Millie Marconi at X:
A government-funded tournament put thousands of ordinary people against CIA intelligence analysts in a 4-year contest to predict world events, and the amateurs won so decisively that the CIA had to fundamentally rethink how it forecasts the future.
The professor who ran the tournament is Philip Tetlock.
He teaches at Wharton. Daniel Kahneman called the book he wrote about the result the most important decision-making book since Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The story actually starts 20 years earlier.
Tetlock spent two decades collecting 28,000 predictions from 284 of the world’s most famous experts. Professors. Government officials. Journalists. Policy advisors. People with PhDs and TV shows. People who got paid huge sums to predict elections, wars, and economic crises.
When he scored their predictions against what actually happened, the average expert performed at roughly the level of random guessing. The most famous experts, the ones who appeared most often on TV, turned out to be the worst predictors of all.
More here.
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