Highlights

Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that “if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.” ^ref-17527

In an effort to determine the roots of accuracy and inaccuracy in forecasting, the American political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock and his assistants collected 27,451 predictions on world politics between 1988 and 2003 from 284 “experts” in universities, governments, think tanks, foundations, international institutions, and the media. Replete with tables, graphs, and equations, Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, reports the findings of this most rigorous study ever done on why some people get the future right and others don’t. ^ref-51842

Startled by this outcome, Tetlock sought what distinguished his foxes from his hedgehogs. The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.” They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.” ^ref-61642

Metadata

Author: John Lewis Gaddis
ASIN: B073QZX7YX
ISBN: 0241333121
Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073QZX7YX
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