Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive

by Charles Duhigg

Two of the universities, however, took a different tack. A group of psychologists, statisticians, and political scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California–Berkeley, working together, decided to use the government’s money as an opportunity to see if they could train regular people to become better forecasters.9 This group called themselves “the Good Judgment Project,” and rather than recruit specialists, the GJP solicited thousands of people—lawyers, housewives, master’s students, voracious newspaper readers, and enrolled them in online forecasting classes that taught them different ways of thinking about the future. Then, after the training, those participants were asked to answer the same foreign affairs questions as the experts.10