Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

by Philip E. Tetlock

polymath Herbert Simon

Machines may get better at “mimicking human meaning,” and thereby better at predicting human behavior, but “there’s a difference between mimicking and reflecting meaning and originating meaning,” Ferrucci said. That’s a space human judgment will always occupy.

Until quite recently in historical terms, it was not unusual for a sick person to be better off if there was no physician available because letting an illness take its natural course was less dangerous than what a physician would inflict.

“All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die,” he wrote. “It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.”5

Why Intelligence Fails,

Scientific facts that look as solid as rock to one generation of scientists can be crushed to dust beneath the advances of the next.16 All scientific knowledge is tentative. Nothing is chiseled in granite. In practice, of course, scientists do use the language

Orders in the Wehrmacht were often short and simple—even when history hung in the balance. “Gentlemen, I demand that your divisions completely cross the German borders, completely cross the Belgian borders and completely cross the River Meuse,” a senior officer told the commanders who would launch the great assault into Belgium and France on May 10, 1940. “I don’t care how you do it, that’s completely up to you.”10 And Auftragstaktik wasn’t limited to senior officers, or even officers. Right down to junior officers, NCOs, and the lowliest private, soldiers were told what the commander wanted accomplished but were expected to use their judgment about how best to do that given what they were seeing. The battlefield “requires soldiers who can think and act independently, who can make calculated, decisive, and daring use of every situation, and who understand that victory depends on each individual,” the command manual stated.11

“Never tell people how to do things,” he wrote, succinctly capturing the spirit of Auftragstaktik: “Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Petraeus also supports sending officers to top universities for graduate education, not to acquire a body of knowledge, although that is a secondary benefit, but to encounter surprises of another kind. “It teaches you that there are seriously bright people out in the world who have very different basic assumptions about a variety of different topics and therefore arrive at conclusions on issues that are very, very different from one’s own and very different from mainstream kind of thinking, particularly in uniform,” Petraeus said.