YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Tetlock

lines on the record: 81
first: 2016-03-24
most recent: 2016-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, what I wish I knew. So the early work was mostly about cursing the darkness. It was about cognitive bias and how we're prisoners of our preconceptions, how we have a heart, that we're too quick to make up our minds, we're too slow to change them. It was a rather dark portrait of human nature. And there's some reason for being pessimistic given the way we think about politics and history and economics for much of the time. The later work has been more about lighting candles. It has a more upbeat flavor that there are specific things you can do to become more open-minded. At least about relatively near-term futures.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people do interdisciplinary work. You know, they're not Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, there aren't any Leonardo da Vinci, as far as I can tell right now in the university world. What we do is we need to carve out very specialized research programs that deliver, have tangible deliverables. We were really on a tight accountability leash in this forecasting tournament. We were submitting forecasts, 9 a.m. Eastern time every day. It was a very rigorous process and we needed to have very focused group.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't claim to be much more general than many of the specialists, my specialist colleagues. I think I'm just more specialized in a weird way. I mean, my work is very specialized and focused. It just draws on different components of different disciplines in a very focused way. That's intriguing.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say That there is no clear path to where I am right now. It's not clear to me where you would go because the work I'm doing is so weird and interdisciplinary. It doesn't fit into any of the existing university niches, which is kind of funny.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we're studying human judgment and the extent to which human judgment can be improved using a variety of tools, some of them drawn from psychology, some of them drawn from statistics, some of them drawn from organization theory, a lot of different tools.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's an interesting point that I really don't have a field anymore. I mean, so the University of Pennsylvania, when they hired me, they didn't really know where to put me, so I'm partly Wharton, partly psychology, partly political science in Annenberg. So a lot of different things. But it's really...”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fascinating. It's not just about forecasting. You can forecast trivial pursuits and you can become a great forecaster in trivial pursuits. And really, the world's not a better place for it. The world will be a better place when we join super forecasting skills to questions on which big policy debates pivot. So you say, if we knew the answer to this question, would we have invaded Iraq? Or if we had known the answer to that, if we knew the answer to this question, what would it change? What we do in Syria, the Ukraine, or with respect to tax policy, with respect to Fed policy or whatnot. So generating prohibitive questions, generating high quality explanations, human-machine competitions. I think these are three really important areas for the future.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that would be one way of doing it. There are a lot of possible machines, there are a lot of possible models that people could work with. And the question is, are you better off just using the model? Or are you better off just using the person? Or are you better off? When are you better off using the combination of the model and the person? And the blunt truth is we really don't know the answers to these questions right now. And we're hoping to learn more. So I think these are really important projects. And I think the other big thing that I'm very focused on because it has relevance to improving the debate in our debates in our society is competitions to generate better questions.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other is another competition, which is called HFC, the hybrid forecasting competition, which will be humans and machines and human-machine combinations trying to make predictions, which I am quite optimistic about.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The facts. Are you good at explaining things? And again, the extent to which we can crowdsource aspects of problem solving and then eventually marrying that, I think, to forecasting. I think that's a very ambitious project. It's in the very early stages. It hasn't been launched yet, but I'm optimistic that it will”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see huge potential here. IARPA, which funded the first forecasting tournament, is going to be funding two follow-up forecasting tournaments. And I think many of your readers might be interested in these, and there will be calls for volunteers to participate in one form or another. One of them is focusing not so much on the accuracy of your forecasts as on the probitive value of the explanations you generate.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big deal. That's a real, real significant if you're talking about avoiding a war or finding It's nothing to sniff at.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Procedure got better. Right. Which is what? Remember, I was saying that a lot of people thought it was kind of crazy to use Teams. You're better off having a lot of independent observers. But there's a way to get the benefits of independence and the benefits of creative interaction at the same time. And one way to do that is by getting everybody to make their judgments anonymously. So you give your probability judgment, your explanation. I give mine and everybody on the table gives theirs. And we circulate that. And nobody knows who said what. So the high status guy isn't swinging everything the way it often happens in groups.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of the statistical tools have improved in various ways. I think some of the tools for running teams. Have even improved. I mean, I think we can do, there are versions of the Delphi procedure, for example, which was developed a long time ago, but it's gotten the Delphi.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Softball. That's right. Well, I think that our knowledge of the imperfections in human judgment. Thanks to a lot of the condomen inspired research programs, I think we've made discernible progress there.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So the big question for us is when is learning possible? When can we learn to do certain categories of things better? And when are we just spinning our wheels and deluding ourselves? Are we spinning our wheels and deluding ourselves about financial markets and many political issues, but we're actually making real progress in the domains of medicine or airline safety or whatnot? And it's a mixed picture. And I suppose what we're trying to do with this forecasting tournament work is to bring some of the rigor that has worked in these more scientific domains, to bring it to bear in domains that are more or less like the wild west.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So there are different types of postmortems, and some of them are constrained by well-defined bodies of scientific knowledge and investigative procedure that reduce the serious risk of capitalizing on chance. And others are just sort of make it up as you go. And I think the things we're talking about are make it up as you go. But there are approaches to doing case studies and learning from the past that are very disciplined and focused and can make us safer and wealthier and happier.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are situations where we really want to continue doing that, though. It's not always bad. I mean, the National Transportation Safety Board, for example, conducts these ex post post-mortems on plane crashes. One of the reasons why air travel has become as safe as it is is because they're so good at doing these post-mortems. Now, obviously, they can't predict which planes are going to go down, but they've become really pretty adept at identifying the critical factors that underlie plane accidents and as a result the rules for pilots and the design features of aircraft have changed in ways that make us all safer, safer. But they're not just”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Soviet Union was the evil empire. It's an evil empire and would never change from within, essentially. You just had to keep up endless pressure and maybe it would eventually crack. But they didn't hold out any, and they certainly didn't see Gorbachev as much of a change agent initially. Each side, neither side really predicted Gorbachev. And what Gorbachev did inside the Soviet Union in the internal transformations that occurred, both sides could readily explain after the fact what happened. So it was this mismatch between virtually zero predictive ability and virtually perfect exposed explanatory ability that troubled me. And I thought, well, you know, if debates this important, like World War III, are being conducted this shoddily, surely there's a better way to do this. And that's what led to the early work on expert political judgment. It was a way to try to, what can we do to keep score? And if we do keep score,”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well mean life evolves in funny, quirky, path-dependent ways. I mean, you can look back on your life and you can say, well, it was kind of inevitable this happened or that happened. But a lot of the things that led to my early forecasting tournament work were, I think, kind of quirky. I mean, it was really kind of quirky that a scholar as young as I was appointed to a National Research Council committee when I was, I guess, 30 or 31 years, 1984. When I was that young, by far the most junior member of a committee like that, and it had a lot of senior scientists on it, but it gave me opportunities to meet a lot of people and it connected me to resources that made it possible to do the early forecasting tournament work. It also impressed on me the need to do it because there we were 1984, 85, liberals and conservatives all had very strong opinions about the Soviet Union and where things were going and the liberals, not that Reagan was sending us to where the nuclear apocalypse and the conservatives thought that then...”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One other person who influenced me is just up town here at Columbia University, Robert Jervis, his book Perception, Misperception International Politics. It came out when I was in graduate school and I could feel myself being tugged toward these topics. It's a brilliant analysis of mistakes that have caused unnecessary wars. Give me that title again, Perception. Perception and misperception in international politics.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Peter Sutfeld was my very first mentor in Canada. I was an undergraduate University of British Columbia, and he was wonderfully supportive of me, and he believed in me. And he really told me that I would probably have a pretty good time if I went to graduate school at Yale. And I took it on faith, and I did that. And I met a number of people at Yale who helped me. The guy who coined the term groupthink, or Irving Janice, was one of the people I worked with, and he was quite an unusual psychologist also. When I got to Berkeley, of course, Daniel Kahneman came along in a few years, and he certainly had an influence on me. I already had a PhD and I was just recently tenured faculty, but Con O'Connor has a very influential guy. He's just a lot smarter than most. us so it's a good idea to listen very carefully when he speaks”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was always a pretty strange psychologist. I had interest that took me pretty deep into social science, into political science in particular, into areas of business. But I was interested in organizations. I was interested in societies and cultures and large entities that were not, you know, that obviously psychology matters there, but it's a stretch for a psychologist. So my early work, I did do a fair amount of experimental work. But I was also did a lot of archival and naturalistic work. So it was a kind of a natural progression for me.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How far into the future might it be in a presidential election, the presidential candidates take pride in what their briar scores are? I think it's a long way off, judging by what's going on this year.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we do have a number of people who are participating in the tournament, and one of the people in GJOpen.com has written a memo on where we are right now. The moderates seem to be doing the best at the moment. But that game is far from over. I mean, this is just very early stages of a long-term process.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one way to proceed would be to say, okay, you've got hawks, you've got doves, you have different opinions about what the long-term consequences of signing this deal are. We don't know for sure which historical trajectory we're on. Why don't the Hawks generate five questions that they think they have a comparative advantage in answering? Why don't the doves generate five questions that they think they have a comparative advantage in answering? And you know what? Victory will have a clear-cut meaning here. If the doves can answer the dove question is better than the hawks and they can answer the hawk questions better, then the doves win and vice versa for the hawks.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the thing that I most hope, I mean, I'm getting older now. I mean, I've been doing this stuff for 30 plus years. And the thing that I most hope lasting legacy of this work, and I hope it improves U.S. foreign policy and intelligence analysis, but I also hope it improves our democracy. And I think in the closing chapter, we talk about the debate between Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson on various issues and how it more resembles a food fight than it does a serious debate between extremely intelligent people, which both of them obviously are. And the question is, could we use forecasting tournaments? Could we structure them in ways to facilitate more civilized debates on issues that matter? So that's why I wrote a piece in the New York Times several months ago with Peter Skoblick on how we could do that with Iranian nuclear deal.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great way to describe it. It's moneyball for the intelligence community. When's the movie? The old world was a world with baseball scouts. Clint Eastwood, trustee baseball scout were gradually being displaced by these number crunchers. We're never going to do away with people who have deep qualitative insights into the subject matter. They're a crucial source of input. But the question is, what roles should we be playing as the world changes? And I think human judgment will always be playing a critical role when we're dealing with human beings.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you'd have to ask the U.S. intelligence community about how exactly things have changed. My understanding is that. The average forecast derived from a group of forecasters is often more accurate than most of the individuals from whom the average was derived. It sounds kind of magical, but it is true. Not always true, but it's a good way to bet”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The takeaways are that it is possible to make better probability estimates of events that many people thought it would be impossible to estimate probabilistically. And it's possible to do that by engaging in systematic talent spawning, which you can only do if you're tracking score. And it's also possible to do by designing good training modules, by putting together teams that are open to dissent and know how to do precision questioning of each other's assumptions. And also by doing a little bit of algorithmic magic.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a smaller number. It was in the hundreds, but yes, in a sense, expert political judgment was a small scale dry run for what IARPA did. Expert political judgment was run more on a shoestring budget, whereas the IARPA forecasting tournaments were run on a much more professional, large-scale basis. And one of the nice things about the IRPA project, people worry about the replicability of research and things like this, but this was all independently monitored by the U.S. intelligence community. These forecasts were submitted at 9 a.m. Eastern Time every day on the day every day the forecast tournaments were running over four years. So there is a very clear... Port”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they approached my wife and me when we were still on the faculty at University of California Berkeley about six years ago, and we had a nice set of drinks over at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. And we were just astonished that the U.S. intelligence community was prepared to run a series of forecasting tournaments. I mean, I predicted that they would never want to do anything like that. So it's kind of ironic, right, that I forecast that forecasting tournaments would be impossible. And I know it was being a bit of a hedgehog. What I said is, look, government bureaucracies don't give slingshot money to David, right? Goliath doesn't give slingshot money to David. Why would a massive influential government bureaucracy, $50 billion or so, want to spread millions of dollars around to a bunch of small-scale academic competition to see whether or not they can do a better job of assigning realistic probabilities to things of national security significance? It didn't make any sense given the normal rules of bureaucratic behavior in Washington.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, it was IARPA as opposed to advanced research projects agency as opposed to DARPA, but it's a cousin and it models itself to some degree, I think, after DARPA. It really wants to do radical world-changing forms of research. And I think changing how we think about uncertainty would be pretty fundamental. Maybe not as fundamental as inventing the internet, but way up there. It would be a big deal to change how we go about doing things. I think our democracy would be transformed. I think the finance industry would be transformed. It would not be...”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got a well defined sampling universe, you've got quick, clear feedback about your predictions. Much of the world, most of the world isn't like that, is not like that. It's definitely not like that. And the question is, what are the limits? How useful is it to apply probabilistic forms of reasoning outside their traditional domains of application? That in a sense is what the U.S. intelligence community really wanted to explore. I mean, can we do better than, say, distinct possibility?”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well There are some types of problems where the probabilities can be readily computed. We can compute the probability of drawing an ace of spades from a randomly shuffled deck very accurately to many decimal points if we want, whatever one out of over 52 works out to. We can do that with coin toss games and so forth. So there are some games in which the classic rules of statistics 101 very clearly apply and there are well-defined probabilities.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It suggests we'd be better off if we were aware of our limitations. Achieved a certain baseline of appropriate humility and got in the habit of keeping score and resisted being sucked into clever scenarios and storytellers and resisted being seduced by credentials. If we could manage to do those things, I think we would proceed through life, making investments and political decisions with better calibrated probabilities. And I think we would be better off as individuals and we'd be better off as a society.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jimmy Carter was an anonymous peanut farmer in 1964, 1976. He was being elected president of the United States. So 12 years is a huge amount of time in politics. So I don't think anybody really is going to suppose there's very much possibility there. But as you get closer and closer, it gets more and more possible. That's not all that surprising. It's in the analogy would be like to snell an eye char when you visit your optometrist and it gets easier. It gets easier and easier the closer up you get for most things. The trouble is we're just not very well tuned to the parameters. And if somebody can tell a really good story about a relatively far off future, about the United States is moving toward a techno-utopia in which GDP will skyrocket as intelligent machines do amazing things for us in the fourth industrial revolution. That scenario may indeed materialize in 2030 or 2040.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard. I mean, there are some categories of questions where longer foresight is possible. I think the Hillary thing was in the cards for quite a long time. But for most of these things, I mean, to take some extreme examples, I mean, in 1940, Dwight Eisenhower was an anonymous Army colonel. In 1952, he was president of the United States in 12 years, right?”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, life is like shuffling the cards. How many months, how many years have to go by before so many random contingencies accumulate that no human being could conceively have anticipated anything that far out? And our current best guess for the kinds of geopolitical geoeconomic questions we're looking at is around a year or so.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I would guess five, but that's a wild guess. The statistician and magician Percy.com is Stanford. I think he estimated at seven.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a superb point. There are different time periods in the different studies. I'm much more optimistic that we can improve forecasting using the right selection, training, teaming tools. In shorter time periods up to about a year. I become progressively more pessimistic when you go out to the longer reaches of three, five, ten years that were included in expert political judgment. And there I think it's going to be very, very difficult to do much better than chance. How many times do you have to shuffle a deck of cards until it's perfectly random?”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I could talk for hours about the principles of error balancing, and everybody would say, yeah, yeah, I kind of get it. Sure, you can make one error, you can make the other error. But the only way it's really going to sink into people's heads is if they go to forecasting tournaments and they actually practice making judgments, get on the bike and try to ride it. And that's what going to a forecasting tournament's all about. That's why we're continuing to run the GJOPen.com, which is a forecasting tournament where people can indeed work to cultivate their skills.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is another one of these, the Ten Commandments that we formulated from observing the super forecasters. They're acutely aware of the principle of error balancing. If you look at the research literature on human judgment, there are two kinds of errors people can make in the situation you're describing. One of them is the error of excessive volatility, of jumping every time there's a little bit of news and exaggerating its diagnostic value vis- ⁇-vis deep market trends. And the other big mistake you can make is excessive rigidity and being so committed to a particular preconception about where the future is going that you just ignore the news altogether and you fail to do any updating. So it's kind of principle of error balancing. It's been like learning how to write a bicycle.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The diplomats try to avoid the last war. I think that's right. I mean, you go from Iraq to Syria and Libya, or you go from one era to another.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And if you can imagine a scenario, here's the big problem with tail risks and scenarios. Most of the time people underrate them. But as soon as the scenario is called to their attention, they overrate it. It's very difficult for people to strike the right balance in dealing with tail risk scenarios.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're moving into a world that's requiring us to make ever subtler distinctions among degrees of uncertainty, the sorts of distinctions we didn't have to make in a revolutionary past. When we were wandering the savannah plains of Africa, either is a lion or isn't a lion stirring in the long grass, and you're going to have to make a judgment call pretty darn quickly. And if you dawdle very long, it may be, you're not likely to pass your genes on to the next generation.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's no absolute rule. That's just the way vague verbiage is. Vague verbiage is vague because it's always a slippery, vague thing. Nobody knows how to quantify it and keeps the pundit safe. I mean, I have lots of forecasters from the earlier work who predicted that Canada would disintegrate or Nigeria would disintegrate. There are a lot of disintegration scenarios out there that haven't happened yet.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's definitely not fair, but it is the state of the art at the moment. You know, there's an old communism joke that's rather apropos here. The Soviet revolutionary Leontsky, after he was thrown out of the Soviet Union by Stalin went around giving talks to left-wing audiences around the world. One probably apocryphal story has it that once when he was introduced to an audience of followers, the speaker said was proclaiming Leontrowski a visionary who could see far, far into the future. And he was saying, and you know, comrades, the ultimate proof of the farsightedness of Comrade Trotsky. Not one of his predictions has yet come true.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the question. I say Bloomberg because Bloomberg is so influential. I think a lot of punnists would say, well, I'm not going to run away and hide from Bloomberg. But the other media could do this too. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. There are lots of major media sites that have the leverage that could induce pundits to be much more intellectually honest. They choose not to exercise that option, probably because they don't perceive a great market demand for it.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bloomberg could actually change the world to some degree if it implemented systematic systems for tracking the accuracy of many of the people who came through. If part of the price for getting onto Bloomberg was that you had to demonstrate that you were engaging in some kind of rigorous scorekeeping and Bloomberg could flash up some batting average statistics as you appear. Bloomberg could increase the collective IQ of our society. It could increase the collective IQ of the conversation.”
2016-03-24 · Masters in Business · Barry Ritholtz's Masters in Business: Philip Tetlock Interview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source