Philip E. Tetlock: evaluation

Transcript context

…Today, I am speaking to Philip Tetlock, who, quite simply, is one of the greatest social scientists in the world. Up until now, we’ve been doing Conversations with Tyler face-to-face. But for obvious reasons, Phillip is in Philadelphia. He teaches at University of Pennsylvania. And I’m here in Arlington, Virginia. Let’s just jump right into it. First question, Philip: with our forecasters, do we want accuracy or do we want them to be a kind of portfolio to make us more aware of extreme events and possibilities? We want a lot of things from our forecasters, and accuracy is often not the first thing. I think that we look to forecasters for ideological reassurance, we look to forecasters for entertainment, and we look to forecasters for minimizing regret functions of various sorts. We would really regret not having anticipated X, Y, or Z, so we want to pump up the probabilities of those things. But if we take, say, the coronavirus — if we had had a few more extreme nuts who were maybe wrong most of the time but insisting that we needed to fear the next pandemic, wouldn’t we have been better off with that kind of portfolio, and thus, we don’t actually want more accuracy from our forecasters?…

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