Part of the beauty (and the horror!) of the world we live in is that things are for the most part unforeseeable. I mean, nobody would have believed you if, back in 2018, you told us there was the greatest pandemic in modern history right around the corner that would forever change our lives as we were used to. But on 31 December 2019 (it’s hard to believe it was two years ago!) the coronavirus was first reported from Wuhan, China, from which it rapidly spread around the globe.
But what if we could have known it prior to the outbreak actually happening? Could we have changed the debilitating course of events that followed? The question may never have answers, but we can have a look at what it takes to make predictions about the future, and how accurate they actually are.
If you've never heard of superforecasting, it’s the practice of prediction that covers everything from whether a currency will become stronger, one country will invade another, or there will be civil unrest in a city. Superforecasters calculate the probability of something happening and then adjust that as circumstances change. In this way, they’re able to come up with consistent predictions.
But it’s much more complex than that. According to Bloomberg, superforecasters did not accurately predict Brexit, putting the chances of a Leave vote at 23% in June 2016—the month of the referendum. Their predicted figure had been higher a few months previously but they had adjusted the likelihood downwards, reports the BBC.
Being a superforecaster entails one quintessential personality trait, which is superior analytic ability. Philip Tetlock, the Leonore Annenberg University Professor in Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Pennsylvania, identified many people who could be turned into “superforecasters”—people whose analytic ability is considerably better than random people (or who, in financial analyst terms, “beat the market”).
It doesn’t mean trusting your gut is all there is, since analysts have to do many other things besides just forecast, but it surely helps, Philip argues. Other personality traits for a superforecaster include being intelligent, playing games and solving puzzles, being able to pragmatically use other people’s ideas, and being open-minded to new data which shows up.
