Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a programme that explores

the numbers all around us in the news and in life, all from underneath the duvet in my bedroom.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many people are searching for answers. How many cases could there be?

How many of those infected might die?

But it turns out that even a question like that is not just a question for a virologist or

an epidemiologist. Of course you have to understand the parameters of the disease,

but you also have to understand a lot of other things. What policy measures will governments take,

will people adhere to those policies? How long can we endure social isolation?

It turns out that there's a lot more than just pure science here.

This is Terry Murray, a senior advisor with the company Good Judgment Inc, which tries to answer

big geopolitical forecasting questions with a global network of super forecasters.

What is a super forecaster I hear you ask? Well, super forecasting is based on the work of one of

Terry's colleagues, Professor Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Tetlock

has been on more or less several times before. One of the things Philip Tetlock has been looking at

for decades now is forecasting who's good at it and who isn't. He did a very famous study

in which he tracked forecasts from experts, mostly political scientists and economists about long-term

geopolitical and geo-economic events and came to the famous conclusion now that they were

a little more accurate than the proverbial dart throwing chimp. However, some of them were more

accurate and those people were the people who looked open-mindedly at a lot of evidence

and didn't have just one big idea. Terry and her colleagues have now asked a group of these

super forecasters to look at the coronavirus pandemic and predict what might happen over the coming

year. All of the people who are certified professional super forecasters qualified in an open

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