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No Stupid Questions

53. What’s the Secret to Making a Great Prediction?

No Stupid Questions

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Society & Culture

4.63.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Also: how do you recover from a bad day?

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is what we're gonna do. It's going to work out well because I said so.

0:08.0

I'm Antelod Duckworth.

0:10.1

I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to no stupid questions.

0:13.4

Today I'm the show. What's the secret to making a great prediction?

0:18.1

My prediction would have been right if these things had happened.

0:21.5

Also, why do even the most successful people have bad days?

0:25.8

The eggs were overcooked.

0:30.2

Angela Duckworth?

0:31.5

Stephen Dubner.

0:32.6

There is at least one way that I would very much like to be more like my son, Solomon,

0:38.4

who's a college sophomore.

0:40.3

He seems capable of making predictions in a way that is totally divorced from emotion

0:47.2

even when he has a stake in the thing he's predicting.

0:50.2

So as an example, he works in politics.

0:53.2

Okay.

0:54.0

And he follows things closely and he has some decent information.

0:58.4

So he often has a pretty good sense of who's going to win a campaign,

1:01.5

whether it's his candidate or the other.

1:03.4

And even if it's the opponent, he's pretty realistic about not letting his fan interests get in the way.

1:10.1

The same thing for sports.

1:11.8

And he'll even say, I have a lot of confidence in this particular projection.

1:15.9

Even though he is never studied with the forecasting guru Phil Tetlock, who you know,

...

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