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How a college-based team of students, faculty and volunteers bested government intelligence community prognosticators and gave birth to Superforecasting.
How the U.S. Government Can Learn to See the Future
Editor’s Note:
Intelligence assessments are made under tremendous time pressure with imperfect information, so it is no surprise that they are often wrong. They can be better, but the intelligence community often fails to use the best analytic techniques. Julia Ciocca, Michael C. Horowitz, Lauren Kahn and Christian Ruhl of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania explain the current deficiencies in assessment techniques and argue that rigorous probabilistic forecasting, keeping score of assessments, and employing the “wisdom of crowds” produces better results.
Daniel Byman
In 1973, then-Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger argued that policymaking could be reduced to a process of “making complicated bets about the future,” noting that it would be helpful if he could be supplied with “estimates of the relevant betting odds.”
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VERY MORNING for the past year, a group of British civil servants, diplomats, police officers and spies have woken up, logged onto a slick website and offered their best guess as to whether China will invade Taiwan by a particular date. Or whether Arctic sea ice will retrench by a certain amount. Or how far covid-19 infection rates will fall. These imponderables are part of Cosmic Bazaar, a forecasting tournament created by the British government to improve its intelligence analysis.
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Since the website was launched in April 2020, more than 10,000 forecasts have been made by 1,300 forecasters, from 41 government departments and several allied countries. The site has around 200 regular forecasters, who must use only publicly available information to tackle the 30-40 questions that are live at any time. Cosmic Bazaar represents the gamification of intelligence. Users are ranked by a single, brutally simple measure: