Quotes from Philip E. Tetlock

That is normal human behavior. We tend to go with strong hunches. System 1 follows a primitive psycho-logic: if it feels true, it is. In the Paleolithic world in which our brains evolved, that's not a bad way of making decisions. Gathering

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

Here's my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."23

Counterfactuals highlight how radically open the possibilities once were and how easily our best-laid plans can be blown away by flapping butterfly wings. Immersion in what-if history can give us a visceral feeling for Taleb's vision of radical indeterminacy.

slow regression is more often seen in activities dominated by skill, while faster regression is more associated with chance.

effective learning from experience can't happen without clear feedback, and you can't have clear feedback unless your forecasts are unambiguous and scorable. Sound familiar? It should. Drezner cited an article about the IARPA tournament.

There is simply no way that any individual could cover as much ground as a good team does. Even if you had unlimited hours, it would be less fruitful, given different research styles. Each team member brings something different.

although we have a substantial body of evidence to support this conclusion, and we hold it with a high degree of confidence, it remains possible, albeit extremely improbable, that new evidence or arguments may compel us to revise our view of this matter.

Social psychologists have long known that getting people to publicly commit to a belief is a great way to freeze it in place, making it resistant to change. The stronger the commitment, the greater the resistance.

glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) liberalized

tip-of-your-nose delusions can fool anyone, even the best and the brightest—perhaps especially the best and the brightest.

In fact, in science, the best evidence that a hypothesis is true is often an experiment designed to prove the hypothesis is false, but which fails to do so.

In his 1972 classic, Victims of Groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis—one of my PhD advisers at Yale long ago—explored the decision making that went into both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

An imperfect decision made in time was better than a perfect decision made too late. Ref. German mission command.

What qualifies as a good question? It's one that gets us thinking about something worth thinking about. So one way to identify a good question is what I call the smack-the-forehead test: when you read the question after time has passed, you smack your forehead and say, "If only I had thought of that before!

In Janis's hypothesis, "members of any small cohesive group tend to maintain esprit de corps by unconsciously developing a number of shared illusions and related norms that interfere with critical thinking and reality testing."3 Groups that get along too well don't question assumptions or confront uncomfortable facts. So everyone agrees, which is pleasant, and the fact that everyone agrees is tacitly taken to be proof the group is on the right track.

Plans are merely a platform for change. Israeli Defense Forces.

As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions

Popular books often draw a dichotomy between intuition and analysis—"blink" versus "think"—and pick one or the other as the way to go. I am more of a thinker than a blinker, but blink-think is another false dichotomy. The choice isn't either/or, it is how to blend them in evolving situations.

Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.

You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal….This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.

If we are serious about measuring and improving, this won't do. Forecasts must have clearly defined terms and timelines. They must use numbers. And one more thing is essential: we must have lots of forecasts.

It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by—and now named for—James Surowiecki's bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton's weight-guessers.