Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Political Party. This features Professor

Philip Tetlock from the University of Pennsylvania. Lots of you will already be familiar with

his work because of books like Expert Political Judgment and Superfocasting the Art and

Science of Prediction. A lot of you will have heard him, of him rather, because Dominic

Cummings has recommended his work and Michael Gover is a big fan of him. I'm delighted

that he came on this show and this is, this really is like going to the best university

in the world and being taught by one of the best professors. This is all about the art

of super forecasting, those people that can more accurately predict particular events

in the future than other people and how you can train yourself to think in a different

way to make your predictions more accurate. Now obviously on a geopolitical scale, the

implications of this work are really profound. But I also wonder, and I talked to Philip

about this, about just the implication for your everyday life, if you start to engage

in these sorts of projects. This is fascinating about how the mind works, about how we think

about problems, about how we solve problems, about how you can break down questions into

other questions that help you answer it. This is just endlessly, endlessly fascinating.

I'll be gone by asking Professor Tetlock, that apart from being motivated by desire to

know the future, where his passion for super forecasting came from.

Oh, it's a long story and it's hard for me to tell the story without revealing just

exactly how old I am and that's pretty old. It got started in the mid 1980s. Before

me, Caliguard Bichoff became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

There was a very vigorous debate about within the Reagan administration, between critics,

the administration and supporters in the US and elsewhere internationally. But where

...