People Predict 32 Big Shifts Coming In The Next Decade That No One’s Ready For

Nobody has a crystal ball that gets it right 100 percent of the time, at least not that I know of. But in the mid-1980s, political scientist Philip Tetlock decided to see whose came the closest.

He recruited hundreds of academics and pundits who had dedicated their lives to thinking about politics, and signed them up for "forecasting tournaments," where they tackled questions such as how long the Soviet Union might last, or who would win the next presidential election, estimating the probability of each outcome.

For instance, someone might say that there was a 30% chance that the Soviet Union would collapse before 1990. Over time, these forecasts were put to the test against reality, and it turned out the experts just weren't that good at anticipating events.

In fact, many of them performed about as well as someone guessing completely randomly. Only a few managed to beat the metaphorical dart-throwing chimp, albeit only by a small margin.

Tetlock didn't recruit only experts for his study — he also placed adverts aimed simply at curious individuals interested in predicting the future.

In the first year, 3,200 people signed up. After the tournament had been running for a while, he introduced an algorithm designed to give the predictions of the most accurate forecasters extra "weight." He also "extremized" the forecasts, pushing the probabilities assigned closer to 100% or 0%.

Helped by the algorithm, the ordinary people who'd replied to the adverts ended up producing better forecasts than the intelligence analysts who had access to classified information, and much better ones than the academics and political pundits. The individuals with the best track records were anointed "superforecasters," and they continued to outdo others involved in the competition.

So, while you might look at a thread like this and think all of these guesses are just unqualified nonsense... In terms of predicting the future, it isn't that unreasonable.

One of the ways in which Tetlock's superforecasters were different from the rest was that they seemed more immune to various biases.

An example of such biases is the so-called “scope insensitivity,” made famous by the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Imagine you have to predict how likely it is that Hungary's Viktor Orban remains in power for one more year. What seems like a reasonable forecast to you? Is there an 85% chance? 90%, maybe?

Now imagine that you’d been asked about two years instead of one. Would your answer have been any different? If not, you’re probably guilty of scope insensitivity, which is to say that you tend to give the same answers to questions that are superficially similar, but actually require quite different calculations.

Most people aren't very “scope sensitive,” but superforecasters are: they also seem less prone to other cognitive distortions such as confirmation bias and overconfidence, which allows them to make better predictions.

In the end, Tetlock proved that prediction isn't a hopeless enterprise—some of the tournament's participants did considerably better than blind chance.

Think about a prediction with two possible outcomes, like who will win the Super Bowl. If you pick at random, you'll be wrong half the time. But the best forecasters were consistently able to cut that error rate by more than 50 percent. As Tetlock put it, "the best forecasters are hovering between the chimp and God."

Who knows, maybe some of the entries on this list will also prove to be Nostradamian.