Quotes from Philip E. Tetlock

Assemble forecasters. Ask them large numbers of questions with precise time frames and unambiguous language. Require that forecasts be expressed using numerical probability scales. And wait for

Think about the love of your life and the countless events that had to happen as they did to bring the two of you together. (...) Once, it was vanishingly unlikely that you two would meet. And yet, you did. What do you make of that? Most people don' think "Wow, what luck!" Instead, they take the sheer improbability of it happening, and the fact it happened, as proof it was meant to happen.

explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.

Most things in life involve skill and luck, in varying proportions. The mix may be almost all luck and a little skill, or almost all skill and a little luck, or it could be one of a thousand other possible variations. That complexity makes it hard to figure out what to chalk up to skill and what to

In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active." But the sixth rule was the key: "Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

After the fiasco, Kennedy ordered an inquiry to figure out how his people could have botched it so badly. It identified cozy unanimity as the key problem and recommended changes to the decision-making process to ensure it could never develop again.

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

What make the difference is correctly identifying and responding to subtler information so you zero in on the eventual outcome faster than others.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Ignoring the vices of our friends and the virtues of our enemies sets us up for nasty surprises.

The ultimate goal of science is uncertainty's total eradication.