Philip E. Tetlock: belief

Transcript context

…But how do you spot them? Is it a personality trait? A cognitive trait? Gosh, that’s a hard one. Danny Kahneman, I think, coined the term when he was dealing with his various critics over time. My wife, Barb, actually was involved in an adversarial collaboration between the Kahneman camp and the Gigerenzer camp on the conjunction fallacy. It took at least two or three years of her life. It’s very hard to get people to . . . Well, lots of us, in principle, are Popperians. We believe in stating our beliefs as falsifiable hypotheses. Most of us believe our beliefs are probabilistic, so we’re somewhat Bayesian. But that’s lip service. There’s what we believe. There’s an epistemological formal self-concept, which is kind of noble, falsificationist, and probabilistic. And then there’s how we actually behave when our egos are at stake in particular controversies. And those things are quite different. I think Danny Kahneman who’s not known as an optimist, proposed it. It sounds like an optimistic idea, but I think he’s not all that optimistic about what it can achieve on close inspection. My efforts at adversarial collaboration have not been all that successful. I’d like to jumpstart a few of them again, but it’s very hard to find the right dance partners. Let’s try a question from the realm of the everyday and the mundane. If I go around, and I look at Mexican restaurants, I’m very good at predicting which ones have excellent tacos. What are you good at predicting?…

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