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Philip Tetlock - Ignore confident forecasters
Futures

Philip Tetlock - Ignore confident forecasters

by Stewart Brand
Jan 27, 02007

Philip Tetlock

Ignore confident forecasters

“What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?” From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an “outcome-irrelevant learning structure.” No feedback, no correction…

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