Quotes from Philip Tetlock

It's very hard to master and if you're not learning all the time, you will fail. That being said, humility in the face of the game is extremely different than humility in the face of your opponents.

It was the absence of doubt—and scientific rigor—that made medicine unscientific and caused it to stagnate for so long.

It follows that the goal of forecasting is not to see what's coming. It is to advance the interests of the forecaster and the forecaster's tribe.

There is no divinely mandated link between morality and competence.

All models are wrong," the statistician George Box observed, "but some are useful.

Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong. And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast, measure, revise: it is the surest path to seeing better.

Be careful about making assumptions of expertise, ask experts if you can find them, reexamine your assumptions from time to time.

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs. These habits of thought can be learned and cultivated by any intelligent, thoughtful, determined person.

Knowing what we don't know is better than thinking we know what we don't.

the facts change, I change my mind.

And yet this stagnation is a big reason why I am an optimistic skeptic. We know that in so much of what people want to predict—politics, economics, finance, business, technology, daily life—predictability exists, to some degree, in some circumstances. But there is so much else we do not know.

All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die," he wrote. "It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.

success can lead to acclaim that can undermine the habits of mind that produced the success.

The fundamental message: think. If necessary, discuss your orders. Even criticize them. And if you absolutely must—and you better have a good reason—disobey them.4

The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough.

In one of history's great ironies, scientists today know vastly more than their colleagues a century ago, and possess vastly more data-crunching power, but they are much less confident in the prospects for perfect predictability.