Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

In a book entitled Superforecasting, Tetlock examines characteristics that lead superforecasters to make such accurate predictions. As it happens, these are good characteristics to cultivate in general: Intelligence: Brainpower is crucial, especially the ability to enter a new domain and get up to speed quickly. Domain expertise: While you can learn about a particular domain on the fly, the more you learn about it, the more it helps. Practice: Good forecasting is apparently a skill you can hone and get better at over time. Working in teams: Groups of people can outperform individuals as long as they avoid groupthink. Open-mindedness: People who are willing to challenge their beliefs tend to make better predictions. Training in past probabilities: People who looked at probabilities of similar situations in the past were better able to assess the current probability, avoiding the base rate fallacy (see Chapter 5). Taking time: The more time people took to make the prediction, the better they did. Revising predictions: Forecasters who continually revised their predictions based on new information successfully avoided confirmation bias (see Chapter 1).