superforecasting-the-art-and-science-of-prediction
What distinguishes superforecasters — open-minded, probabilistic thinkers who systematically update beliefs and outperform experts at prediction.
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
superforecasting demands thinking that is open-minded, careful, curious, and—above all—self-critical. It also demands focus. — location: 376 ^ref-35973
“All models are wrong,” the statistician George Box observed, “but some are useful.” — location: 1308 ^ref-30335
regression to the mean is as easy to forget as it is to understand. Say you suffer from chronic back pain. Not all days are the same. Some days, you feel fine; others, you feel some pain but not a lot; and occasionally it’s awful. Of course it’s when you have one of those awful days that you are most likely to seek help by visiting a homeopath or some other dispenser of medical treatments unsupported by solid scientific evidence. The next day you wake up and…you feel better! The treatment works! The placebo effect may have helped, but you probably would have felt better the next day even if you had received no treatment at all—thanks to regression to the mean, a fact that won’t occur to you unless you stop and think carefully, instead of going with the tip-of-your-nose conclusion. This modest little mistake is responsible for many of the things people believe but shouldn’t. — location: 1618 ^ref-61986
For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded. — location: 2024 ^ref-33155
in 1992–93 I returned to the experts, reminded them of the question in 1988, and asked them to recall their estimates. On average, the experts recalled a number 31 percentage points higher than the correct figure. So an expert who thought there was only a 10% chance might remember herself thinking there was a 40% or 50% chance. There was even a case in which an expert who pegged the probability at 20% recalled it as 70%—which illustrates why hindsight bias is sometimes known as the “I knew it all along” effect. — location: 2913 ^ref-25509
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