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Conversations with Tyler

Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2020

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren't just intelligent, but fox-like integrative thinkers capable of navigating values that are conflicting or in tension.

He joined Tyler to discuss whether the world as a whole is becoming harder to predict, whether Goldman Sachs traders can beat forecasters, what inferences we can draw from analyzing the speech of politicians, the importance of interdisciplinary teams, the qualities he looks for in leaders, the reasons he's skeptical machine learning will outcompete his research team, the year he thinks the ascent of the West became inevitable, how research on counterfactuals can be applied to modern debates, why people with second cultures tend to make better forecasters, how to become more fox-like, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded March 26th, 2020

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.5

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:27.3

Today, I am speaking to Philip Tatlock, who quite simply is one of the greatest social

0:32.4

scientists in the world.

0:34.2

Up until now, we've been doing conversations with Tyler face-to-face.

0:38.2

But for obvious reasons, Philip is in Philadelphia.

0:41.5

He teaches at University of Pennsylvania, and I'm here in Arlington, Virginia.

0:46.6

Let's just jump right into it.

0:48.6

First question, Philip.

0:50.6

With our forecasters, do we want accuracy?

0:53.9

Or do we want them to be a portfolio to make us more aware of extreme events and possibilities?

0:59.4

I think we want a lot of things from our forecasters.

1:03.0

And accuracy is often not the first thing.

1:05.9

I think that we look to forecasters for ideological resurance.

1:10.8

We look to forecasters for entertainment.

1:13.8

And we look to forecasters for minimizing regret functions of various sorts.

1:19.0

So that we would really regret not having anticipated XY or Z.

1:22.2

So we want to pump up the probabilities of those things.

1:24.9

But if we take, say, the coronavirus, if we had had a few more extreme nuts, who were

...

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