Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest, Professor Philip Tetlock.

He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves in the departments of psychology, political science, and then also the Wharton School of Business.

He is the author of many books, including famously expert political judgment. How good is it? How can we know?

And his most recent book, Super Forecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction.

Philip is also the co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Good

Judgment Project, which is a long-term study on how to improve the accuracy of human

judgment and forecasting. Phil, welcome to rationally speaking. Thank you. So we're going to be

talking today about super forecasting and what you've learned from running the Good Judgment Project.

And probably a good place to start is to say that many of our listeners, I'm sure a large chunk of our audience is already familiar with you in your work to at least some extent.

But probably many of them associate you most strongly with the finding that received quite a lot of publicity in the years since expert political judgment came out, that experts, forecasters of economic or political topics are not really experts.

That their judgment, their forecasting is no better than, well,

sometimes the claim goes no better than amateurs, sometimes it goes no better than chance.

And you, in the beginning of your new book, Super Forecasting, you talk about how that

finding has sort of gotten distorted from the original, from the actual conclusion that you found

in your research.

So why don't you kick things off by elaborating a little bit on that?

Sure.

I think I started the mischief by using the dart-throwing chimpanzee metaphor in the book,

although I don't think the metaphor was unique to me.

...