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When Marty felt people weren’t explaining their forecasts enough to get good discussions going, he explained his in greater detail and invited comments. He also organized a conference call to hash out workloads, with details handled by him—
Most teams have a nucleus of five or six members who do most of the work.
workloads were divided, but as commitment grew, so did the amount of effort forecasters put into it.
“There is simply no way that any individual could cover as much ground as a good team does. Even if you had unlimited hours, it would be less fruitful, given different research styles. Each team member brings something different.”
Most economists would say markets are the most effective mechanism for collecting widely dispersed information and distilling it down to a single judgment.
Prediction markets are simply markets that trade in predictions, meaning traders buy and sell contracts on specified outcomes—such as “Hillary Clinton will be elected president of the United States in 2016.”
Teams of ordinary forecasters beat the wisdom of the crowd by about 10%. Prediction markets beat ordinary teams by about 20%. And superteams beat prediction markets by 15% to 30%.
How did superteams do so well? By avoiding the extremes of groupthink and Internet flame wars.
Teams were not merely the sum of their parts. How the group thinks collectively is an emergent property of the group itself, a property of communication patterns among group members, not just the thought processes inside each member.
All this brings us to the final feature of winning teams: the fostering of a culture of sharing.
the pro-social example of the giver can improve the behavior of others, which helps everyone, including the giver—which explains why Grant has found that givers tend to come out on top.
The choice is not ability or diversity; it is fine-tuning the mixes of ability and diversity and gauging which work best in which situations.
Leaders must be reasonably confident, and instill confidence in those they lead, because nothing can be accomplished without the belief that it can be.
Decisiveness is another essential attribute. Leaders can’t ruminate endlessly. They need to size up the situation, make a decision, and move on.
And leaders must deliver a vision—the goal that everyone strives ...
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How can leaders be confident, and inspire confidence, if they see nothing as certain? How can they be decisive and avoid “analysis paralysis” if their thinking is so slow, complex, and self-critical?
Fortunately, the contradiction between being a superforecaster and a superleader is more apparent than real.
In the late nineteenth century, Moltke was famous the world over after he led Prussian forces to victory against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1871—
“No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,” he wrote.
In Germany’s war academies, scenarios were laid out and students were invited to suggest solutions and discuss them collectively. Disagreement was not only permitted, it was expected,
All this may sound like a recipe for a fractious organization that can’t get anything done, but that danger was avoided by balancing those elements that promoted independent thinking against those that demanded action.
An imperfect decision made in time was better than a perfect one made too late.
The wise officer knows the battlefield is shrouded in a “fog of uncertainty” but “at least one thing must be certain: one’s own decision. One must adhere to it and not allow oneself to be dissuaded by the enemy’s actions until this has become unavoidably necessary.”
“Frequent and rapid decisions can be shaped only on the spot according to estimates of local conditions.”8 Decision-making power must be pushed down the hierarchy so that those on the ground—the first to encounter surprises on the evolving battlefield—can respond quickly.
Auftragstaktik blended strategic coherence and decentralized decision making with a simple principle: commanders were to tell subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it.
As Moltke observed, “It shakes the trust of subordinates and gives the units a feeling of uncertainty if things happen entirely differently from what orders from higher headquarters had presumed.”
Eisenhower understood that a cool and assured appearance could do more to spread confidence and boost morale than false claims of certainty.
Like encountering shocks on a battlefield, grappling with other ways of thinking trains officers to be mentally flexible.
“You have to have tremendous humility in the face of the game because the game is extremely complex, you won’t solve it,
That being said, humility in the face of the game is extremely different than humility in the face of your opponents.”
The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt—the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes.
Intellectual humility compels the careful reflection necessary for good judgment; confidence in one’s abilities inspires determined action.
Forecasters who can’t cope with the dissonance risk making the most serious possible forecasting error in a conflict: underestimating your opponent.
when it was clear that superforecasters were not merely superlucky, Kahneman cut to the chase: “Do you see them as different kinds of people, or as people who do different kinds of things?” My answer was, “A bit of both.”
What makes them so good is less what they are than what they do—the hard work of research, the careful thought and self-criticism, the gathering and synthesizing of other perspectives, the granular judgments and relentless updating.
But the continuous self-scrutiny is exhausting, and the feeling of knowing is seductive. Surely even the best of us will inevitably slip back into easier, intuitive modes of thinking.
We can’t switch off the tip-of-our-nose perspective. We can only monitor the answers that bubble up into consciousness—and, when we have the time and cognitive capacity, use a ruler to check.
Kahneman first documented scope insensitivity thirty years ago
“How bad does this make me feel?” Whether the question is about 2,000 or 200,000 dying ducks, the answer is roughly the same: bad. Scope recedes into the background—and out of sight, out of mind.
the vast majority of forecasters were scope insensitive. Regular forecasters said there was a 40% chance Assad’s regime would fall over three months and a 41% chance it would fall over six months.
But the superforecasters did much better: They put the probability of Assad’s fall at 15% over three months and 24% over six months.
It suggests that the superforecasters not only paid attention to the time frame in the question but also thought about other possible time frames—and thereby shook off a hard-to-shake bias.
Taleb insists that black swans, and black swans alone, determine the course of history. “History and societies do not crawl,” he wrote. “They make jumps.”
History does sometimes jump. But it also crawls, and slow, incremental change can be profoundly important.
“The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille,” wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, “the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.”
If you have to plan for a future beyond the forecasting horizon, plan for surprise. That means, as Danzig advises, planning for adaptability and resilience.
“Plans are useless,” Eisenhower said about preparing for battle, “but planning is indispensable.”
But a point often overlooked is that preparing for surprises—whether we are shooting for resilience or antifragility—is costly.
Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don’t find it, they impose it.
Brushing off surprises makes the past look more predictable than it was—and this encourages the belief that the future is much more predictable than it is.
