Predicting the Future Is Possible. ‘Superforecasters’ Know How.

12/03/21 • 52 min

8 Listeners

Can we predict the future more accurately?

It’s a question we humans have grappled with since the dawn of civilization — one that has massive implications for how we run our organizations, how we make policy decisions, and how we live our everyday lives.

It’s also the question that Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” has dedicated his career to answering. In 2011, he recruited and trained a team of ordinary citizens to compete in a forecasting tournament sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Participants were asked to place numerical probabilities from 0 to 100 percent on questions like “Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile in the next year” and “Is Greece going to leave the eurozone in the next six months?” Tetlock’s group of amateur forecasters would go head-to-head against teams of academics as well as career intelligence analysts, including those from the C.I.A., who had access to classified information that Tetlock’s team didn’t have.

The results were shocking, even to Tetlock. His team won the competition by such a large margin that the government agency funding the competition decided to kick everyone else out, and just study Tetlock’s forecasters — the best of whom were dubbed “superforecasters” — to see what intelligence experts might learn from them.

So this conversation is about why some people, like Tetlock’s “superforecasters,” are so much better at predicting the future than everyone else — and about the intellectual virtues, habits of mind, and ways of thinking that the rest of us can learn to become better forecasters ourselves. It also explores Tetlock’s famous finding that the average expert is roughly as accurate as “a dart-throwing chimpanzee” at predicting future events, the inverse correlation between a person’s fame and their ability to make accurate predictions, how superforecasters approach real-life questions like whether robots will replace white-collar workers, why government bureaucracies are often resistant to adopt the tools of superforecasting and more.

Mentioned:

Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock

“What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?” by Christopher W. Karvetski et al.

Book recommendations:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Perception and Misperception in International Politics by Robert Jervis

This episode is guest-hosted by Julia Galef, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, host of the “Rationally Speaking” podcast and author of “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.” You can follow her on Twitter @JuliaGalef. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.)

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out o...

Can we predict the future more accurately?

Mentioned:

Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock

“What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?” by Christopher W. Karvetski et al.

Book recommendations:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Perception and Misperception in International Politics by Robert Jervis

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out o...

Previous Episode

Best Of: How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable

Joe Biden’s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone.

But there’s a twist of irony in that vision. Because right now, even in places where Democrats hold control over government, they are consistently failing to build cheaply, quickly and equitably. In recent decades, blue states and cities from Los Angeles to Boston to New York have become known for their outrageously expensive housing, massive homeless populations and infrastructure projects marred by major delays and cost overruns — all stemming from this fundamental inability to actually build.

Jerusalem Demsas is a policy reporter at Vox who covers a range of issues from housing to transportation. And the central question her work asks is this: Why is the party that ostensibly supports big government doing ambitious things constantly failing to do just that, even in the places where it holds the most power?

So this is a conversation about the policy areas where blue city and state governance is failing the most: housing, homelessness, infrastructure. But it is also about the larger problems that those failures reveal: The tension between big-government liberalism and anti-corporatist progressivism; the cognitive dissonance between what city-dwelling, college-educated liberals say they believe and their inequality-amplifying actions; how reforms intended to make government more accountable to the people have been wielded by special interests to stall or kill popular projects; and much more.

This conversation originally took place in July 2021, but it has become even more relevant with the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the ongoing negotiations over the Build Back Better Act.

Mentioned:

“Why does it cost so much to build things in America?” by Jerusalem Demsas

“Los Angeles’s quixotic quest to end homelessness” by Jerusalem Demsas

“Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation” by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti

Public Citizens by Paul Sabin

“Zoom Does Not Reduce Unequal Participation” by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, Luisa Godinez Puig, and Maxwell Palmer

“The Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce” by Ezra Klein

“California Is Making Liberals Squirm” by Ezra Klein

Book recommendations:

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find a transcript of this episode here and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Next Episode

Families Are Drowning in Care Costs. Here’s How To Change That.

Every day in the United States, more than 10,000 babies are born and 10,000 people turn 65. But America doesn’t have anything close to a comprehensive family policy. That means no guaranteed paid family leave, no universal child care or preschool and a patchwork system of elder and disability care that leaves millions without support.

American families are drowning as a result. In some states, the average cost of a full-time child-care program is nearing $20,000 a year; the median yearly cost of a private room in a nursing home is over $100,000 — a figure that well exceeds the median household income in the United States. And workers in the child care and eldercare industries routinely make poverty wages.

Ai-jen Poo is a co-founder and the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and the author of “The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.”

Fixing America’s systems of care has been Poo’s life’s work. But for her, the current state of America’s care infrastructure is more than a looming crisis; it’s a huge opportunity — one that, if solved, could supercharge the American economy, ensure dignified care across our life spans and revolutionize the future of work. And Poo’s movement may be on the brink of a major victory: If signed into law, the Build Back Better Act would be the most transformative investment in children and caregiving in generations.

This conversation is about how caring for the people we love became so atrociously unaffordable and unmanageable — and what it would take to change that. It also explores why Poo thinks we should view child care and eldercare as essential infrastructure for running our economy and society, the racialized history of why the United States lags behind most of its peers in developing comprehensive family policy, the cultural narratives that have caused America to undervalue care work for so long, how solving the care crisis would be a policy “win-win-win” for everyone, Poo’s view that “care is a problem the market cannot solve” and why Poo believes that the future of work is inextricably linked to the future of care.

Mentioned:

“Prep School for Poor Kids: The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency” by Martha J. Bailey et al.

Book recommendations:

The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

This episode is guest-hosted by Heather McGhee, a public policy expert whose work focuses on the intersection of race, inequality, and social policy. She is the chairman of the board of directors of the racial justice organization Color of Change, the former president of the think tank Demos and author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” and. You can follow her on Twitter @HMcGhee. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.)

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on A...