YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip E. Tetlock

lines on the record: 78
first: 2020-04-22
most recent: 2020-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, there's a lot of cognitive resistance to treating one's beliefs as falsifiable, probabilistic propositions. People naturally gravitate toward thinking of their beliefs as ego-defining quasi-sacred possessions. That's one major source of obstacle. Then you have the existing status hierarchies. You have subject matter experts who are entrenched, have influence. Why would they want to participate in exercises in which the best possible outcome is a tie, which they reaffirm that they deserve the status that they already have? So psychological, sociological resistance, you know, it's interesting, you know, the sociologists and economists have kind of different reactions to forecasting journalism. The sociologists react, why would anyone be naive enough to think that anyone would want to have a forecasting tournament in their organization, their status disruptive, right?”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, to be very cautious because we're running against the green. We're running against the psychological green. We're running against human nature. We're running against the sociological green.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the next project is the one that I mentioned earlier. It's linking historical counterfactual reasoning with conditional forecasting. I think it'll be the second phase of the focus research tournaments. I think that counterfactual reasoning has for too long been the last refuge of ideological scoundrels, insofar as we can improve the standards of evidence improve in judging counterfactual claims as well as conditional forecasts and linking the two. I think there's a potential for improving the quality of debates among interested parties.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now in the quarantine days, I mean, it used to be pre-quarantine, you know, we said, oh, we're going to go to Europe, we're going to go here or there. There were these little points of unpredictability that spiced up life. Those do not exist right now.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have a pet-free existence and we don't, our lives are actually pretty, pretty, pretty simple. I guess we subscribe to that old adage. You'd be boring and stayed in your life so you can be violent and creative in your work. We have a kind of a routine here.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not good at predicting your questions. What am I good at predicting? I think Pretty good at anticipating the fragility of a lot of microsocial science knowledge prior to the replication crisis erupting.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of us in principle are pulparians. We believe in stating our beliefs as falsifiable hypotheses. And we also, most of us believe our beliefs are probabilistic, so we're kind of somewhat Bayesian. But that's lip service. There's what we believe in our, there's our formal set of epistemological, formal self-concept, which is kind of noble falsificationist and probabilistic. And then there's how we actually behave when our egos are at stake in particular controversies. And those things are quite different. I think Danny Kahneman, who's not known as an optimist, proposed it. It sounds like an optimistic idea, but I think he's not all that optimistic about what it can achieve on close inspection. My efforts at adversarial collaboration have not been all that successful. I'd like to jumpstart a few of them again, but it's very hard to find the right dance partners.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, that's a hard one. I mean, that was a thing that Danny Conomer, I think, coined the term when he was dealing with his various critics over time. My wife, Barb actually, was involved in an adversarial collaboration between the Kahneman camp and the Gigarinza camp on the conjunction fallacy. It took at least two or three years of her life. It's very hard to get people to”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's an optimal distance. I mean, so for history, for example, sounds quite very different from what I started as an experimental psychologist, and history looks very different, but they can be connected because historical judgment is something that psychologists study to some degree. Psychologists are interested in hindsight and counterfactuals and so forth. So you can link the two. So I think there's an optimal distance. When you go foraging as a fox, you probably don't want to forage way, way far away. You want to forage far enough away that'll be stimulating, but still possible to reconnect.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of obvious things like read a little bit more outside your field if you're a liberal, read the Wall Street Journal. If you're a conservative, you read the New York Times. Expose yourself to dissonant points of view. Try to cultivate some interests outside your field and try to connect them together”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a number of academics in the past, like Jim March at UC Irvine many decades ago, tried to do something like that. Amy Gutmann, who president of the University of Pennsylvania, is trying to do that with Pan integrates knowledge, which is the Chared Professorships that were used, among other things, to hire Barbara and hire a number of other people. And we are sort of floaters. We're not connected to one unit. We have multiple connections. That's a very hospitable work environment from my point of view. But I don't see a lot of places doing a Jim March, a UC Irvine experiment. Oh, let's integrate all social sciences together. Amy Gutmann, PIK, Penn integrates knowledge kind of program. You don't see too many of them yet. It runs against the grain. I'm not even sure it'll survive at Penn beyond Amy. I mean, the natural tendency will be for departments to want to claw back the resources.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the great advances in science come from hedgehogs, we're producing hedgehogs on an industrial scale here. And I think there's some advantage that we get a little bit more room for weirdo eclectics.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one thing I think that would be useful, I mean, there is this tendency for training in universities to become hyper professionalized and compartmentalized. So I think it is harder for people who have weird interests that straddle, say, psychology and organizational science and political science and law history. People who have weird sets of interests, it's hard for them to get traction in the current career environment. Certainly in my home discipline of psychology, I mean, you had this kind of rampant publication inflation, which PhD students get to get a job. You'd have to have a ridiculous number of publications and some of them in A journals. It's the sort of thing we didn't really expect 30 years ago. We thought, oh, that's a tenure case. That's a junior hire. So those kinds of pressures, I think produce a focus, a narrowing of focus. Now you say, well, yes, the great, I said earlier in the”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's probably a tendency in that direction, yes, because weirdness is a big word. Weirdness takes lots of forms that you and I would. We would not be embarrassed about turning away lots of weird people. Sure. You think people who grow up with the second culture are better forecasters? You're thinking of my work with Karmit, Karmi Tudmore. Of course. Yeah. Gosh, you really looked into my Vita here. This is highly unusual. I think there does seem to be some advantage there. And where does that come from? How does it work? I think it has to tie into accountability. Accountability to conflicting audiences.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who first saw it coming? I think probably my advisor at University of British Columbia, Peter Sudfeld, who've supported me and believed in me when there didn't seem to be very many good reasons for doing so. Kind of a confused Canadian kid who was unsure whether to become a lawyer in Canada or go off to Oxford or go to graduate school in the US who tipped me towards social science in the US. And what did he see that other people had not seen? God only knows. Well, if anyone would know it's you, right? You've lived with it for some time. I think he probably thought I was bright enough to do well, and he probably thought that I was contrarian and weird enough that there was some possibility of doing something distinctively well, something distinctive and different. Do you think academic advisors in general today undervalue weird students?”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“False positives. But some do much, much better than others, right? Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel. Right. The question is, are they doing better because they have better social networks? Are they doing better? They have better judgment. Do you think super forecasting as a technique also applies to super forecasting how people will do? Yes. I think everything we know from the overlap between super forecasting and intelligence and the overlap between intelligence and success in many different professional lines of work would suggest that I was almost certainly true. Who first super forecasted your own major success? Yeah. I don't know what my first major success was, and some people might whether there has been a major success in my career.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You interpret their behavior in terms of a super forecaster model? Someone like Peter Thiel, he found Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hoffman, Elon Musk. He's a kind of super forecaster. How do you super forecast talent in other people? Well, it really helps to be working in an environment in which super bright people are not super rare. It's very, very hard to forecast, to identify talent when the base rate falls below 1 in 1,000,1 in 10,000 one and 100,000. You're looking for a needle in a haystack. But the great advantage that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have is that the talent pool is relatively rich. So there's quite a few flaky people that come by seeking their money, for sure. But their odds of success are significantly better than they would be if they're working from a population base rate. And of course, they can tolerate a lot of mistakes because just a few hits will pay for a lot of.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Playing World of Work a lot help you become a better forecaster or playing chess? I don't have any evidence bearing on either of those things. But, you know, there's a third variable problem there too. But you get used to a test, right? You know if you lose, there's very little self-deception. This is true. I mean, the people who do well in these sorts of things often like games like that. Venture capitalists when they try to spot talent in others.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the longer term objective of this research program is not just say we're not playing Civilization V for the sake of getting better at civilization 5. The ultimate goal is to link the sophistication of counterfactual reasoning about the past to the The subtlety and the accuracy of conditional forecasts going into the future. Another thing you should observe, by the way, if people are becoming better counterfactual reasoners, is you should observe less ideological polarization in their counterfactual beliefs. Counterfactual belief should become as ideologically depolarized as conditional forecasts are.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you can measure what people's beliefs are in the counterfactual. And then you can measure people's beliefs about conditional forecasts that are logically connected to the counterfactuals and kind of a Bayesian inference network. If I know that you think that the Russians would be every bit as nasty and snarly, even if we hadn't moved into the Baltic, it might even mean nastier, it's probably a fair bet that you're also likely to think it's a good idea to increase arms sales to the Ukraine, ratchet up sanctions on Putin's cronies, and so forth. So we can identify the counterfactual belief correlates of more or less accurate conditional forecasting. And in that sense, you can indirectly validate or invalidate. You can render more or less plausible certain counterfactual beliefs.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next task will be to connect superior performance and simulated worlds to superior performance in the actual world. This is where things get tricky, of course, because in the actual world, we don't have the ground truth. So if I ask you a counterfactual question of the form, if NATO hadn't expanded eastward as far as it did in 2004 under the Baltics, NATO-Russia relations would be considerably friendlier than they are now. Yeah, we've got to counterfactual that. Now, we can't rerun history. We don't know how relations with Russia would be if NATO hadn't gone into the Baltics. Russia would have gobbled up the Baltics. Maybe Russia would be friendlier or feel less threatened. You have people who have more hawkish or more dovish mental models of Russia. And those mental models predispose them to give you certain canned, almost ideologically reflexive answers to those counterfactuals, right? Right.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're hoping to do in the focus program is to develop some objective metrics for identifying people and methods of generating probabilities that produce superior counterfactual forecasts in simulated worlds in which you can rerun history and assess what the probability distributions of possible worlds are. Well, it turns out you get World War I 37% of the time, even if you undo the assassination of the Archduke and you get something like World War II, you get used to where we're going. So we're hoping that one result of focus will be to help us identify people and methods that generate superior counterfactual forecasts and domains where there is a ground truth.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undo Hitler, you undo World War II, you make Kennedy grouchier during the Cuban Missile Crisis, you trigger World War III. You've got these sorts of arguments that are essentially unresolvable. Can't rerun history. You can rerun civilization five, but you can't rerun history. So that makes counterfactuals a place where ideologues can retreat. They can make up the data, make up whatever facts they want to justify no matter how bad the war in Iraq went. You can always argue that things would have been worse if Saddam Hussein had remained in power. You have these factual and counterfactual reference points that people use in debates implicitly to make rhetorical points. So a lot of people, part of what attracted to me to counterfactuals, was A, how important they are in drawing any lessons from history, B, how important they are in policy arguments, and C, how unresolvable they are. One of the things I think”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they have to be rather intimately connected, although disentangling this one is going to be really, really hard and it's one of the things I do want to dedicate a few years of my life to doing. Now, obviously, when you say someone a good counterfactualizer, people shrug their shoulders and they say, well, how are you possibly going to know whether?”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good example, actually. Avoy, I'm not a super forecaster. I don't play civilization five, but civilization five was one of the simulations that IARPA chose to feature in its counterfactual forecasting tournaments under the rubric of focus. And if any of your listeners are interested in signing up to be forecasters for focus, we still have one more round, round five, and we will be recruiting people. But again, just to reflect my temperament, I don't have the patience for a game like Civ5. Forecasting is inevitably a mixture of fluid and crystallized intelligence. And you have to invest a lot of energy into mastering a game like Civilization V. And I suppose as people get older, they may become less likely to make those kinds of cognitive investments. I mean, it becomes more and more essential as I get older, I think, to focus on the things where I have a real comparative advantage.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see the work I'm doing as very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Public, transparent, standards of evidence for judging the subject matter expertise. I think one of the great challenges of our time is striking the right balance between democracy and technocracy. And I think the fissures that have emerged, it's not just a conservative are very skeptical of social science, and apparently some parts of biological science too, which is, I think, very unfortunate. But you see this kind of some reflexive skepticism towards science on the left as well. So, I mean, how do you manage the relation between small Democrats and technocrats in a society in which expert guidance is increasingly crucial?”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that had huge spillover effects. Now, could there have been an enlightenment in China, could the Chinese have created certain types of technologies without science? If they hadn't scuttled their navy in around 1400, all those sorts of counterfactuals.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would have been, you see, I'm not a historian of the West. I mean, what do I really know about that? I'm simply reporting the news here.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have inside information here. We did a survey of some very prominent historians. We reported it in that book on Making the West. We were a part of it anyway, also in an article on American Political Science Review. I think that if you looked at just the unweighted average of judgments for the median, I think was probably around 1730, 1740.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did see myself coming back just very recently last week and in the quarantine period to Westworld. It's not a movie. It's a series, of course, but I think that is, I think the first two seasons are quite brilliant.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very difficult question because of the tail risk aspect to it. If you looked at the number of people who've died from terrorism versus other causes, it would seem that the amount of money we spend on suppressing terrorism would be disproportionate. But the tail risk complicates that a lot.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I fell for it. James Gandalfini fell in love with his performances. And then one of the last things he did is he played Leon Panetta in Zero Dark 30. And there he is, eliciting forecasts from people in the CIA about whether Osama bin Laden is in that compound and About Abad. Is he there or isn't he effing there? I never knew him, but I think very highly of his work.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had a wonderful time as a kid watching Monty Python. So and also faulty powers. So I really enjoyed his comedy. I haven't followed him since then. But when I was younger, I thought he was absolutely hilarious and brilliant. I appreciate the flattering things he said about my work.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't read a little bit of Tolstoy and I've seen a number of films and I know some of the shorthand versions and I know that Isaiah Berlin had a hell of a time classifying tall story as a hedgehog or a fox but I don't think I'll pass on now.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got endless grief when my wife and I decided to leave Berkeley and move to Philadelphia. People thought that we were borderline insane. But we left for very personal reasons. And without going into what those were, I would say Philadelphia has been a moderately pleasant surprise. It's a city that has many, many, many problems, but it's not as bad as the people in Northern California thought it was.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, indeed, the old expression, there's no view from nowhere. There is no such thing as pure value neutrality. That doesn't mean it's not something worth aspiring to. But you're right. The value is often, even if you had a perfectly objective forecasting tournament system, if you had people generating the questions promoting a political agenda, you could skew the results. I think that's one of your points, right?”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One reason why we're even talking right now today is that the intelligence community was forced essentially by the recommendations of the Reform Commission to take keeping score more seriously, to take training for accuracy and monitoring of accuracy more seriously. That's when they created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects activity, which is the R&D branch housed within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and its job is to... Support innovative research. Where that can be defined in various ways, but accuracy is certainly one of the very important component of that. But it's not accuracy with a liberal skew or a conservative skew. It's supposed to be just plain just the facts ma'am accuracy.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a long history to efforts to reform the CIA, you know, going back to 19, it was founded in 1947. There have been various efforts since then. People have been unhappy with the CIA for many reasons over time, Vietnam being a big one, but there are lot, lots of other reasons that people have expressed unhappiness. Both liberals and conservatives have at various points been unhappy with the performance of the intelligence community. In 2001, it came to a kind of a crisis point, I think, and then there was a commission to reform intelligence analysis, and WMD Fiasco in Iraq, that the pressure grew even more.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is supposed to be the division of labor here. And forecasting tournaments are one of, I think one reason they may be interested in forecasting tournaments is because forecasting tournaments incentivize people to do one thing and only one thing, and that's accuracy. You don't get points for skewing your judgments toward your favorite cause. You take a hit on the long term by doing that.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, of course, the CIA, bear in mind, is by statutes supposed to be value neutral. It's not there. They're supposed to be feeding impartial apolitical advice.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not talking about huge effect sizes here. Integrative complexity. I think that fluid intelligence is probably a more powerful predictor, but a combination of fluid intelligence and integrative complexity, I think, does boost forecasting accuracy.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're picking up a tendency to endorse values that are often in conflict with each other. So the more frequently that you as a political thinker confront cognitive disheness between your values, your value orientations, the more pressure you are to engage in integratively complex synthetic thinking. When your values are more lopsided, it's easier to engage in what we call simpler modes of cognitive distance reduction, like denial or bolstering and spreading of the alternative, so we downplay one value, push up the other value, and make your life stress free. Some ideological positions at some points in history require more tolerance for dissonance, and some people are more inclined to fill those roles.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that particular measure in integrative complexity is, I think it does have some correlation with forecasting accuracy. But I think you're picking up something more than just forecasting accuracy. You're picking up what I call value pluralism.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that period, it was a mixture of moderate labor, moderate, conservative. The centrists did better. It was slightly left shifted.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bob Putnam collected those data that I reported that study in 1984. But Bob Putnam collected the original data and he reported it in a book beliefs that politicians published in the 1970s. And I think those data were based on interviews with members of the British House of Commons. They were not speeches. They were interviews, confidential interviews that Bob Putnam got access to and put a lot of work into obtaining. He shared them with me and I used them as grist for a small research program. I was running in the 1980s on cognitive style and political ideology, trying to tease apart the rigidity of the right versus the ideal log hypotheses.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was brought up. It was brought up for a political reason. He had a political point to make. And Dominic Cummings had a political point to make as well. He fears that I think parts of the civil service are hostile toward Brexit and want to undermine the Boris Johnson administration's objectives. I think this comes to something deeper now. It's not just about the UK. It's about the intellectual fissure that exists between social science and conservatives. that most social scientists are liberal and conservatives are wary of advice from social scientists. I think we may have partly paid some price for that, but it kindly the slowness of the Trump administration responds to COVID-19.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some people in Singapore too, and that's an interesting place. You should mention that. Interesting, you should bring that one up. But Mr. Cummings and Mr. Go both separately brought up my work at various points during the Brexit debate. And Michael Gove, at least in the UK, famously said that Britain had had enough of experts. I don't know if you remember that particular quote. And he was thinking of, well, he invoked a support, at least, for that position, ex-ray political judgment, in which portions of that book compare subject matter experts to minimalist statistical baselines like extrapolations. Can you predict simple extrapolation algorithms? And the answer was often no. Gove was raising the point that where these guys get off making these confident predictions about the consequence of the Brexit when the best empirical evidence would suggest they're probably not materially more accurate than simple extrapolation algorithms.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might actually say, you know, I suppose the most prominent political fan I have at the moment is probably one of the senior advisors to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, who recently caused a bit of a stir in the UK by appointing a super forecaster who had written some blogs that people interpreted as misogynist or racist or fascist or eugenicist or I don't know some mixture of all those things but I think his name was Andrew Sabisky as a young man of 24-25 the kind of the kind of person young people attracted as I said before to forecasting it's a fast track toward upward mobility because you have all the high status people making vague verbiage forecasts people like me”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the president on China, and some upstart RD operation called Diorfa says, hey, we're going to run for these forecasting tournaments in which we assess how well the analytic community can put probabilities unless Xi Jinping is going to do next. And I'll be on a level playing field competing against 25-year-olds and 65-year-old. How am I likely to react to this proposal, this new... Don't take a lot of empathy or bureaucratic imagination to suppose I'm going to try to nix this thing.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if we can make them run much further away from objective standards than they already are. But that's a very interesting point about forecasting tournaments. And I look at the kinds of people who are attracted to participate in them. At the very outset, I mean, I invited lots of big shots to participate in forecasting tournaments and they turned me down. They've repeatedly turned me down at a very interesting correspondence with William Sapphire in the 1980s about forecasting tournaments we could talk a little about later. The upshot of this is that young people who are upwardly mobile see forecasting tournaments as an opportunity to rise. Old people like me, aging baby boomer types who occupy a relatively high status and site organizations see forecasting tournaments as a way to lose. If I'm a senior analyst inside an intelligence agency and I'm say I'm on the National Intelligence Council and I'm expert on China, a go-to guy.”
2020-04-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source