiple times in the past to no avail and that this time appeared to be just another grandstanding political maneuver that everybody involved understood was going nowhere, and that therefore the alarmist tone of the post wasn’t necessary. This was consistently done in a polite and conversational manner.

    The blogger responded by flipping out: excoriating as brain-dead idiots the first couple comments to note this, then simply deleting and IP-banning any further statements of these arguments.

    The Rangel draft bill indeed went nowhere. I made a followup comment noting this (which was not approved for posting) at the time it was definitively shelved. I made a followup comment (which again was not approved) expressing an opinion of those who avoid facing even their own minor errors.

    Some time later, on another blog’s comment thread, I made note of the incident. The blogger mentioned earlier erupted with his own comment, a paragraph of pretty much solid foul language, concluding with a comment about how he sure felt better having shown me.

    To this day, as far as I know, he hasn’t addressed either the simple fact of the failed prediction or the more serious issue of his reaction to having it pointed out.

    What’s interesting is how _many_ such characters there are in blogs, once you actually start looking for them.

  2. Jonathan says:

    There are many such characters in blogs because readers reinforce their behavior by responding to extreme opinions, and to extremely confident opinions, and because many bloggers and blog commenters are head cases to begin with. It’s just the nature of the Internet.

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