If we take “highly improbable” to mean a 1% or 0.1% or 0.0001% chance of an event, it may take decades or centuries or millennia to pile up enough data. And if these events have to be not only highly improbable but also impactful, the difficulty multiplies. So the first-generation IARPA tournament tells us nothing about how good superforecasters are at spotting gray or black swans. They may be as clueless as anyone else—or astonishingly adept. We don’t know, and shouldn’t fool ourselves that we do.
