Philip E. Tetlock: belief

Transcript context

…If we’re trying to estimate how much people cut back on their risk-taking behavior because they’re afraid of the virus, are the group of people best suited to do that epidemiologists, other social scientists, or your superforecasters? Maybe even economists, right? We study elasticities. Why should it be the epidemiologists? I think you’d want an interdisciplinary team. Diversity is one of these words that’s been reduced to a cliché, but we have found in our work that cognitive diversity helps, and it helps in certain quite well-defined ways. If you want to create a composite that out-predicts the vast majority of the superforecasters, a good way to do it is not only to take the most recent forecast of the best forecasters in the domain, but it’s also to extremize that forecast to the degree that people who normally disagree, agree with each other. And when you have convergence among diverse observers, that’s a signal that the weighted average composite is probably too conservative and you should extremize. Does the diverse team have a CEO, someone in charge?…

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