Philip E. Tetlock: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But given that, when a pundit is on, say, the evening news, there’s not a little box at the bottom that gives the Tetlock score of that pundit, correct? So most people don’t know the actual record. Given that, out there somewhere is a measure of how good or bad the pundit is, are you worried that, in a sense, you will make those pundits run further away from objective standards precisely because they do poorly by them? I don’t know if we can make them run much further away from objective standards than they already are. [laughs] But that’s a very interesting point about forecasting tournaments. I look at the kinds of people who are attracted to participate in them. At the very outset, I invited lots of big shots to participate in forecasting tournaments, and they’ve repeatedly turned me down. I had a very interesting correspondence with William Safire in the 1980s about forecasting tournaments. We could talk a little about it later. The upshot of this is that young people who are upwardly mobile see forecasting tournaments as an opportunity to rise. Old people like me and aging baby-boomer types who occupy relatively high status inside organizations see forecasting tournaments as a way to lose. If I’m a senior analyst inside an intelligence agency, and say I’m on the National Intelligence Council, and I’m an expert on China and the go-to guy for the president on China, and some upstart R&D operation called IARPA says, “Hey, we’re going to run these forecasting tournaments in which we assess how well the analytic community can put probabilities on what Xi Jinping is going to do next.” And I’ll be on a level playing field, competing against 25-year-olds, and I’m a 65-year-old, how am I likely to react to this proposal, to this new method of doing business? It doesn’t take a lot of empathy or bureaucratic imagination to suppose I’m going to try to nix this thing. Which nation’s government in the world do you think listens to you the most? You may not know, right?…

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